The Goddess of Small Victories

by Yannick Grannec

  Even in childhood, Anna had had the ability to envisage all the ramifications of a situation, including the dead ends. It wasn’t the sign of a pessimistic outlook—bad options are a part of the whole—but her talent proved incompatible with the unconcern necessary for a lighthearted life. She hadn’t found herself a profession where she could capitalize on her analytical bent. Living among old papers at least freed her of the burden of labeling every possibility.

  It had been thoughtless to propose the idea, but tomorrow—in defiance of the doctors’ orders—she would take the old lady to the movies. She had found a movie house in Doylestown near the retirement home. The County Theater was showing a matinee of The Sound of Music. The film lasted nearly three hours, the trip took ten minutes, call it twenty. Adele would be back at Pine Run in time for dinner.

  The main difficulty would be getting out of the building without drawing attention. At nap time, Anna would take her confederate on a long walk through the garden. She would park the car around the back near the little ivy-covered gate. She had assigned Gladys to divert the staff’s attention, and the elderly Barbie had been thrilled to be included. Then there was the problem of getting Mrs. Gödel into the car and from there into a seat in the movie theater. Adele had solved the problem by showing Anna how spry she was, relatively speaking, on three legs—Gladys had appropriated a cane from her comatose neighbor for the occasion. Jack, the young pianist, had been drafted to help them transfer Adele to and from the car, both on the way out and on the way back. But how would Anna explain the caper to the police, the doctors, or even her boss if Mrs. Gödel croaked in her arms? Everyone would accuse her of having hastened her death.

  Anna grabbed a book from her bedside table. The lines danced in front of her eyes. The charm of A Room with a View was not working for her this morning. Her unruly mind wandered to the Arno, to Florence, and especially to Gianni.

  After her abrupt break with William, she had bummed around France, Germany, and Italy. She was surprised to discover how much she liked living as a tourist when no chaperone or return ticket was on the horizon. Her sole concession to the past was to write regularly to Ernestine, Leo’s old nanny, never failing to include her current address. But Leo had never written. In Florence she had bought herself a shockingly expensive old Baedeker, the same guidebook that E. M. Forster’s heroines carried with them everywhere. The worn red-and-gold cover, the yellowed pages, gave her the sense of traveling in time more than in space. For once, she felt that she was not doing what was expected of her.

  One day when she had abandoned her plan to enter the Uffizi Gallery because of the interminable line, a man approached her, amused by her irritation, with an offer to jump ahead using his pass. Italy was a good fit for Anna, and she knew it. She’d followed the man, enticed by the prospect of seeing treasures forbidden to the public. They had become inseparable. Gianni was the son of a very old Florentine family. An expert in the painting of the quattrocento, he knew his city’s smallest nooks and crannies. With him, every walk was a surprise, every meal a feast, and sex joyful. When she ran out of money, he offered to give her a place to stay and take care of her needs. The transition occurred naturally: he was neither demanding nor intrusive. Uncynical, surrounded by friends, and little given to introspection, Gianni was a quiet hedonist. Life with him was simple but never dull. So as not to feel entirely kept, she had worked on a few translations and buried her sense of guilt, lulled by her comfortable existence, which was punctuated by erudite discussions and weekends by the sea.

  With Gianni, she had almost managed to forget the young woman she had escaped being—intelligent but not astute, and neither uglier nor prettier than anyone else. A life with no real drama. With no great joys either. She had never been happy in that tub of lukewarm water.

  Today, she had to admit that she had drifted into her rebellion more or less unwittingly. She had done nothing, decided nothing. A tourist in her own life. It had simply been easier to burn everything behind her than to accept her mediocrity. Maybe she was provoking fate by hitching a ride with someone else. One day, a great misfortune would make her miss this sweet Gaussian boredom.

  32

  1946

  Ambulatory Digressions

  Coming Back

  In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.

