I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

Author:Tom Wolfe [Wolfe, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0374281580
Amazon: B001F7AP8Y
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2004-11-04T07:00:00+00:00

18. The Lifeguard

Charlotte had never been in a building like the Dupont Center for Neuroscience before, although she had seen pictures of such places, all lean and clean and bare and spare and white and bright and sharp and hard, with glass walls. In Mr. Starling's office, two glass walls came together to form a right angle on a corner without benefit of any column or other structural support. Mr. Starling, wearing a white lab coat, sat at a sci-fi outer-space-movie desk. Charlotte found all this glamorous and awesome, awesome in the more literal sense of wonder commingled with fear.

This was his, Mr. Starling's, building! It wouldn't even exist except for his pioneering at Dupont! He was chairman of the Neuroscience Department, father and ruler of this entire shining twenty-first-century Xanadu of Science! She was sitting not three feet from him in the presence of.the Future! An entirely new millennium in the life of the mind was in birth here! Yes.but just why had he-summoned her here by e-mail to go over the paper on Darwinism she had turned in? Her hopes were high-He loves my paper!-and fears of the worst made her highly anxious.

Mr. Starling's eyes were lowered, peering through a pair of tortoise-colored half-glasses perched way down on the ridge of his nose. He was scanning her paper and adding notes in the margin to ones already there. The door to the room was wide open. Charlotte could hear the four women who worked in the outer office answering the telephones ("He's in a meeting"), complaining about the coffee ("What do they make this with, Fantastik?"), complaining about men ("Why would I want to go to this reunion and have to grin at a bunch of old men I've been introduced to three times in the last hour, and they still wonder why I look familiar?.")

Mr. Starling put Charlotte's paper down on his desk, took off the half-glasses, put them in the breast pocket of the lab coat, and leaned so far forward in his chair that his forearms rested on top of his thighs. Why such an extreme posture? He smiled. Whether that smile expressed warmth, pity, or cynical mistrust of the wiles of the human beast, Charlotte didn't know. She couldn't decode it.

"Ms."-Miz-"Simmons," said Mr. Starling, "I want to ask you something. Did you by any chance think the assignment was to disprove the theory of evolution in fifteen to twenty pages?"

The irony cut her to the quick. "No, sir." She could barely make her voice rise above a gasp.

"The assignment," he continued, "was to assess the theory with regard to the conventional requirements of the scientific method. Perhaps you remember our discussing the fact that in science, no theory merits consideration unless you can provide a set of contraindications, which, if true, would prove it wrong."

"Yes, sir," mumbled Charlotte.

"From this standpoint," said Mr. Starling, "evolution has to be considered as a special case. You may remember our talking about that."

"Yes, sir."

"Because of the immensely long

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