Clippings

“He was the forerunner.”
“That’s what you said in the storm. I’ve thought since: perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.”

Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke — a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace — perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

Adam came and sat next to Nina.
“Hullo,” they said to each other.
“My dear, do look at Mary Mouse’s new young man,” said Nina.
Adam looked and saw that Mary was sitting next to the Maharajah of Pukkapore.
“I call that a pretty pair,” he said.
“Oh, how bored I feel,” said Nina.

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies — a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

As with many scholars, the life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying, which can cut him off completely from the realities around him. The absent-mindedness of eccentricity of famous mathematicians comes simply from this. The fact is that the discovery of a mathematical proof is usually reached only after periods of intense and sustained concentration, sometimes renewed at intervals over months or years before the hooked-for answer is found. Gauss himself acknowledged that he spent several years seeking the sign of an algebraic equation, and Poincaré, on being asked how he made his discoveries, answered “by thinking about them often”…

A novice must stick it out until he discovers whether the rewards and compensations of a scientific life are for him commensurate with the disappointments and the toil; but if once a scientist experiences the exhilaration of discovery and the satisfaction of carrying through a really tricky experiment—once he has felt that deeper and more expansive feeling Freud has called the “oceanic feeling” that is the reward for any real advancement of the understanding—then he is hooked and no other kind of life will do.

The light wavered a little, as though the hand that held it wavered. It swept slowly along the hood once more. The voice stabbed at me again.

“Listen, stranger. I’m holding a ten shot automatic. I can shoot straight. Both your feet are vulnerable. What do you bid?”

“Put it up — or I’ll blow it out of your hand!” I snarled. My voice sounded like somebody tearing slats off a chicken coop.

“Oh — a hard-boiled gentleman.” There was a quaver in the voice, a nice little quaver. Then it hardened again. “Coming out? I’ll count three. Look at the odds I’m giving you — twelve fat cylinders, maybe sixteen. But your feet will hurt. And ankle bones take years and years to get well and sometimes they never really –”

“Not much of a sales talk for a blackmailer,” he said, still smiling.

“I always wonder why people pay blackmailers. They can’t buy anything. Yet they do pay them, sometimes over and over and over again. And in the end are just where they started.”

“The fear of today,” he said, “always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn’t defeat reason, there would be very little drama.”