The Principle

by Jérôme Ferrari

  You wrote that the scientist must also be a priest and that there’s a place where we can be sure that the love of God doesn’t lie.

  Do you remember entering a vast hall in the Technical University of Munich in November 1953, having been invited by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts? A year earlier, an island in the archipelago of Eniwetok vanished into thin air after the explosion of the first American thermo-nuclear bomb. All that remains of it is an underwater crater. And invisible radiation. And the unknown heavy metals forged by the bomb, slumbering in the waters of the Pacific. You must miss the days when people could still afford the luxury of surprise and alarm. It’s all become so sadly predictable. After a time, the worst curses become monotonous.

  In the photograph the English took in the garden of Farm Hall in 1945, you had already aged so terribly, as if for you the war had lasted a hundred years. But today, as you stand in that hall at the University in Munich, a few minutes before giving your lecture on “The image of nature in contemporary physics,” and lean toward Ernst Jünger as if to whisper something confidential, while, sitting a few rows in front of you, Martin Heidegger smiles in a self-satisfied way, I even hesitate to recognize you. You’re fifty-one years old and, next to you, Ernst Jünger almost looks like a young man. How is it possible? Somehow you’d remained yourself for so long, so stubbornly young. Your youth has vanished and I know that it vanished in one fell swoop. The new physics you helped to found, when you still looked like a carefree boy scout, has burst all continuous lines into a broken series of discrete events separated by dark chasms. Maybe the line of time hasn’t been spared. One morning, we look in the mirror and see the astonished face of a stranger. We leave somewhere in Wilson’s chamber a new drop of condensation briefly illuminating the fog. We trace a pretense of a trajectory, but we know perfectly well that we carry with us the memories of another.

  Remember, there is no trajectory: it’s from you that I learned that.

  There’s probably no continuity either.

  As you and Ernst Jünger exchange a few words, an incredibly youthful smile suddenly lights up your deeply-lined face. The vague shadow of those lines could already be glimpsed on your childhood photographs, and the alert young professor from Leipzig who couldn’t be differentiated from his students must sometimes have shuddered and stooped inexplicably on sensing the silent presence of the old man he had always carried inside him. Do you remember what Einstein thought, when he indulged in metaphysical speculations? Everything is given once and for all, the vast universe and each of our lives, our tiny love affairs, as one compact block of inaccessible eternity, which our minds run through and roll out for us as a continuous flow, like the tip of a diamond following the grooves of an endless record. If that’s the case, then in a way something still remains of your vanished youth as you leave Ernst Jünger and cross the packed hall in the Technical University of Munich. I imagine Martin Heidegger, who the next day will give his lecture on “The question of technique” to an even more incredible number of people, watching with subtle condescension as you make your way to the rostrum. The audience fills every space on the benches. The Munich students refuse to politely give up their places to the visitors who’ve come from all over West Germany. Nobody respects the safety instructions. You move forward laboriously in such an atmosphere of intellectual fervor that you might almost think yourself back in a reborn Athens, although you know it isn’t so.

  You once asked: “What is strong?”

  You answered that it was the almost inaudible sound of a silvery string.

  Today, you say:

  “Technique is almost no longer seen as the result of conscious human efforts to increase material power, but rather as a large-scale biological event in the course of which the internal structures of the human organism are increasingly transported into the surrounding world; it is thus a biological process which by its very nature is outside the control of man; for ‘even if man can do what he wants, he cannot want what he wants.’”

  I haven’t abandoned you, you see: your words still reach me as I sit here, for the last time, in a taxi driving to the airport along Sheikh Zayed Road, one evening in September 2009. Beneath the orange lighting of a parking lot, Indians dressed in awful sweat-soaked checkered shirts argue as they play cricket. The tallest tower in the world rises in the darkness like the spire of a huge cathedral—no, you’re right, it rises rather like a monstrous carnivorous plant, sinking its roots deep into the sand of the desert, and it’s the whole city that’s a giant organism, pulsing with the force of a new, pitiless, primitive life, which in every way resembles the life that pulses in us too, with its abrupt spurts in growth, its erratic greed, its insane prodigality, its infections, its cancers, and its rottenness. Nothing is lacking here, not even blood : the whole city is bound together by the blood it has fed upon, and still feeds upon. Indian blood, Pakistani blood, the blood of Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, all that anonymous blood that flows tirelessly in its steel veins and makes it proliferate, indifferent to the approval or disapproval of men, whom it returns to their impotent solitude. They built it, but it owes them nothing. And the death that threatens it today won’t come from them.

  The towers of the Marina that are still under construction offer their naked entrails to the scorching sun. The cranes have been motionless for weeks. The workers squat in silence, waiting for their wretched wages that won’t come, while, beyond the shores of the Gulf, mothers who’ve forgotten their faces shower curses on them. The disease has spread, from one financial center to another, through intangible networks, into the great body of the world, and has even reached here. A slow paralysis is creeping over all the vital organs of the city, which pants like a dying animal. No sooner is it born that it’s about to die. Nowhere else, ever, has the blind process of life and death manifested its uncontrollable power with such purity, never has it taken place with such terrifying speed. You probably wouldn’t be surprised. You know that in a very short space of time, an almost infinite energy can emerge from nothingness then go back to it.

