When my father revealed that we would be moving to California in early 1958, where he would have a new job with better pay, my overall feeling was: It’s time. “Lowell,” I wrote in anticipation of the move, “is the kind of city I like to go through on a train and think how lucky I am not to live there.” We’d been there for a year and a half, a longer stopover than usual, and a thin crust of familiarity had already settled on all the churches and buildings and houses. When a place gets all echoey like this, I felt, when everywhere you look you see residues of what’s already happened, the only thing to do is move on. The specific content of the memories does not have to be tragic; it’s just that no matter how you evoke it, the past is inherently always about death: what was and no longer is. My family had found a surefire way to escape the sickening accretion of memory, which was to pack up and move.
I understood too that the concept of home was badly in need of updating before it expired altogether when I reached eighteen, which was, as my mother had always made clear, when I would “age out” like a foster child and be released to the streets or, should I qualify, to college. This did not seem so harsh to me at the time, since I understood the family, my family at least, to be a temporary and unstable unit like one of those clumsily named elements down at the bottom of the periodic table, Berkelium or Rutherfordium, for example. In the new managerial gypsy class we had entered, the point was not to set down roots—or, in chemical terms, bond with other families or groups—but to follow the breadwinner as unseen forces drove him from one office, one company, one brand to another. And then, when we were no longer needed to provide him with the cover of suburban respectability, the family would undergo fission and we would head off in our separate directions.
By this time it was obvious that my father had given up science—which was the only white-collar occupation he deemed worthy of a person’s best efforts—for money. Given that he was over six feet tall, looked like Dean Martin, and could outdrink any competitor, maybe it had been inevitable that he would eventually be drafted from the laboratory into management and what was ultimately, at the time of his retirement in the 1980s, a salary in the upper five figures. Or maybe he fought for his various promotions—hiding the tattoo under neatly pressed white shirts and suit jackets, upgrading from boilermakers to martinis, developing a consistently below-par golf game and an enthusiasm for flying around the country to meetings. The fiction was that he did it all for us. Maudlin with drink one Sunday afternoon, he told me that, left to himself, he would happily have toiled away in the lab, but that he had a family to support, which meant submission to the endless, trivial, and demeaning demands of the company. It would have been easier on me if he had just waved toward the corporate hierarchy he had so much contempt for and said: See this pile of steaming shit? Well, I’m going to climb my way to the top of it.
But I was not too sure about his choice of California. I knew the stereotype, thanks to Life magazine, of happy, tanned people driving around in sports cars from one beach party to another. What if all this sunshine worked its magic on me and I turned into a teenager? Chronologically, I fit the description, but I knew the demographic group only as the “juvenile delinquents” of media paranoia or the dwarf grown-ups practicing mating rituals on American Bandstand. Adolescence I could handle and in fact might as well have been running through a checklist of approved adolescent activities. Read Dostoevsky: Check. Camus: Check. Escape into fugue states where the agreed-upon and shared reality of world evaporates: Check.…In Lowell, I could move seamlessly from school to family dinner to an evening immersion in The Underground Man without experiencing the slightest hiccup of dissonance. But who could read Dostoevsky in a subtropical environment or Conrad in a place where the major seafaring activity seemed to be surfing? I arrived in Los Angeles with my shoulders hunched against the threat of corruption.
It was different all right, but not always in the ways I expected. This was my first exposure to the “modern,” by which I don’t mean anything fancy and academic; that’s just the word my parents used to describe what they saw as the upgrade in our new environment. Lowell had been ancient and gnarly; in Los Angeles, or at least on the white west side of the city where we took up residence, everything was clean and smooth. Gone were the curlicues and doodads that adorned Lowell’s nineteenth-century building façades, replaced by plain, flat, pastel-colored walls that seemed to have no function at all except to reflect back the sun. I found this modernity immensely freeing, at first anyway: an invitation to fill in the blanks for myself.
