“What’s the point of having two different words, ‘gravity’ and ‘love,’ if you’re going to use them to mean the same thing?”
“It’s called a metaphor.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Metaphors are attractive falsehoods. They only confuse people’s thinking. Most people are too confused already.”
At that moment one of the washed-out pitiless stars above them brightened and descended, roiled the water with its retro-rockets and landed on the crumbling jetty. The door hissed open, and out of the blinding light stepped a couples counselor who approached Saskia and took her gently by the hand and said, “Get out now, and don’t look back.”
Did she and Mark talk more that evening? Did she go home with him? She can’t remember. She remembers writing him a day or two later and telling him it wasn’t working.
He didn’t even call. He wrote a note, starting with something like “If that’s the way you feel then of course—” He expressed no regret. It confirmed all her doubts.
Then, as in an annoying indie rom-com, she discovered she was pregnant. (She used a diaphragm, but there was that one evening a couple of days after her period ended when she had accidentally left her bag in the car, and how could she have been so stupid, and how fucking Leave It to Beaver was it—ha!—that she was blaming only herself, as though pregnancies were parthenogenetic.) Angry at him, she didn’t tell him for six months, during which he didn’t call or write or hire a single plane to fly over her house with an apologetic banner, and then she wrote him another letter in which she said she was a few weeks away from giving birth and he was the father, and he deserved to know, but she wanted to raise the child on her own, because he wasn’t around even when he was around, and because, to be fair, she had left him no say in the matter, whatever small say a man should get in such a case.
If this was a final test, he either failed it spectacularly or aced it, responding with the same passive acceptance. Under a surface of generosity and understanding that probably made him feel good about himself, she sensed an ocean of indifference. His own child! It was appalling.
In retrospect, she can see that in those years, still so close to her traumatic adolescence, the most wounded part of her wanted to rip a man’s heart out and hand it to him on a silver platter. But he didn’t have a heart. And by the way, Tin Man, everyone knows what they mean when they say that.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
She has to admit, this is kind of interesting—Newman’s volume 3, page 1936, “Paradox Lost and Paradox Regained,” by Edward Kasner and the man himself. There’s a tricky little cheat that could be applied to the bus she’s riding on. Consider the tires. When a tire makes one revolution, it travels a linear distance along the road, assuming no slippage, equal to the circumference of the tire. That much is obvious. But now consider the smaller circle formed by the wheel hub. During the same interval, that circle also makes exactly one revolution and travels the same linear distance. Doesn’t that therefore prove that the circumference of the hub and the circumference of the tire are equal?
Of course not. Kasner and Newman’s elucidation, involving cycloids and curtate cycloids, leaves something to be desired. The more fundamental point is that here we have one of those conceptual sleights-of-hand whereby a particular case is falsely generalized. Obviously, every point throughout the volume of the wheel is displaced the same horizontal distance, regardless of what cycloid it inscribes—or straight line, if we consider the center of the wheel. At the same time, none of these points travel the same curved distance, because the parameters of their cycloids vary. It is only at the point of contact with the road that we can infer the circumference of the wheel, precisely because that is the point of contact. But that measurement is not the same as the actual distance traversed by a point on the circumference, because that, too, is a cycloid.
Amazing, how easily you can fool people with simple ideas.
She remembers one from third-grade math class: Three friends (of course men) arrive at a hotel and rent three rooms for ten dollars each. They pay the thirty dollars and go upstairs. Then the manager (male) remembers that the hotel is running a discount: three rooms for twenty-five dollars. He gives five dollars to the bellboy (boy) and tells him to return it to the guests. (The boy passes one woman mopping the stairs and another sponging toilets, but neither woman appears in the puzzle.) The bellboy, being dishonest, returns one dollar to each man and pockets the other two. Each of the three men has now paid nine dollars. Nine times three equals twenty-seven, plus the two dollars that the bellboy kept makes twenty-nine. So what happened to the thirtieth dollar?
It turned out that the kid sitting next to her in class had already heard the puzzle from his father, and he said to her in awe, apparently quoting his pre-arithmetical progenitor, “And you know what? No one has ever figured out where that dollar went.”
She turns off her overhead light and stares out the window into the blackness and thinks about human stupidity.
Oh—hers, too, for sure.
Here’s a simple idea that a simple mind believes, despite itself, to be true: Mette loves Alex, therefore Alex loves Mette. There’s something compelling, conceptually, about symmetry. Look at physics, Newton’s third law. Look at physicists, searching for supersymmetry. Look at a number line. Look at your face in the mirror. There’s something DNAish in our attraction to it. Yet DNA itself is right-handed. And for some reason matter slightly predominated over antimatter