  You wrote that there’s a place where the love of God doesn’t lie.

  But, as you say today to the silent crowd listening to you in Munich, instead of that love man no longer meets anything but himself. Strange excrescences of our organs have inexorably overrun the world. They’ve transformed it. Flesh has become glass and metal. Long nerves of copper snake through the darkness of the shafts drilled in the concrete. Incinerators digest the tons of garbage dumped day and night by endless lines of trucks crossing the desert. The workers, exhausted by dehydration, are eliminated like toxins. The cold eyes of the security cameras never close. Blood remains blood.

  On the road to the airport, the taxi driver, who’s very young, suddenly turns and tells me in a beseeching voice that he’s constantly afraid in this vast city.

  He’s just come from Nepal.

  He misses his family.

  He didn’t know it was possible to be so alone.

  I put my headphones on and listen to Depeche Mode, at high volume, as if I were twenty, watching the skyscrapers parade past. The driver stops speaking. Nothing can save from solitude a man who’s stopped meeting anyone but himself. That’s the way it is. This world that extends and reflects us is more terrifying, more alien, more hostile than wild nature ever was, and I can do nothing about it.

  You wrote that the scientist must also become a priest.

  But you’ve known for a long time that his sin makes that impossible. It isn’t up to him to choose what he must become—an engineer, a technician, a hired hand responding servilely to the sovereign injunctions of an inhuman voice, as we all zealously respond to it, concealing our weakness beneath the vulgar mask of arrogance. Our creativity, our rebellions, our noisy displays of irreverence are nothing more than the pitiful symptoms of an unprecedented submission. The island of Heligoland is a long way away, its dazzling beauty. The castle of th
e prince of Denmark. The flower-filled springtime of Göttingen. Youth and faith. You’ve lost so much. You tell Elisabeth how glad you are that you’ve sometimes been able to glance over God’s shoulder. You’ll once again sit beside Niels Bohr at the foot of the Acropolis. You’ll exchange letters with Wolfgang Pauli. But what the war has broken will not be mended. And your disagreements with Einstein are no longer of any interest to anyone. They’ve never had the slightest practical application, which these days means that they’re quite simply worthless. You can’t helping thinking sadly of them as you evoke to your listeners in Munich the possibility of escaping the danger of the biological process you’ve just described, a danger all the greater since it takes on the exhilarating appearance of progress, a danger I know, from the height of the superiority conferred on me by my date of birth, that we will never escape, Heidegger may well quote Hölderlin with mysterious grandiloquence, applauded to the rafters by delighted students, but we shan’t escape it. That process will continue all the way to its inconceivable end, it will subject everything to the tyranny of its growth with such radical intransigence that nothing will be spared, not even the sanctuary to which you were refused entry by Professor von Lindemann’s little dog leaping so vehemently one day in 1920, because you threatened its purity and, if he could have witnessed it, old von Lindemann himself would have had to admit, much to his despair, that mathematicians too had known sin—if only he could have seen them in their City offices, developing the infallible algorithms that determine, at a speed the human mind can’t even imagine, decisions to buy and sell in all the markets of the world.

  But the markets have collapsed, in one financial center after another, even here on the shores of the Gulf. The designers of algorithms are shaking in impotent dread. Soon perhaps, the skyscrapers strung out along Sheikh Zayed Road, and the tallest tower in the world itself, will be abandoned to the sands of the desert and the wind will carry the acrid smell of their metallic rottenness all the way to Iran. Their decay will be much slower than their birth. They will stand for a long time by the sea, their mummy-like bones eroded by salt. They may become an object of fearful fascination to men who will be unable to figure out the secret of their fleeting existence. Nothing more will emerge from the ground, waiting to be named.

  In a few months, my activities have been reduced to almost nothing. The telephone has stopped ringing. I check my e-mails out of habit. Soon I won’t be able to pay my employees or pay back my loans. Soon, the art of lying will have become useless. Here, there’s no other remedy for bankruptcy than prison. The rich are the first to flee, as I myself am fleeing. Then it’ll be the turn of the Filipino housemaids, the Russian and Nigerian whores. The workers will go somewhere else to die, of hunger, thirst, despair, everything the poor die of. I may miss the plate-glass windows of my living room looking down on Jumeirah Beach, the tall figures of the abaya-clad young women I’ve never been able to talk to, the red leather seats of my sedan, the wonderful glitter of its bodywork caressed every week, with infinite gentleness, by the chamois leathers of the sweat-drenched Pakistani cleaners in the underground parking garages of the shopping malls. At the airport, I give the taxi driver all the cash I have left and won’t be able to use anymore.

  He takes my hand effusively.

