Song of Two Worlds - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Lightman, physicist, essayist, and novelist, is Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT, where he was the first person to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. Lightman’s writing has appeared in Harper’s, Salon, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other publications. His widely known Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller, and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. His recent book The Accidental Universe was chosen by Brain Pickings as one of the best ten books of the year. He lives in Massachusetts.

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40

Abbas and I shovel sheep dung,
My olive trees hunched
Like a throng of old men—
Sun overhead, I look up
And I gaze at the clouds—

This is the way that I see:
Ten trillion photons of light make their way
Through my pupils each second of time,
Through the oval-shaped lens, through
The jelly-like fill to the retina, hundreds
Of millions of cells, where each photon
Of light meets a molecule, retinene, coaxing
It straight from its twisty vine,
Curled bougainvillea-like. Neurons
Respond to the dance. Protein molecules shift
In their shape, so that sodium cannot find
Passage, electrical charge unrelieved,
Shudder of current moves through
The neurons and flies to the folds of my brain.
Here the fourth layer is sentry, receives
The first tingle, computes a sensation,
And passes its tremblings to five other sheets.
In shards of a second, some hundreds
Of millions of neurons start quivering,
Each being shocked by one thousand others
And doing the same to one thousand more.
Click-click-click sound the firings,
Some punctured and scattered, some synchronized.
Click-click the pulsings in waves—
And my brain tells me “cloud.”
I believe in the knowledge of sight.