Properties of Light by Rebecca Goldstein

Author:Rebecca Goldstein [Goldstein, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

I did not know whether to laugh or cry, to hear him pouring his solemn nonsense into the fallen darkness of that hour. I could not see his face clearly, his eyes and mouth, but I knew the expression of them, the awful outpouring of emotion that matched the excruciating tremolo of his voice.

I did not laugh, I did not cry, and did not grasp at all what it was that Samuel Mallach was trying to tell me in the closing moments of the winter-lit day, talking on and on about things that seemed so irrelevant to our work, and in a manner that left me in doubt as to whether he was even speaking, in fact, to me.

— You owe your scientific ideas to her! But she wasn't a physicist. She didn't know any science.

I finally brought myself to protest the assertion of a Dotty transcendent.

— No, Justin, you misunderstand, you misunderstand me. It was in my life with her, in its intensity. That's what made it possible for me to think as I did in those days. I will never be able to think with the same intensity again. It was Carlotta who made it possible, who drew the kundalini up into the crown of my skull.

He ended on such a note of forlorn longing, the last inanities sobbing insanely in the frigid air, that I could easily have laughed out loud. He turned at last to face me, and looked at me so searchingly and long that I wondered what he hoped to locate in my face. His gaze had bent itself into an agony of stare, and I suffered its probe with growing discomfort, for it was the gaze of a lunatic or lover: no one elsewise stares like that. What did he want from me, this madman, what did he hope to locate in my face?

I searched the eyes that were searching mine and, all at once, it was with a knowledge that came all at once, one violent flare and then I knew.

He meant to get the glorious physics out from me. That is what he meant. He saw that it was in me and must be aroused so that there was no containing it, the gnostic fire, coiled in some base cranny of my lower body, that it must be heated by applications of sublimity to such a frenzied pitch that it would be forced out from my muladhara chakra, rising upward until it flooded the recesses of my singular skull.

He meant to get the glorious physics out from me and had given me the gift of his extraordinary daughter, as slender as a lotus stem, enchantress of the world, so that it might be done.

I knew it in a moment's span, the merest second's fracturing open, suffered the knowledge as one suffers a blow.

And then something more followed upon this, as effect will follow cause: a further epistemic thrust that was another order of astonishment. It was not like any knowledge I

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