by Stephen Fry
“Blimey. Let me see . . .”
“Yes, a strange game, is it not? To put yourself into the mind of a Nazi. You have to imagine a whole new collection of humans to hate. Have another try.”
“Interior decorators?”
“No.”
“The mentally ill?”
“No.”
“Slavs?”
“No.”
“Poles?”
“No.”
“Er . . . Muslims?”
“No.”
“Cossacks?”
“No.”
“Anarchists?”
“No.”
“Conscientious objectors?”
“No.”
“Deserters?”
“No.”
“Journalists?”
“No.”
“Christ, I give up.”
“You give up? You can think of no one?”
“Shoplifters? No, not criminals, you said. Um, a racial group?”
“The purple triangle? No, not a racial group.”
“Political?”
“Not political.”
“What then?”
“Very well. I tell you for whom was the purple triangle. I tell you when you come and visit me in my laboratory. When will that be?”
“Oh. Well, I’ve got some more work to do on . . .”
“Perhaps you can come tomorrow morning? I should like it very much. We could talk too about your thesis.”
“You’ve read it then?”
“Certainly.”
I waited for some praise, but he added nothing more. We writers hate that. I mean, you know, this was my baby for God’s sake. Imagine you’re lying there in the maternity ward and all your friends pile in to inspect the newborn child.
“This is it, is it?”
“Yes,” you gasp, flushed with maternal pride.
Silence.
I mean, come on . . . that just won’t do. I’m not saying you have to kneel in awe, proffering bowls of frankincense and jars of myrrh, but something, just a little “aaaaaah!” . . . anything.
“Right.” I said at last, when it was clear that no gurgles of delight and admiration were ever going to be forthcoming, and blushing a little at the thought that he too found my flights of imaginative fancy insupportable and embarrassing. “So I’ll come round to your labs tomorrow morning then?”
“Second floor, New Rutherford. One will direct you from there.”
“Freemasons!” I said.
“I’m so sorry?”
“Was it freemasons? The purple triangle.”
“Not freemasons. I tell you tomorrow. Good-bye.”
He left me draped over the bridge under the hot sun. Below me, Jamie and Double Eddie leaned forward from the bank, tugged on a fishing line and hauled in a bottle of white wine from the water. Whatever happened to them, I thought, they would have days like this to look back upon. In dank provincial libraries in February as, balding and bitter, they fussed over their mugs of Earl Grey; in local news production offices, fighting for budgets; in classrooms, floundering in the chaos of contemptuous thugs; at the Crush Bar in Covent Garden, twittering over a diva’s tessitura—wherever they might wash up, always they would have a memory of being nineteen, with flat stomachs, dazzling hair and bottles of river-cooled Sancerre. This place, I reflected sadly, belonged much more to them than to me; yet I would stay here forever. To them it would always be an island of time, an oasis in the desert of their years, while for me it would soon become a gossipy, oppressive workplace like any other.
Oh, shut up, Michael. Oasis in the desert of their years. Fff! I don’t half think some crap sometimes. For all I know, if you’re going to suffer in life, it’s much better never to have known any kind of happiness at all. For all I know, the pain of suffering is far more bitter for someone whose childhood and youth has been nothing but trust and love and joy. I mean, if we’re talking deserts and oases, it would be a lot worse for a person brought up in Verdant Valley, Vermont, to find themselves in the Sahara than it would be for a Tuareg who had never known anything else. The thirsty man’s memories of endless unfinished glasses of iced tea in happier days are not a comfort, are they? More a corroding torture. Probably better to have had a miserable, starved, abused childhood. Give you some real appreciation of things. Force you to taste every drop of happiness to the full when it comes. No, hang on, that can’t be right: trauma is the problem there. That’s what everyone goes on about these days. Suffering will traumatize you and close off your capacity to enjoy anything at all. Numb you, desensitize you, dissociate you. Whatever. Jamie and Double Eddie were enjoying themselves, carping the diem, gathering the rosebuds, intensely living the moment on the pulses, fully sensitized, fully associated. Good on them, whatever the future might hold.