  —Paul Dirac

  The quiet IAS building suddenly clattered to life: chairs scraped the floor, doors were flung open, and feet shuffled in the halls. These men of science had laid down their chalk and their telephones and were hurrying to lunch like every other human being at that hour. I’d wasted all morning with the secretarial staff, but I wasn’t comfortable enough in English to navigate the administrative maze without their help. Once all this nonsense was out of the way, I would have to find myself an affordable ticket to Germany or France, then a train to Vienna, crossing a Europe that the newspapers described every day in apocalyptic terms. Leaving was relatively simple, but I would then have to get back into the United States, and our passports at this point were still German.

  I knew that my husband was dead set against my visiting him at the Institute. I waited for his formal summons before entering his office. He was standing in front of his blackboard, concentrating, deaf to signals from his stomach.

  “You’re not with Herr Einstein? Then the two of us can have lunch.”

  He jumped. He was so predictable: I’d hoped to make him flee toward a lunch with Herr Einstein. With Albert there, Kurt wouldn’t dare not to eat.

  “Or shall I just accompany the two of you along the way?”

  “It would be inappropriate, Adele. He will think that I’m incapable of acting on my own.”

  “He likes you too much to think anything of the kind. Put your jacket on. You’re late.”

  We found Albert smoking his pipe on the steps of Fuld Hall, reading a newspaper.

  “I was trying to determine the probability of seeing you appear, my friend. Luckily, your good wife has you in hand.”

  “I’m making sure that he won’t escape!”

  A thin man came out of the building, anxious not to be noticed. He shared with Albert a flagrant lack of vanity about his hair.

  “Dirac, don’t you say hello?”21

  Hunching over a bit farther, the man came and shook the physicist’s hand. He greeted us with a slight nod and fled immediately. Einstein, sucking on his pipe, watched him retreat.

  “Paul is morbidly shy. Schrödinger almost had to handcuff him to make him accept their Nobel Prize.”

  “Aesthetically, Dirac’s writings are a true pleasure. No one has a more highly developed feel for mathematical elegance than he.”

  “Gödel! You’re not going to start working on quantum physics, are you?”

  “If I had the time, I would put my back into it, just for the pleasure of contradicting you, Herr Einstein.”

  “We are both too allergic to chaos to wade into those waters.”

  “Everything has an underlying logic, even chaos.”

  “You can find anything with mathematics! The most important part is the content, not the mathematics.”

  “Do you take me for a charlatan?”

  “Good God, no! Don’t be so paranoid!”

  I shuddered at hearing him use the word. Kurt didn’t notice. He was busy buttoning his overcoat.

  “We should hurry, gentlemen. You’ll be late for your appointment.”

  Halfway down the lawn, Kurt, now reconciled with his coat buttons, picked up the conversation where he had left off.

  “A mathematical theorem exists beyond doubt. A theory of physics can never attain the same degree of absoluteness. I have great respect for you, Herr Einstein, but all your insights are considered only highly probable, given the means at present available to prove them.”

  An incongruous noise escaped from the physicist’s abdomen.

 
“My stomach disagrees. I’m too hungry to listen to you lecture once more on the supremacy of mathematics. Dr. Gödel has given his diagnosis. I am suffering from acute incompleteness! The sole remedy is … to fill up my belly!”

  “Don’t joke about my theorem. These absurdities are beneath you.”

  Albert gave a backhanded slap to his newspaper.

  “Simplification, conflation, anecdote, manipulation. That’s the start of glory, my friend! Every day they attribute nonsense to me that I would never say, even after a night of drinking.”

  I gave Kurt a dig with my elbow. Albert knocked the ash from his pipe against the sole of his shoe.

  “When a scientist is glorified, he is recognized for something that no one else understands but that everyone assumes as a matter of course. Yesterday, everything was magnetic, today it is all atomic. Children will tell you that E = mc2 before they know how to multiply. Even the milk shakes at the corner drugstore are atomic! And tomorrow everything will be quantum mechanical! People will discuss antimatter between the cheese plate and the fruit, all the while exchanging gossip about Hollywood.”

