head. However reasonable my suspicions, confirmation was still a surprise. Parry’s machine said, “Please leave your message after the tone. And may the Lord be with you.” It was him, and it was two sentences. That his faith should have such reach, into the shallows of his answering machine, into the angles of his prose. What had he meant when he said he felt it too? What did he want?
I looked toward the gin and decided against. A more immediate problem was how to spend the evening until Clarissa’s return. If Ididn’t make conscious choices now, I knew I would brood and drink. I didn’t want to see friends, I had no need of entertainment, I wasn’t even hungry. Voids like these were familiar, and the only way across them was work. I went into my study, turned on the lights and the computer, and spread out my library notes. It was eight-fifteen. In three hours I could break the back of my piece on narrative in science. I already had the outlines of a theory—not one that I believed in, necessarily, but I could hang my piece around it. Propose it, evince the evidence, consider the objections, reassert it in conclusion. A narrative in itself—a little tired, perhaps, but it had served a thousand journalists before me.
Working was an evasion; I didn’t even doubt it at the time. I had no answers to my questions, and thinking would get me no further. My guess was that Clarissa would not be back before midnight, so I abandoned myself to my serious, flimsy argument. Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn’t always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn’t have to defend myself against the usual flotsam—the scraps of recent memory, the tokens of things not done or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean. I didn’t trick myself from my chair with promises of coffee, and despite the tonic I had no need to urinate.
It was the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur that nourished the anecdotal scientist. All those gentlemen without careers, those parsons with time to burn. Darwin himself, in pre-
Beagle
days, dreamed of a country living where he could pursue in peace his collector’s passion, and even in the life that genius and chance got him, Downe House was more parsonage than laboratory. The dominant artistic form was the novel, great sprawling narratives that not only charted private fates but made whole societies in mirror image and addressed the public issues of the day. Most educated people readcontemporary novels. Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth-century soul.
Then two things happened. Science became more difficult, and it became professionalized. It moved into the universities; parsonical narratives gave way to hard-edged theories that could survive intact without experimental support and that had their own formal aesthetic. At the same time, in literature and in other arts, a newfangled modernism celebrated formal, structural qualities, inner coherence, and self-reference. A priesthood guarded the temples of this difficult art against the trespasses of the common man.
Likewise in science. In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data were in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in 1915 and ’16, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in 1914 to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in 1919 to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data were overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory.
I looked toward the gin and decided against. A more immediate problem was how to spend the evening until Clarissa’s return. If Ididn’t make conscious choices now, I knew I would brood and drink. I didn’t want to see friends, I had no need of entertainment, I wasn’t even hungry. Voids like these were familiar, and the only way across them was work. I went into my study, turned on the lights and the computer, and spread out my library notes. It was eight-fifteen. In three hours I could break the back of my piece on narrative in science. I already had the outlines of a theory—not one that I believed in, necessarily, but I could hang my piece around it. Propose it, evince the evidence, consider the objections, reassert it in conclusion. A narrative in itself—a little tired, perhaps, but it had served a thousand journalists before me.
Working was an evasion; I didn’t even doubt it at the time. I had no answers to my questions, and thinking would get me no further. My guess was that Clarissa would not be back before midnight, so I abandoned myself to my serious, flimsy argument. Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn’t always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn’t have to defend myself against the usual flotsam—the scraps of recent memory, the tokens of things not done or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean. I didn’t trick myself from my chair with promises of coffee, and despite the tonic I had no need to urinate.
It was the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur that nourished the anecdotal scientist. All those gentlemen without careers, those parsons with time to burn. Darwin himself, in pre-
Beagle
days, dreamed of a country living where he could pursue in peace his collector’s passion, and even in the life that genius and chance got him, Downe House was more parsonage than laboratory. The dominant artistic form was the novel, great sprawling narratives that not only charted private fates but made whole societies in mirror image and addressed the public issues of the day. Most educated people readcontemporary novels. Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth-century soul.
Then two things happened. Science became more difficult, and it became professionalized. It moved into the universities; parsonical narratives gave way to hard-edged theories that could survive intact without experimental support and that had their own formal aesthetic. At the same time, in literature and in other arts, a newfangled modernism celebrated formal, structural qualities, inner coherence, and self-reference. A priesthood guarded the temples of this difficult art against the trespasses of the common man.
Likewise in science. In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data were in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in 1915 and ’16, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in 1914 to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in 1919 to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data were overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory.
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