A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects, and therefore he is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master. This is regarded as a matter of noblesse oblige. For the present purpose I beg to renounce the noblesse, if any, and to be freed of the ensuing obligation. My excuse is as follows. We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us that from antiquity and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum-total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them, and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. So much for my apology.
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER
It was the summer of 1968, the “summer of love,” I heard it called. Many nights I had had enough of physics. Many days too. I would be on my way to the university only to slip into a cinema, just like in my college days in Delhi. The first film I watched in Canada, in the valley that was Montreal, was Valley of the Dolls. The American English was difficult to understand, but there was not much to the plot. Young single women moving to the even brighter lights of New York City…. I wanted a marriage like mum and dad’s but not yet. First I wanted new experiences, new faces, new surroundings…Women half-naked in their bras and underwear. Women on booze. Women wanting abortions. Women as whores…and the feeling of loneliness is overpowering…Neely took the red pills. Jennifer took the blue pills. Susan took the yellow pills. They were all impossibly beautiful.
One night, I was walking on Ste-Catherine Street, on my way home after demonstrating in the lab. A girl approached me. I didn’t talk to girls that easily, but she spoke first. What’s you name? Where you came from? Where you live? Are you alone? What do you do this evening? I could not think of the right answers to any of the questions. They seemed as new and impossible as the geometry of snowflakes. Would you come with me for a walk? Sure, I said. That I could do. She walked and I limped along the street for a few minutes in silence. My boots making my characteristic asymmetric knocking sound, her heels making quick, high-pitched, even clicks. She had to slow down her pace. After a few minutes she said: Business is business. I charge you twenty dollars and spend night with you. I did not know how to respond. I started perspiring. Then, I tried to apply the laws of symmetry: If I spent the night with you, I asked, would you have fun too? Yes. Then why would you want twenty dollars? She did not answer, just turned and walked away. I had tried to put us on the same footing, but even I knew the theory was moot, because I could never afford to do the experiment. I could never spend twenty dollars on that.
I entered a pub around the corner. I told the waitress, who introduced herself as Jean, to take all my money and bring me four glasses of beer. I emptied out my pockets to find $1.25. You sure? You could have five glasses for that, you know. She must have thought I could not add. When she saw all four glasses empty half an hour later, she came with two more glasses. I am off in an hour, she said, wait for me. She took me for a ride in her car all around Montreal. She would be my tour guide, she said. This is a wonderful city, part of the Hochelaga Archipelago where the Ottawa River flows into the St. Lawrence River. You should know all that. She showed me Chinatown, the Red Light District, the port, and of course, she said, from a distance, the site of Expo 67. She explained that Canada had just celebrated its one hundredth birthday and had invited over sixty countries around the world to the party. She said her friend worked there as a hostess in the Canadian Pavilion and was not allowed to wear mini-skirts because it distracted the men. She said she had attended the opening remarks by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. He called the Expo “a monument to Man” and had said that the “genius of Man knows no boundaries but is universal.” She said she believed in universality. That we are all the same, at some level. She never asked me about the Himalayas, or Hinduism, or my family, or for that matter my leg. Which I liked about her.
I pointed to a glowing white sphere on the horizon. It was the American Pavilion, which I had seen up close. I had gone to Expo on a free pass after meeting an Indian fellow who had a stall selling imports at the Indian Pavilion. She explained that the sphere was built by Buckminster Fuller, that he dreamed up structures and then built them. That is a geodesic dome, she said. Geodesic, yes, I said. The shortest possible line between two points on a sphere or other curved surface. My gaze followed the curve of her brow all the way down to the curve of her hands on the steering wheel. Jean saved Mount Royal for the end. I insisted that I could walk to the top with her. This is not a mountain, I said. The Himalayas are mountains. Maybe, she replied, but 125 million years ago, it was a volcano, so just imagine that. Let’s stay in the car, it’s warmer here. She put a cassette into the deck telling me it was a Montreal poet named Leonard Cohen. He sang slowly and clearly, not like most of the pop music I heard on the radio. The song was called “Sisters of Mercy.” I understood every word. I could have hooked up with Jean then and there. Such was the Mexican Hat potential. Instead, I decided to never return to that pub.
A month later, I saw Jean at Montreal General Hospital. I had gone with Preet to have the cast from his broken leg finally removed. He was good as new, the nurse said, and then, looking at me, correcting herself. “All fixed. I mean, back to normal. I mean, the bones have healed just fine.” A woman down the hall was waving at me, but I did not recognize her. I asked the nurse who she was. She said she was a medical student in residence. “She’s an interesting woman. She says she wants to study people, you know, their psychology, so she works part time in a bar. She’s always talking about Freud. I guess they don’t really teach that in med school.” I knew it was her. I heard the Leonard Cohen lyrics. I went home and opened up my library copy of Schrödinger’s What is Life? and read until the early hours of the morning, allowing my thoughts to drop in random directions from the Himalayan peak of my consciousness, until the white outline of the Mount Royal cross disappeared from my mind’s eye, replaced by a white ball, rolling down the peak, settling on a state, breaking symmetry.
What is this ‘I’? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. “The youth that was I,” you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.