  I reached out and took Albert’s briefcase as he struggled to relight his pipe and hold his newspaper at the same time.

  “People have a right to try to understand.”

  “Of course, dear Adele. But laymen crowd around science the way the Hebrews did around the golden calf. The mystery of complexity is gradually replacing the mystery of the divine. We are the new priests. We officiate in our white coats, with our suspicious accents! Your turn will come, my friend. One day you will become a myth.”

  “I would like to see my husband signing autographs!”

  “Gödel, the man who demonstrated the limits of science! Who toppled the scientific ideal!”

  “I’ve never claimed anything so idiotic! I was talking about the internal limits of axiomatic systems.”

  “The details are irrelevant. You are the consecrated wafer for all the pedants. They’ll toss the uncertainty principle and the incompleteness theorem into the same bag and conclude that science is not able to do everything. What great good luck! No sooner are we made into idols than we are struck down.”

  “A good excuse to share nothing and keep everything among yourselves, among the elect. I thought you were more democratic, Herr Einstein.”

  “You’re right, Adele, no one should be deified. All the same, I worry about the confusion in the mind of the general public. Poorly digested scientific terminology is the new Latin liturgy. Any harebrained thought formulated in pseudoscientific language sounds like the truth. It’s so easy to manipulate the crowd by giving them false facts.”

  He angrily crumpled his paper.

  “The times are growing darker. This Truman doesn’t come up to Roosevelt’s ankle.”

  “I don’t see how my theorems could enter popular culture. They derive from a logical language that is much too difficult for the layman.”

  “The recipe couldn’t be easier. A pinch of shortcut. A dash of bad faith. Does the universe contain undecidable propositions? Yes! Consequently, the universe cannot conceive of itself. Hence, God exists.”

  “Can Kurt Gödel conceive of himself? No! His wife has to remind him when it is lunchtime. Consequently, Kurt Gödel is not God.”

  My husband stuck his fingers in his ears. “I’m not listening to you two anymore! You’re talking absolute nonsense!”

  At the corner of Maxwell Lane, a brand-new sky-blue Ford slowed down alongside us. The driver, a sweet-faced woman in her forties, waved hello at Professor Einstein and offered to give him a lift.

  “I prefer to walk, darling Lili. You know that very well. Allow me to introduce you to Adele and Kurt Gödel.”

  She gave us a friendly smile.

  “Alice Kahler-Loewy, but my friends call me Lili. Mrs. Gödel, you’re Viennese, aren’t you? It would be such pleasure if you would join us one night for dinner. I’m going to say a word or two to Erich. See you soon!”

  She took off with a squeal of tires. Her charm, so free of affectation, had won me over. Albert regretfully watched the car drive off.

  “Lili is a very good friend of Margot and the wife of Erich von Kahler. Do you know him, Gödel?”

  “He is a philosopher and a historian. I’ve met him at the Institute.”

  “You would get along with her very well, Adele, I’m sure of it. Our families have known each other for ages. Their house on Evelyn Place is an intellectual oasis that is astonishing even for Princeton. They are very good friends with Hermann Broch.”22

  “Von Kahler? They’re upper-crust. I don’t feel comfortable in that crowd.”

  “It’s true that I never see you at the receptions for Germanophiles. But in fact it’s one of the great pleasures of Princeton. Thomas Mann gave a wonderful lecture only last week. And Lili is not in the least snobbish. She finds my jokes funny, to give you an idea!”

