Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

that he read as though they were fiction, he was struck dumb by the spite of people, which was sadly not outweighed by the charity of others, no matter how generous it might be.

He knew he had been robbed but he was not sure exactly what had been stolen from him.

Leo Szilard, brilliant gadfly, meddler, inventor, physicist, molecular biologist, friend of Einstein, inveterate seeker of patents, crusader for peace, amateur policy analyst, writer of exceedingly dull fictions, and would-be savior of the world, was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1898. There, the oldest of three children, he lived in a house designed by his uncle Emil, which looked like a fairy-tale castle. In the garden of the castle Leo played with his brother and sister and their cousins. Later, in the wake of the fall of Bela Kun, persecution and war following him, Szilard left Hungary for Berlin, Berlin for London, London for New York. Szilard was always one step ahead of catastrophe.

After curing his own bladder cancer with a self-designed course of radiation treatments, Szilard died suddenly in 1964, in La Jolla, California, of a heart attack.

He had moved to La Jolla for the sunshine.

Unlike Oppenheimer, Szilard did not dwell on his former life, his former ties, his lost family when he found himself transplanted into the twenty-first century. This was partly because none of his personal ties had been too close. He had always been too busy with destiny to have much truck with minor details of emotion and sentiment.

Instead he immediately set himself the task of catching up on history, ravenously, tirelessly, processing information at a high rate of speed and storing it for reference in the near future. He was instantly as busy and as full of zeal, as unfazed and as tunnel-visioned as he had been in the 1940s.

The walks that Ann had begun to take soon became, if not a compulsion, at least a necessary hinge. It was hills that she liked, hills and hidden corners.

She set herself tasks of thinking when she left on a walk, small tasks such as: What counts as mundane? If mundane just means “Of, pertaining to, or typical of this world” how it is that over the years the mundane has become allied with the trivial?

The word mundane derives clearly from the Latin mundus, the world. Why is the world—which after all is all we have—so much maligned? Why does familiarity breed contempt? When she thought of being familiar she thought of bed, and Ben. There was no contempt there but it was certainly the case that when they were first together there had been a voluptuous turbulence, now settled into routine.

She knew this was just what happened. She knew that Ben liked the routine and had been relieved to trade uncertainty for stability, and she did not mind. But why desire had to change when the new became old she did not know and walking by herself she lamented it. When there was not less love why was there always a slacking off?

She stopped to watch a thin coyote trot across the road and disappear in a thicket and decided it was this: that familiarity breeds not contempt but affiliation, and affiliation is the opposite of urgency, of focus and ardor and intent. Affiliation is a linking of arms in which the subjects move forward side by side. Because they are looking ahead into the world, watching the road and making sure not to stumble, they no longer look each other in the eye.

Thus the opposing tension of two people standing face-to-face dissipates.

As soon as he had raised himself from the gutter and wandered through downtown Santa Fe long enough to assess his surroundings, pat down his pockets to discover a wallet fat with cash, and secure a hotel room, Fermi collapsed.

For several days he existed in a state that might fairly be described as mild catatonia, sitting on the edge of his hotel bed and staring.

Contingencies. Had the German military had access to an A-bomb during what they call World War Two, it is unlikely that strategic planners in the Third Reich would have forfeited the opportunity to drop said device on an English or American city.

Had the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was heading the Nazi A-bomb program, decided to use graphite instead of so-called heavy water to slow down neutrons in his chain reaction experiments, the Germans might well have beat the Americans to the bomb.

Had Fermi and Szilard, when they discovered that graphite could be used for this crucial purpose, published their findings, Heisenberg would have known about graphite.

It was a man named George Braxton Pegram, physicist at Columbia University and an avid tennis player and canoeist, who told Fermi and Szilard not to publish.

This might, among other functions, serve as a parable for those who do not believe in the power of the printed word.

Evidently the mundane is by nature massive, even all-powerful. Once a few particles can exterminate people by the billions, never again can it be argued that small and trivial are in the same family.

The public library was a sanctuary. Ann liked the calmness of the stacks, which she felt as the presence of thousands of minds, many sympathetic. In the silence she sometimes thought she could detect a low hum, all of them murmuring.

On the day in question, however, the sanctuary was no protection.

Around two in the afternoon the other librarian stepped out to lunch. Moments later a thunderclap sounded and heavy rain drummed on the roof. Ann leaned on her counter listening to the rain and wondered what Ben was doing, whether the inventors of the leveraged buyout were calling him into the kitchen for tea. Or maybe he was going to sit sketching at the drafting table with Yoshi the landscape architect. They did not speak each other’s language and they had no interpreters, Ben had told her. Hence instead of talking they drew on a paper, and passed it back and forth politely, bowing their heads.