Read Online Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers - Free Book Online

now, before all the discoveries were made. And when, in his late twenties, his research team assayed the milk of their transgenic cows and confirmed the presence of a protein they themselves had placed there alongside all of nature’s own tangled enzymes, he felt for two months that he could die satisfied.
    Then the two months ended, two months during which he had done absolutely nothing new for the world. Frantic again, he returned to the lab, to learn something about real work.
    He and his girlfriend—a sociologist who studied the power of crowds—got married. They had two children, one of each. He and his wife raised the kids somehow, between them. It crushed Thomas todiscover his daughter could not abide the smell of life science. It hurt him worse to discover that his son preferred making money to making discoveries. He released the children into the laboratories of their own lives. He got divorced. He wished his ex-wife all the world’s fresh horizons. Later, he had affairs, when there was time. But the love he really lived for was
knowing
.
    That thrill of first discovery returned a handful of times over the next twenty years, in diminished forms. He pushed himself forward on the pleasure of
first
: first place, first to lay eyes on, first in the hearts of his peer reviewers. But he wanted more than simple primacy.
First
was just a sporting bagatelle. To look on a thing that had been true since the start of creation but never grasped until
you
made it so: no euphoria available to the human brain could match it. Cleaner than drugs, broader and more powerful than sex—Huxley’s “divine dipsomania.” Anyone who tasted it once would spend the rest of his life trying for more.
    Science fit the very folds of Tom Kurton’s brain. Its exuberance tempered the tedium of daily lab work, kept him alert, overrode fatigue, and rendered risks trivial. And the goal of scientific exuberance, like the goal of life, which it helped to propel, was to replicate itself.
    And so his life, from the simplest of beginnings, has spun out endless living forms, not all of them viable, not all of them pretty, not all of them sane or even wise, but each a turbulent attempt to lay bare the order in things, and all of them variations most wonderful.

     
    Russell Stone lies in bed at night, reading about Algeria and its victims until he can’t breathe. He reads about a “vast national passion for reticence.” He reads about a culture struggling to emerge from feudal female sequestering and subservience. He can’t connect these accounts to his student’s existence. Even her years in Canada don’t explain such a leap.
    When the Algeria books threaten to suck him under, he switches to a layperson’s handbook on happiness that he’s checked out from the public library. He flips around in it, buffet style, hoping that some paragraph somewhere might explain
something
, or at least lull him to sleep.
    Sleep is not an option. He reads on, squinting at the clinical studies.One study claims that the most satisfied people are also those who can list the most peak experiences in sixty seconds. He sits up in bed with his yellow legal tablet and tries to write down the happiest moments in his life. The first one he remembers stops him cold.
    He’s tried to kill it, over the years: the three-day escape with Grace Cozma to Flagstaff that frosty March, in their last spring in the writing program. Her idea:
Come up with me to see the canyon. I have to see the damn Grand Canyon before I escape this place.
Until then, the farthest they’d gone was her ordering him to lick Mexican beer off her fingers one crazed happy hour after workshop.
    They rented a car—midsized luxury sedan, when they couldn’t afford economy—and drove up. But until they were standing at the reception desk in the ponderosa-pine lodge in Flagstaff, he had no idea whether Grace would ask for one room or two.
    She asked for one. One of everything, for the next three days.
Come up