Gone too were the churches; at least they were not prominent in the suburban scenery of West L.A. at the time. If I wanted to reflect on the glories and shortcomings of organized religion, there were no cathedrals to sit in quietly for purposes of observation, but I could walk just twenty minutes from our house down Sunset Boulevard to something called the “Church of All Religions,” which was my first clue as to the essential strangeness of L.A., apart from the climate. Here the religions were all conveniently on display together, each represented by its own shrine or plaque, and organized around a little freshwater lake, the only one in Los Angeles. Well, not all religions. Christianity and Hinduism were the most prominently represented, and each of them only in its softest, most loving form, suggesting that the essence of religion is one long swoon into the infinite All. Nothing like this “church” could have occurred in New England, of course, where the denominations bristled with mutual hostility and the realm of the sacred never bore any resemblance to an amusement park. The Church of All Religions had once been a movie set—perhaps for the filming of a version of Don Quixote, since the most prominent feature of the site was a windmill—and had later been taken over by a successful ecumenically minded swami. The most memorable aspect of Hinduism here was the plaque revealing that for weeks after his death the swami’s corpse had remained sweet-smelling and his nails had continued to grow.
Even the city’s sprawl delighted me, testifying as it did to an excess of space. Stores didn’t have to be crammed into the first floor of multistory buildings housing stacks of offices higher up. In fact, there were hardly any offices or office buildings visible at all, suggesting that whatever was going on here—the shiny diners, supermarkets, and shopping centers—had sprung up spontaneously and without any kind of administrative oversight. High school wasn’t a single grim box of a building, it was a “campus” of scattered bungalows, one for each teacher or class, and you could walk right on out to the parking lot and, if you had learned how to smoke, have a cigarette, with no one paying any attention. In my last few weeks in Lowell, a girl had been dragged into the basement of the high school and raped—a crime so awful it could only be whispered and then only by a determined “realist” like my mother. Nothing like that could happen at my new high school, where there was no basement or dark interstitial spaces to get trapped in.
I was right to be on guard, though. We arrived in March, the middle of a semester, leaving me scrambling to catch up in trigonometry, which as a result I never fully understood. What kind of person looks at, say, a piece of rhubarb pie and comes up with the notion of a cosine? What is the deep mysterious link between triangles and circles, sharp points and gentle curves? Even more threatening was a required course brazenly entitled “Life Adjustment,” since I knew that just by looking at me anyone could tell I fell short of “adjustment.” Most of my clothes were homemade by my mother, like the Black Watch plaid dress with the white appliqué collar and cuffs that I had been so proud of in Lowell, but that here, where the cool girls wore close-fitting sweaters and tight tubular skirts, looked like some kind of folk costume. On about my third session in this course we were given a “personality test” to fill out, featuring multiple-choice questions about our eagerness to spend time with friends (of which I had none at the moment), eventual interest in marriage, and general satisfaction with the status quo. I filled it out quickly and guilelessly, prepared to learn something about that mysterious doppelgänger, my “personality.” But no, as soon as we had finished the tests, the teacher instructed us to exchange papers with the person sitting across the aisle from us, so that the tests could be corrected.
I stuck up my hand to raise the obvious, even platitudinous question: How could there be “right” answers if, as had just been explained, each person has a unique personality? All the time thinking: What is this, communism? Because as I understood it, that’s what communism, our great national enemy, meant—the forcible destruction of the individual by the power of the state—and here it was going on right out in the open. I got some kind of patronizing answer about my being new to the class and how everything would be clear soon enough. So I stood up without saying another word, picked up my books, and walked out of the bungalow, taking my potentially incriminating test with me. The amazing thing, compared to what might have happened in Lowell, is that I could just walk out, without anyone trying to stop me.
