OPUS 366: Index Universalis (The Law of Wolves)

What happens when a brilliant mind refuses to accept the boundaries between disciplines? Dr. Cornelis van Houte has undertaken an audacious intellectual experiment: writing 365 books covering everything from Roman law to quantum physics, from military strategy to Russian theology. This final volume—Opus 366—is his reckoning with that extraordinary project. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, part literary tour de force, this remarkable work takes readers inside the mind of a polymath who has discovered disturbing structural similarities between thermodynamics and jurisprudence, between Galois theory and colonial administration, between the death of submarines and the birth of legal persons. Van Houte writes with surgical precision about the loneliness of interdisciplinary thinking, the exhaustion of compulsive pattern-recognition, and the strange burden of seeing connections everywhere. His prose moves effortlessly from technical analysis of Maxwell's Demon to lyrical descriptions of painting the same grey sky five hundred times, seeking a precision that always lies just beyond reach. This is a book about what it costs to think without boundaries—and why some minds cannot stop paying that price. Readers of Roberto Bolaño, László Krasznahorkai, and W.G. Sebald will recognize a kindred spirit: an author who has built something unprecedented from the fragments of specialized knowledge that define our age. "Van Houte has written the novel that Jorge Luis Borges might have composed if he had been a tax lawyer with a painting studio." —Early Reader Opus 366 stands alone as both conclusion to an ambitious project and meditation on the nature of knowledge itself. It is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies on the other side of expertise.