One, two, buckle my shoe

Counting isn’t just crucial to science – quantity matters to the Bible, horror films and Virginia Woolf, too. By Andrew Robinson Does a digital clock always show an odd number when you wake?

Testament, teems with numbers, regarding ages, heights, weights and measures, in detail that frequently seems obsessive. “If it is characteristic of a sacred text that it evokes the ineffable and the uncountable, it can also be characterised by a kind of sacred exactitude and totality,” remarks Connor. “If God is beyond measure and numeration, then the apprehension of God is often regarded as a matter of counting.”

Many modernist writers, such as James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett are preoccupied with number, also. “Woolf ’s diaries are full of actions of counting up, counting out and counting off, and they provide an energising metre throughout her novels too.” Connor quotes her description in The Years (1937) of a German air raid over London, in which two characters, as they count off the seconds on their watch while guns boom, stare at an oscillating spider’s web.

Other sections of the book are less well written and convincing. The chapter on horror claims, dubiously, that when one awakens disorientated at night, the time shown on one’s bedside digital clock always seems to be an odd number, such as 1:29 or 3:13. The discussion of music mentions not a single composer, not even Bach, despite his fascination with numbers. On the visual arts, several pages are devoted to Jasper Johns’s uninspiring paintings of numbers, including Numbers in Color, which is reproduced, pointlessly, in black and white. In the final chapter, the author ponders why some authors delegate the “delicious” task of compiling an index to others, while himself omitting some tasty index entries.

But the main weakness, at least for this reviewer, is Connor’s “unrepentant utilitarianism”. Surely all of us accept from personal experience that number crunching, bureaucratic targets and university rankings may have their uses but are potentially – and very often actually – enemies of imagination and creativity, both in the humanities and in the sciences, and inimical to job satisfaction. Geniuses throughout the ages, such as Mozart and Einstein, have flourished despite, not because of, “living by numbers”. The book never really grapples with this fact. Mozart is totally absent; Einstein receives only two brief references. They do not include this pertinent remark attributed to him: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Even if Einstein never said it, most of us would probably agree that the comment is true. Would Connor disagree?

‘ Not everything that counts can be counted’: a remark attributed to Albert Einstein