  I was skeptical but decided to keep it to myself. Herr Einstein’s golden aura allowed him to ignore social differences, but it was another story for me. Money wasn’t the only disparity. There was also culture, and the divide was one I couldn’t cross. Lili, as I learned later, was the daughter of a great Austrian art collector. The Nazis had stripped her father of his assets in return for letting his family go, but he was unable to emigrate in time. Her husband, Erich, had barely escaped from the Gestapo himself. He had lost his house, his fortune, and his German citizenship. His books were on Hitler’s blacklist, along with Albert’s and those of his close friend Zweig, who had not survived.23

  Although I read very little, I had heard of Thomas Mann and his Magic Mountain. Why would I saddle myself with a thousand-page novel set in a sanatorium? I had my own experience of it already. I couldn’t count on Kurt to raise my cultural literacy: his own tastes in art were as uninformed as mine. He disliked Goethe and found Shakespeare difficult to fathom. He enjoyed light music and short books. Wagner made him nervous; Bach anguished him; he preferred popular songs to Mozart. His choice of entertainment, like his choice of food, tended toward the flavorless. No one could suspect him of intellectual laziness, but when anyone accused him of a reverse snobbism toward art, as Einstein sometimes did, he would answer: “Why should good music be dramatic or good literature long-winded?” This was the advantage of being a genius. My own simple tastes, on the other hand, passed for a scandalous lack of education. My husband’s lack of interest in society, while it kept me from making friends, at least spared me from humiliation.

  “I have never managed to finish The Magic Mountain. It’s so boring! I like succinctness. The longer a work is, the less substance it has.”

  “Gödel, the more I know about you, the less I understand.”

  “I am extremely sensitive to every form of stimulus. My energy is limited, and I save it for my work. When I’m not working, I avoid tiring my senses. I hate comedies, and dramatic works exhaust me.”

  “You’re like a violin that is too tightly strung, old friend. Your music is delightful, but there’s a danger that you’re going to break a string at any moment. Give yourself a little slack!”

  “You would find me less interesting if I were more like you, Herr Einstein.”

  “You are right. Our walks are the high point of my day. No one dares to contradict me anymore except you. It’s so tiresome.”

  I could see my man swell with pride. Albert knew how to handle him. He liked to dole out abrupt contradictions and subtle flatteries to quiet Kurt’s anxious nature, but in this instance he was being sincere: walking was one of their few shared tastes. For both friends, it functioned as a sort of philosophical gymnastics. One day when I’d made fun of their little after-dinner walks, my husband subjected me to a long history lesson. His illustrious predecessor Aristotle had founded the Peripatetic school, where teachers and students debated while they walked, because there is nothing like an ambulatory exchange of ideas to get an argument unstuck. By following this method, Kurt hoped to go beyond the travel
ed paths of thought. As if I hadn’t always encouraged him to see people! Without having studied a great deal, I knew one thing to be true: you exist only through others. But I never understood how he expected to break free of his habits by always taking the same path. I wasn’t a philosopher, I suppose.

  “Kurt hates being wrong. With you, he has an uphill battle.”

  “Contradiction, like digression, is a precious stimulant. Thinking has to be a movement, unstable, like life itself. If it stops, it hardens and dies.”

  “Kurt is such a stay-at-home. He doesn’t allow for any fantasy.”

  “He walks as a logician does, one street after another. Nietzsche climbed mountains. He wanted to measure himself against the extremes.”

  “And his philosophy is exhausting! Kant took a walk every morning around his house. Whatever my wife may say, I prefer his method. I’ll stick to Mercer Street.”

  A gleaming Cadillac raced up the street toward us. I automatically herded the two sleepwalkers away from the road. Albert looked at the chrome-plated monster.

  “The American love of cars fascinates me. I don’t even have a driver’s license!”

  “I like how practical Americans are. Over here, everything is easier.”

  “That’s your point of view, Gödel. To my way of thinking, the United States is a country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without ever having known civilization. I lived in California where, without a car, believe me, you’re in trouble. Distances are enormous. Going out for my little walks after a meal, I stood out for my eccentricity. Meditative walks are not American, they are European. Will philosophy disappear from this continent as a result?”