As for my future. Perhaps Fraser-Stuart was right, perhaps I wasn’t cut out for an academic career. I mean, arse it. I knew, deep inside me I knew that it had been madness to present him with all that horse shit. Hell, I knew that. Nonetheless, some demon inside me had allowed me to include those passages and present them to him. Perhaps I wanted to provoke him into failing me.
Can you have a midlife crisis at twenty-four? Or is it just the usual crisis of adulthood, something I was going to have to get used to until I doddered into oblivion? For the past year, I realized, I had been suffering from this pain, this leaking of hot lead in my stomach. Every morning when I awoke and stared at the ceiling and listened to Jane’s gentle snoring it flooded my gut, a dark swell of recognition that here was another pissing day to be got through as me. How can you tell if that’s freakish or usual? No one ever says. The ceaselessly expanding Christian Societies in the university would tell you that it was a sign that you needed room for Christ in your life. That your ache was a vacuum in the soul. Yeah, right. Sure. It was the same void that drugs filled, I supposed. I had thought too that maybe this was what Jane was for. No, not what Jane was for, what Love was for. Then either I didn’t love Jane as I should or this was another blown theory. The longings of a creative spirit then? Maybe my soul craved expression in Art? But: can’t draw, can’t write, can’t sing, can’t play. Great. Where does that leave me? A kind of Salieri deal perhaps. Cursed with enough of divine fire to recognize it in others, but not enough to create anything myself. Aw, rats . . .
So perhaps it was nothing more than the fear of the arrival of a transitional phase in my life. This is when the void yawns in front of you. When you stand at brinks, on thresholds. The void is the doorway you’ve always wanted to pass through, but as you near it, you can’t help looking back and wondering if you dare.
Self-consciousness, that’s what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. There I am. That’s me, walking along the street, what do other people see? That’s me, about to be Dr. Young. That’s me, with a girl on my arm. That’s me, wearing that cap—dork or dude? There I go, books under my arm, cutting the dash of the hip historian, academic cool on two bare legs, what a guy! So it’s a Prufrock syndrome. Do I dare to eat a peach? Are they laughing up their sleeves? Or not. Me thinking they’re laughing up their sleeves. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What’s the trick? Blushing is the outward sign. Maybe I could train myself not to blush on the outside and the self-consciousness on the inside would go too. Naah . . .
Things of and pertaining to a crisis, the dictionary says, are critical. So my life is at a critical stage. A pivot, we have. The hinge of the door to my future is my thesis. So deliberately but unconsciously I don’t oil the hinge, I let it groan loudly just in case I want to scamper back and choose another door. Now I have been told to go back and oil the hinge. The door will swing soundlessly open and everything will be fine and smooth. Is that what I want?
At length, Jamie and Double Eddie finish their
wine, collect their things and get up to leave, waving good-bye and treading with over-careful mimsy steps back up the bank, like Edwardian children picking their way over seaside rock pools. A tear falls from the end of my chin and joins the river water on its journey to the ocean.
MAKING WAVES
A window on the world
Physics is way hip. If you see a couple of literature students in conversation these days, chances are they’ll be talking about Schrö- dinger’s Kitten or Chaos and Catastrophe. Twenty-five years ago the coolest cats on campus were E. M. Forster and F. R. Leavis; next came the Structuralists, Stephen Heath and his liggers and groupies on the Difference and Deconstruction tour; now American tourists hang around in Niels Bohr T-shirts in the hope of touching the tires on Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair and having the secrets of the universe zapped into them.
The Alpha and Omega of science is numbers. Mean to say, a man don’t get nowhere without them.
The above two sentences, for instance, they don’t work with numbers. The Alpha and Omega of science are numbers, I’d have to say, and a man doesn’t get anywhere without them.