  He’s on the verge of tears.

  He’s very young, maybe nineteen.

  He murmurs words of insult or blessing in his language.

  His gratitude is more unbearable to me than his hatred.

  In the end, it’s quite likely I won’t miss any of it. I’m taking nothing with me but one item of hand baggage. I’m supposed to be taking a short business trip. But it’s not just a question of caution. What’s the point of being loaded down with pointless remnants? We can’t only half change our lives. In my apartment, the closets are full of clothes I’ve abandoned to mildew without any regrets because they’re no longer mine. In the first-class lounge, the receptionist smiles at me. I see it as a tribute to the end of this life, a brief, solitary twinkle in the cloud chamber. This life too will grow blurred, it’ll join the ghosts of other lives, lost in limbo, between the possible and the real, to which nothing connects it. I may have been a childish, conceited student, and a young man lost in the twists and turns of an absurd war he didn’t understand, but they’re nothing to me, I feel no closer to them than I do to the British captain who received you patiently in his office in Farm Hall and laughed at your naivety; and very soon, for sure, I’ll think of that foreigner drinking a glass of champagne in the first-class lounge with a smile on his face the way we think of a dream.

  You asked: “What is strong?”

  You replied that it was the white rose, the almost inaudible sound of the silvery string, and, I remember, it was then that I realized what you meant. I thought you were right and, in a sense, you know, I still think that. Because, like you, I may have been many things I don’t recognize and to which I owe nothing, and now at last I’m free to join you, across the broken lines of time, as I’ve so much longed to do. I don’t want to disturb your happiness, looking out at the North Sea from the island of Heligoland, I don’t want to butt into your exhausting discussions with Niels Bohr, nor do I want your orphaned eyes to turn away, just because of me, from the cloud chamber where the principle awaits you, no, I prefer to stand beside you in Urfeld, in May 1945, by the Walchensee, when the din of the war has fallen silent and it’s again possible to hear the crystalline, almost imperceptible sound of the silvery string.

  You’ve just cycled across what remains of Germany to rejoin your family. You’ve passed SS officers, children, frozen trees, and hanged men.

  I’m an American soldier from the Alsos Mission.

  I don’t even know my own name. All I know is that for a long time I’ve been advancing in the shadow of death, across a ruined continent that’s stopped being the center of the world. I’ve seen corpses walking. I still have in my nostrils the smell of decay, the smell of flesh, the smell of the engines of ripped-open tanks lying in viscous pools of oil and blood. And now I’m standing beside you, facing an unknown lake surrounded by snowcapped mountains beneath a blue sky lit by an icy sun.

  To me, you’re merely an enemy scientist whose work is of great interest to our intelligence services, though I probably have no idea why.

  You’re sitting beside me, smiling wearily.

  I find it hard to believe you’re only forty-three.

  I don’t know what’s made you age like that.

  Very likely, I don’t care.

  You then turn to me and ask, with incredible cordiality, an extraordinary question:

  What do you think of our lakes and our mountains?

  I should feel surprise, or cold anger. I should answer curtly that you have no right to ask a question like that, not you, not now, or I should turn my back on you with contempt, abandon you to your thoughtlessness. I should suppress a violent gesture. But I lean toward you and see your face glow with such disarming trust that I find it hard to lose my temper.

  You smile at me with a smile of eternal youth.

  I look at your lake and your mountains, I look at you again, I may hear a sound so long covered by the screams, the weeping, and the whizzing of bombs, a soft, distant sound, the notes of an immortal chaconne rising from a solo violin that’s never fallen silent. And I realize that the question you ask me is neither out of place nor pointless. How could I be your enemy?

  You ask again, insistently:

  Look and tell me, I beg you: have you ever seen anything more beautiful?

  And because I’ve at last joined you in this place where it’s impossible for God’s love to lie, I place a hand on your shoulder, smile back at you, and reply:

  No.

  Oh, no, I assure you.

  I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have mainly drawn the histori
cal material of this novel from Werner Heisenberg’s autobiography, Der Teil und das Ganze, and the memoirs of Elisabeth Heisenberg. I have also made use of Thomas Powers’s extremely well documented book, Heisenberg’s War.

  The third part, “energy,” is based on the recordings made at Farm Hall between July and December 1945, which were made public in 1993.

  I have received valuable support in Germany.

  I should like to thank Christian Ruzicska for his constant help and Martin Heisenberg, who agreed to speak to me about his father.

  My debt to Cornelia Ruhe, professor of Romance Literature at the University of Mannheim, is immeasurable. With tireless generosity, she translated Werner Heisenberg’s correspondence for me. May she receive this novel as a sign of gratitude and, even more, of friendship to her, as well as to Bernd, Oscar, and Mathilda, from this side of the Rhine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jérôme Ferrari is a writer and translator born in 1968 in Paris. His 2012 novel, The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, won the Goncourt Prize. He is also the author of Where I Left My Soul (MacLehose, 2012).