On Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book”

The astronomer Carl Sagan once asked the recreational mathematician Martin Gardner if he believed in God only so he would be happy. “My faith,” Gardner obliged, “rests entirely on desire.” In a 2014 New York Times review of his autobiography, Undiluted Hocus-Pocus, the paper notes this answer had twisted Gardner into “a human Möbius strip combining the faith and skepticism of his parents,” one a devout Methodist and the other “a Scripture-doubting science buff.” Gardner, who penned the autobiography in 2010, aged 95—he’d die the same year—told Sagan his faith earned him “a lasting escape” from the realization “that you and everyone else are soon to vanish utterly from the universe.”