Mark has an insight, which he tries to formulate. “And so . . . perhaps . . . I haven’t seemed to you in these past few days to be worried enough, either. Like your mother, maybe?”
“Well of course, I told you as much. Although you’re nothing like my mother, believe me.”
“But I have been worried. I sent Mette that text.”
“I know, I know. You’re the way you are, Mette’s the way she is.”
Mark can’t argue with that. He doesn’t want to accidentally make things worse, so he doesn’t say this, or anything else, he just watches the beverage cart inch closer. He always gets tomato juice, since the potassium helps to calm his nerves.
“I’ve been working on this Joan of Arc play,” she says.
“You mentioned that a couple of years ago. You’re still working on it?”
“Writing takes a long time.”
“I wasn’t implying—”
“Or it does me, anyway.”
“I didn’t—”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m writing it just to understand Mette better.”
“I still don’t quite know what you’re referring to.”
“She doesn’t speak to me! Hardly ever!”
“You mean, she’s mad at you?”
“No. Or . . . I don’t know. That’s the problem—I don’t know what the problem is. I don’t even know if there is a problem. I just get this idea that you and she are buddies and I’m excluded, and it . . . it’s embarrassing to put it into words, it sounds like middle school . . . but I’m her mother, she’s spent all her life with me and yet . . . You know, in a way, she’s all I really have. Jesus, that sounds so melodramatic . . . Shit! Never mind, never mind.”
Is she upset? Her face is turned away. Mark is dumbfounded. “I . . . She . . . I’m sure she . . .” All sorts of platitudes come to mind, but no one ever wants platitudes, do they? Mark hates it when people say I’m sure everything will be fine, when they have no way of knowing. It’s insulting to a person’s intelligence to think they will be comforted by empty words. The fact is, he doesn’t really know anything about Saskia’s relationship with Mette.
The beverage cart is still five rows away. Looking past it, Mark sees again all those lit screens and thinks about his students, how he and his colleagues have been forced to reduce class workload because students resolutely refuse to do more than a certain piddling amount, which shrinks annually. He sometimes wonders if, along with resource depletion and environmental degradation, another reason intelligent civilizations never spread to other star systems is that, as the fruits of technology proliferate, intelligent creatures prefer comfort and entertainment to the hard challenge of scientific advancement or the risk of exploration. Maybe intelligent civilizations are common in the Milky Way, but we never hear from any of them because everyone’s home watching movies. And who’s to say that’s unfortunate? Adopting a cosmic perspective is all about shedding privileged points of view. He’s a scientist, so of course he values the advancement of science. Maybe creatures that sit in recliners and watch movies are less likely to kill one another and blow up their planet.
“His ways are not our ways,” she says.
She has turned back toward him. Her face is blank. Or rather, he can’t read it. “What’s that?”
“It’s something Joan of Arc said at her trial. Referring to God, of course.”
“Ah.”
“I say that to myself sometimes when I realize I’m inflating balloons and hanging streamers for a pity party.”
“Ah.”
“Shaw fucked it up in his play, he changed it to ‘His ways are not your ways’—Joan talking to her judges. Shaw turned it into typical Shavian lecturing and self-righteousness, when the original is more about Joan accepting her fate.”
“So . . . is that a little like saying, ‘You’re the way you are’?”
“Yeah, I guess. You know those mugs that say ‘It is what it is’? I kind of hate them because the phrase has been adopted as corporate-seminar-speak, but like a lot of facile clichés there’s a profound truth hidden there if you can just see it fresh. You know, pretend you’ve never thought of it before.”
“There’s a quote I’ve always liked,” Mark says, “I think it’s from Confucius. ‘Wherever you go, go there with all your heart.’”
“Yeah, that’s a good example. It actually means everything, if you can just hear it like a new idea.”
“It’s a good principle for scientists.”
“It’s similar to that Coen brothers line you mentioned, ‘Just look at that parking lot.’ Holding on to an idea of wonder.”
“Which is what science is all about.”
“I didn’t know you believed in the heart, though.”
“It’s just an expression. It could easily be ‘go there with all your attention.’”
“Don’t you think ‘heart’ means more than that?”
“Well . . . maybe. Attention plus moral engagement. Plus intuition, which is probably related to empathy. All of that makes good science.”
“Moral engagement?”
“Of course. All decent scientists struggle with the implications of their discoveries, whether it involves human biology or the military, or whatever. My father uprooted my mother and sister and left a secure position at RAND, he crossed the country to get away from nuclear weapons. Even though he loved the science. He never found atmospheric research to be as interesting. I think it’s one of the things that made him depressed in his later years. What people don’t understand is that, even if scientists dread the misuse of what they discover, they know that what is discoverable will be discovered, by someone. The whole nature of science—its openness, its explicable structure—means there’s a strong likelihood that if you can see a way forward in a certain area of knowledge, other scientists can see it also.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“While we’re talking about quotes, there’s one my father liked, he used to say it to me all the time, it’s actually from some fantasy novel, I think, about some society on another planet. One of the characters explains to a visitor, ‘There’s a dreadful law here, that if anyone asks for machinery they have to have it and keep on using it.’ Of course my father was thinking of nuclear weapons. I guess
