Physics of Interminableness

At a dinner in Orvieto, Pope Urban IV shouts at Thomas Aquinas to pass the involtini. Whether this incident actually occurred is doubtful. Whether it matters is even less clear. And yet the delay—the dish hovering eternally between hands—refuses to end.From this trivial, possibly apocryphal incident unfolds The Physics of Interminableness, a philosophical satire and narrative inquiry into why so many things in modern life never conclude. Across twenty meticulously digressive chapters, Otto Handley follows the involtini as it gathers unexpected mass, drawing in theologians, bureaucrats, physicists, monks, committees, crowds, forms, footnotes, and infinite feeds. Zeno's paradoxes invade the dining room. Language learns to postpone endings. Technology accelerates everything except arrival.For readers of Beckett, Kafka, Bernhard, and institutional satire, Otto Handley offers a work that is as funny as it is exacting—a meditation on delay, attention, and the strange endurance of unfinished things.