By the end of the day, this seemed less like a moment of glorious resistance than a narrow escape. I understood that my test answers were seriously wrong, off the scale, possibly insane, and that I would be exposed as a deviant with no place in this sunny, superficially friendly new world. When I got home I went to my room and broke into tears. It’s too late now to perform a chemical assay and determine how much these were the hot tears of a fresh hurt and how much the familiar balm of childish self-pity, but there was definitely hurt involved. I had come to believe, especially as the acne subsided in the last year or so, that it was up to me to decide how much to be involved with the growing category of “other people,” with Joseph Conrad weighing in heavily on the side of involvement. He had convinced me, in story after story, that tragedy awaits the person who fails to reach out in love, to make a commitment to other people or even just a connection. There it was in Victory: “Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to love, to hope—to put its trust in life,” to take the plunge, in other words, that Conrad’s hero takes far too late. In my journal, I had chided myself more than once for my aloofness, even finding it “deplorable,” and promised to correct it someday when the opportunity arose to develop “emotional involvements.”
But now the personality test raised the possibility that the choice might not be mine to make. Maybe I had been in the wilderness for too long and developed some rude odor that no one expects to find indoors. What with all that reading, thinking, and staying up late to make notes, I had let myself go, failed to keep up my credentials as a human being, and turned into the kind of freak who had to be ejected from human society lest the general consensus be undone. I did not belong here, as sooner or later the school officials and everyone else would realize.
I dried my eyes, went back downstairs, and cautiously announced to my mother that California was not working out for me; it was obvious that I didn’t fit in. What was I expecting—pity? California wasn’t working for her either. My father was rarely around and she had left all her civic attachments in Lowell, where by the end of our stay she had risen to the presidency of the citywide PTA. So she just smacked the iron down hard on the handkerchief she was ironing for the sole purpose of enabling it to stick neatly out from my father’s breast pocket and told me that I had always thought I was “special” and that was what was wrong with me, because I wasn’t special at all. I was just like everyone else and I might as well get used to it.
Nevertheless I managed, with no help from my parents, to transfer out of Life Adjustment. The next day I went to the administration office, housed in a bungalow of its own, where I announced to some adult at a desk that I could not take this course, that it went against my most fundamental principles. She kindly allowed me to switch to typing, which I had failed to learn when I went from “typing practice” to longhand journal-keeping. Possibly she took me for some kind of hard-line Christian who found Life Adjustment offensively secular by virtue of its inattention to the afterlife.
After that I stopped worrying about being a deviant and began to think of myself in a new way, as a rebel, and no one, however psychiatrically or politically conservative, should hold this against me, because at least it was a halting step toward social connectedness, an acknowledgment that there were other people and that I existed in some kind of relationship to them. I fit into the human enterprise after all, even if my role was to overthrow it from within. I laid this out a few months after our arrival in Los Angeles, in an entry I submitted to a newspaper essay contest on the theme of “the role of youth in our society” or a similar abstraction that could only have been crafted in an era when newspaper editors suffered from an excess of job security. Unfortunately no copy of my essay survives, but the general idea was that “society” tends toward stagnation and conformity unless continually challenged by the young. That was it: no complaints about racial injustice or nuclear war, neither of which loomed large in my metaphysical scheme of things, just a general exhortation to stand up, question everything, take nothing for granted. I comforted myself when I lost with the fact that I would not have accepted the prize anyway, which was a date with the young actor who had starred in a movie called The Restless Years.
What I was rebelling against? Well, of course the great collectivist project of high school, which was to transform us all into interchangeable units capable of occupying the interchangeable houses that made up Southern California suburbia. I learned to smoke, which I didn’t have to go outside of the family to master, since my beloved aunt Jean, on a rare visit, introduced me to her menthol-flavored Newports, from which I graduated to stealing my parents’ Camels. Smoking came in handy for waiting out high school’s most fascist institution—football “pep rallies” at which attendance was mandatory. Kathy, one of my first California friends, and I would hide in adjacent stalls in a girls’ restroom and pass a cigarette back and forth while the sound of brainwashed chanting poured in through the window. We thought that if we stood on the toilet seats no one would see us by looking under the doors. It did not occur to us, at that point in the history of American public health, that cigarette smoke had a detectable odor.