The part of my brain that operates numbers is only slightly larger than the area that concerns itself with the politics of New Zealand or the outcome of the Masters golf tournament. I have schoolboy French and I have schoolboy arithmetic. Just enough to get by in shops and restaurants. If I pay for a thirty-pence newspaper with a one-pound coin I am smart enough to expect seventy pence back. If I bet five pounds on a three-to-one Derby winner I will be pissed off not to finish fifteen quid richer. Price the horse at seven-to-two however, and sweat will begin to break out on my brow. Numbers suck.
Dutifully, like most people of my generation, I have read, or tried to read, popularizing histories of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Unified Field Theories, the T.O.E. and all the rest of it. It is probably true to say that I have had gently explained to me in print and in person what an electron is more than twenty times, yet to this day I can’t quite remember whether it’s a minus thing or a plus thing. I’ve a feeling it’s a minus thing, because a proton sounds positive (though not as positive as a positron, whatever one of those little mothers may be) but what this negativity betokens I have less than no idea. All the little particles that make up an atom have to add up and bind together in some way, I’m pretty sure of that. But how a particle can have a minus quality or a negative charge beats the hell out of me. Maybe it only has a negative charge to balance the books of the atom.
I have read books specifically designed, so far as I can tell, to enable nonscientist pseudo-intellectuals like myself to bullshit at dinner parties about particle accelerators, the Strong Force and charmed bosons, written in a clear manner with big diagrams, small words and the minimum of algebra, yet I have been utterly unable, after taking my head out of the pages, to retain a single useful fact, let alone an idea of the principles involved. Tell me once however, in a low voice on a noisy afternoon, that the Battle of Bannockburn was fought in the year 1314 and I will remember it to my dying day. I mean, what is going on here? 1314 is a number too, isn’t it?
I remember reading once about the row that went on between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. Hooke thought that Newton had stolen from him the idea that bodies attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the square of their distance. Never forgave him for it. Now, I distinctly recall learning this phrase at school, thinking it would look good in an essay on the seventeenth century.(Historians like to nod at scientists in passing, Darwin, Newton, those guys, a few remarks about “mechanistic universes” and “the upsetting of Victorian certainties” are as safe in a history essay as that old standby “the newly emergent middle classes.” As everyone knows, there is no period in history in which you can’t write successfully of a newly emergent, newly confident middle class, just as there is no period in history after the sixteenth century in which you can’t write about “the sweeping away of the old certainties.”) So, I learn the Hooke-Newton sentence happily and write it down in my notes. As I write I look at each word. They are so simple. “Bodies attract each other . . .” no problems there. Easy to remember, especially for a schoolboy who, let’s face it, is attracted by bodies every waking and sleeping moment of his life. We know that “bodies” to a scientist usually mean “objects in space.” “Bodies attract each other with a force that varies . . .” That’s more or less okay too, most things vary after all. So the moon is attracted by the sun, but maybe not as much, or maybe more, than it is attracted by the earth. I can handle that. “Bodies attract each other with a force that varies inversely . . .” Hello. “Inversely,” eh? Problems ahead. Down periscope. Sound the klaxon. “A force that varies inversely as the square of their distance.” Dive, dive, dive! I mean, okay, I know what a square is. Four is the square of two. Sixteen of four and so on. I just about mastered that. But inversely? Come on, you have to admit that this is more than a bit of a bugger. What is the inverse of a force? If it comes to that, what is the inverse of a number? Is the inverse of a square the same as saying a square root? Is the inverse of the square of four, minus four? Or is it perhaps two? Or a quarter? Or minus sixteen? You see the problem. Well, not if you’re a scientist, you don’t. All you see is that Michael Young is as thick as a plank.
