Emma Cline's third novel, Switzy , never uses the word "Alzheimer's." The Guardian's reviewer points this out and then says something stranger: we are certain anyway. David Hastings, the man at the center of the book, is on a private jet with his assistant, Cody, flying toward a euthanasia clinic, and the disease taking him is the one thing the novel will not name — while he loses, page by page, the ability to be certain of anything at all. The reader supplies the diagnosis. The book leaves a gap the exact size of your attention, and you fill it.
On its own that is a craft observation. It stopped being small this week, because two philosophers turned up in the same news cycle to say the same thing outright.
The Marginalian published Iain McGilchrist and Henri Bergson within a day of each other. McGilchrist, drawing on The Matter with Things , argues that because our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can create and destroy — but it "never leaves its object unchanged." Bergson got there in 1896, in Matter and Memory , decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience and long before Oliver Sacks described perception arriving in the hundred milliseconds between the world and us. Bergson's target was matter, consciousness, and the relation between them: how perception happens at all.