Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of four novels, including THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM, and a collection of short stories, STRANGE ATTRACTORS. Her work has won numerous prizes, including two Whiting Awards. In 1996, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, where her work was concentrated in the philosophy of science and was supported by a National Science Foundation fellowship. She resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Properties of Light

Mariner Books

Excerpt

I
The essential fact is that I hate her.
My hatred is my cause: material, formal, final. It makes my world for
me. I have largely forgotten the feel of things unimplicated in its
being. For them, I retain only the words, as empty as plundered
graves. The diminishment bothers me less than I would have imagined,
there remaining still so much to me, to the substance of my thoughts,
the implications of my hatred being many.
Such hatred as mine might be described as obsessive, although the
description would be false. Would an obsessive even pose the
possibility of his own delusion? The stance of objectivity required
in order to ask of oneself whether one is obsessing is unassumable
for those who, in fact, are.
This is my first argument.
Does it lead to a more general result, namely that the answer to the
question Am I obsessing? must be a logically certified no?
As a matter of fact it does. This is interesting, though not very. I
have not produced, by any stretch, a result remotely on the scale of
the sublime Descartes's analogously conclusive remarks concerning the
question Am I existing? Formally, my argument and his share this
feature: the very conditions that must hold in order for the question
to be put at all determine its answer. In the case of the Cartesian
question, the answer is affirmative, and metaphysics has produced, in
the four hundred years since, nothing much better than this. It is
not only interesting but supremely practical. What could be more
useful than having the means of convincing oneself that one exists
whenever the question should arise? Without it, I might degenerate
into a very dubious modality of mind. I might go mad.
Here is my second argument, and it, too, is faintly redolent of the
subtle rationalist. There is an affinity almost natural between the
Cartesian condition and me. My second argument: Obsession connotes
excess, and excess, in turn, unnecessity. If my hatred is obsessive,
then it must be possible for me to exist, at least in principle,
without it. And yet of all I once thought true of me, it is my hatred
alone that cannot be separated from me. Of all else I know I can be
deprived and still continue to be, since of all else I have in fact
been deprived. But of my hatred? It might possibly be the case that
if I ceased entirely to hate that I should likewise cease altogether
to exist.
I am a real thing and really exist, but what thing? I have answered:
a thing that hates.
My indifference to the world at large is absolute. Outside of my
hatred, I care not what exists, nor how, nor why. Properties of
matter and energy, of space and time? Less real to me now than the
unseen object is said to be to the newborn tabula rasa. No pull left
in these subjects to keep me put, I glide off.
I glide away.
My almost universal indifference is all the more remarkable
considering that I am, by training, a physicist, once said by some
(most certainly by me) to have inhabited a singularity of promise. I
might have been expected to preserve some lingering interest in the
ultimate constituents of existence. I have none. Were an angel of God
to offer me the definitive description of the properties of light
(for it was on them and their paradoxical duality, both wave- and
particlelike, that my singularity of promise had once largely been
focused) I doubt I'd even hear the cherub out. I can attend to
nothing but the essential fact, its decoherent history,
configurations traced impermanently among ill-defined confusions. One
might have thought that I'd know more, one might have thought.
It is a warm night and windless. The air hangs still and heavy. One
feels that one might float on it, as on a waveless sea. Above, the
moon is hanging low, like a puckered-up bulge of a belly.
That was a repulsive simile.
I once thought that darkness was as real as light, was even more
real. I figured darkness to be not the absence of light, but rather
light the absence of darkness.
I was an inveterate and inventive theorizer as a child.
Instinctively, I read the observable world as a system of coded
signs. My theory of darkness was one of my earliest juvenilia, dating
from a time while I still lived in the haze of unbroken-in
consciousness. I had (still young) to discard it, however, for as a
theory it had a flaw: it was untrue. Light is the something, and
darkness its privation. I can no longer remember the precise
reasoning that led to my rejecting the primacy of the dark. The
distinction between truth and falsity has always mattered much to me.
A warm night and windless. Summer nights have qualities hospitable to
habitations, by old memories and the like, all manner of insinuations
carried weightless in thin air. A quiet night steeped deep in summer,
yielding itself to all manner of insubstantialities, desires
perfectly preserved in the bitterness of mind.
There are others I could hate as well, with all my soul, as I hate
her, and yet I don't. My hatred, though essential, is essentially of
her, and, in that sense, external. I was not a hating child. Hatred
requires an attention that it was not yet in me to squander on
people. I had other things to think about. So far as people were
concerned, I was largely not concerned, with the sole exception of
Jake Childs, who was my father, and Cynthia Childs, née Rosenthal,
who was my mother. The world for me was fixed around them, and there
was nothing in it for me to hate.
My parents and I were, from as far back as I remember, the best of
chums, composing a perfect Platonic solid, so that the running
commentary of my contemporaries-nerd! geek!-sounded faintly, like
some far-off phantom choir. I suppose I was a nerd and geek, too
nerdy and geeky to care. I think the words hardly signified at all.
We were what we were, we three, with neatly overlapping interests: my
father and I in abstract argument; my mother and I in beauty; my
father and mother in me. We all understood one another with a perfect
accord, which would have been as gratifying for a well-disposed
outsider to observe as would his observance be disruptive of the very
state to be observed.
This is a nuisance very central to modern physics.
It was a touchingly typical boyhood, mutatis mutandis, of course, for
it is true that at an age when my contemporaries were having their
this-little-piggy-wiggies wiggled, I was solemnly reciting the law of
the excluded middle-every statement is either true or false, and no
statement is both!-and constructing truth tables for propositions of
first-order logic. And nights, it is true, would never find the three
Childses-Papa Childs, Mama Childs and Baby Childs-huddled around the
softly glowing television sets whose jumpy phantasmata were thrown
off flickering from the windows of our neighbors. We owned no
television but sought what spectacles we craved from the nighttime
skies. It was our habit to arrange ourselves on our backs in our
modest and mythical backyard, studiously murmuring, even in the
chilly seasons lying on the unmade lawn and staring up at softly
glowing galaxies, inhabiting a space measured out in units of time,
delivered by the speed of light. My mother, her...