Bodies attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the square of their distance . . . I am fairly certain that I could look at that sentence from now until the crack of doom and never get any further with it. A good popularizer, someone as thick as a Planck if you like, might be able to summon me up a good analogy along the lines of “when you throw a stone into a bucket of water the ripples spread outwards, yes?” Or, “picture the universe as a doughnut, well now . . .” and while he was talking, if he was good with words and images, I might just get a handle on the principle he was describing. But it wouldn’t help me when I came upon a new phrase. “Bodies are sometimes attracted with a constant force defined as the reciprocal root of their mass” or whatever. He would then have to begin the whole weary work again with a new model or a new analogy. It’s like grabbing a live salmon, the harder I try to get a grip on it, the further it slips from my grasp. Numbers suck.
Only the anecdotal lingers with me. Einstein liked ice creams, sailboats and violins. A musician once said to him when they were playing a duet together, “For God’s sake, Albert, can’t you count?” Einstein himself said things about God not playing dice with the universe. He said that he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but that he knew exactly what weapons would be used in World War IV: sticks and stones. Heisenberg was attacked by an SS newspaper for being “a white Jew” and “the spirit of Einstein’s spirit” and was only saved on account of his mother knowing Himmler’s mother. Under the dryer in Berlin one afternoon she said, “You tell your Heinrich to lay off my Werner,” and Mrs. Himmler said, “But Heinrich thinks the Uncertainty Principle is a Jewish lie.” “Oh, that’s just Werner,” said Mrs. Heisenberg. “He doesn’t mean it. Just showing off as usual, trying to get attention.” What else do I know about physics? Oh yes, Max Planck, the Father of Quantum Mechanics, was also the Father of Erwin Planck, who was one of those executed by the Gestapo in 1944 after the failed July bomb plot. Erwin, of course, was also Rommel’s Christian name, and Rommel perished after the bomb plot too. Schrödinger’s cat was Siamese. The word quark comes from Finnegans Wake. One of the Bohrs once said that if you weren’t shocked by quantum mechanics then you hadn’t understood it properly. When Crick and Watson built their model of DNA in the shape of a pasta twist, they were helped by a woman who many believe should have shared their Nobel Prize. Nobel, come to that, invented dynamite and Friedrich Flick, a Nazi supporter who made millions out of slave labor in World War II, owned the company Dynamit Nobel. Flick left a billion pounds to his playboy son in 1972, with neither an apology nor a cent for the survivors of his slave factories. Flick’s grandson tried to found
a chair of “European Understanding” at Oxford University, but withdrew it when moral philosophers there called his money “tainted.” See? Everything I know about physics comes down to history. No, let’s be honest. Everything I know about physics comes down to gossip.
“Newton’s had the most terrible row with Leibniz.”
“No!”
“True as I’m standing here.”
“Says he stole his fluxational method.”
“Get out of here!”
“Mm. Says he can call it calculus or whatever he chooses, but it’s just the fluxational method dressed up in a fancy wig and Isaac thought of it first.”
“What is the fluxational method, exactly? Or calculus, come to that?”
“Who cares? The point is they’re simply not talking to each other.”
“Fancy!”
“I know . . . what’s more Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein have had a spat too.”
“What about?”
“Something to do with neutrinos, I hear. Albert doesn’t believe in them. Wolfgang’s furious.”
“Neutrinos?”
“Some sort of antacid for indigestion, I believe. I expect now that he’s living in America, Albert prefers Rolaids.”
“Sakes!”
And so on . . .
Science, say scientists, is real history. The specific mixing, steaming and boiling on the stove of the cosmos that gave rise to planet Earth x billion years ago is real history; what happened in the hypothalamus and cortex of Homo sapiens x million years ago to give us consciousness is real history. So the technopriests would have you believe. Bastards. Numbers suck. They don’t exist. There’s no such thing as Four. Even worse, there’s especially no such thing as Minus Four. I mean, no wonder the world fell apart after Gresham and Descartes. Allowing minus numbers to stalk the globe. A thousand years in which usury was rightly banned and then—Bam!—debit, credit, minus numbers and the positing of “minus one hundred tons of coffee.” Negative equity. From bonds to bondage, debt to debtor’s prison, savings to slavery. Numbers suck.