Or you could say that I was rebelling against banality, but only if you understood by banality the near-universal refusal to recognize “the situation,” including the impending deaths of all of us. It made me almost frantic that everyone could go on doing what they were doing without ever acknowledging what was going on—the steady turning of the earth and passage of days, leading, as far as anyone could tell, to the absolute darkness of Nothing. That first summer in Los Angeles, while I was taking physics in summer school and polishing up my French by reading Gide’s La porte étroite, I wrote:
Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, “What difference does it make?” Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others. Being constantly subjected to it at school, at work [I had a phone-answering job for a TV repair service], I feel like screaming and throwing things.
In school I made a few friends that first semester, mostly bright, studious, college-bound kids like myself to eat lunch with and occasionally see after school. It was easy to make friends here, where people did not sort themselves by religion, and where no one was impressed, one way or another, by my atheism, or intent on converting me. A school of this size even offered a small selection of fellow misfits like Kathy, who was rich and self-assured enough to giggle at the monstrous expectation that we fit into some Hollywood teenage norm. I lived not far from David—poor, chronically morose David—who would have been my boyfriend if such a concept had ever arisen between us. We got together at his house after school, where there was an actual bar in the living room, and if no one was around we would sit cross-legged on the floor and sample his parents’ liquor while we talked about something like furniture: What did it really add to anything? Why did people submit to such an obvious obstruction and burden? There was my first-ever “political” friend, Dina, a Zionist who had spent a year in a kibbutz and glowed with an incomprehensible zeal for agrarian socialism.
Mostly there was Marina, who daringly wore peasant skirts and hoop earrings to school, and introduced me to the nascent concept of bohemia. I spent more time with her than any other friend, often at her house, which featured an enviably jolly mother and bright, crude, folkish weavings on the walls. Sometimes we studied chemistry together, or at least laughed about it, gleefully naming the day of a major upcoming test—it fell on Friday, April 26—Black Faraday, we called it, in honor of the nineteenth-century chemist Michael Faraday. It was Marina who located the first coffeehouse we ventured out to in Venice, ostensibly in search of folk music. Sometimes someone would take out a guitar and make sounds that I would strain to appreciate while Marina nodded along rapturously. What impressed me most about these places was that nothing was for sale. Hot water and instant coffee were available on a table near the entrance, and you could leave some change in a jar if you felt like it. Contrast that to the diner where I now waitressed on weekends and evenings, where in principle every sugar cube had to be accounted for.
My parents didn’t know about our forays into L.A.’s emerging “beat” scene (which didn’t call itself that—or anything), and this was a good thing since the newspaper seemed to think it was a hotbed of “narcotics” and sexual “deviancy.” Actually there was more so-called deviancy at the diner I worked in, where the ultra-butch middle-aged fry cook had begun giving me long inquiring looks, especially around closing time. I admired her proficiency as a cook, but if she had another life to go home to, a smaller and possibly more squalid kitchen of her own, I did not want to know about it.
Drugs, yes, there were no doubt some drugs in the coffeehouse culture. Marina and I became friendly with Frank, a guitar player who was our age and went on to become a rock star in the sixties—as I realized years later only when I saw one of his album covers. I was driving my mother’s car when Marina, in the passenger seat, opened the paper bag on her lap to show me that it was filled with a flaky brown substance she identified as Frank’s marijuana, which for some reason he’d asked Marina to hold on to for him. I insisted, over her baffled objections, that we pull over and dump it down a storm drain—before the police caught us, or before we were tempted to try it and descend immediately into delinquency and ruin.
The real danger of the nascent counterculture was nothing more than the spectacle of grown-ups openly shirking their grown-up responsibilities, sitting around for hours without any visible connection to jobs or offices or factories or families. This was immensely reassuring to me, like finding a pocket of people who’d survived a deadly disease I had just been diagnosed with: Becoming an adult at, say, age eighteen didn’t have to mean giving up everything you cared about and getting press-ganged into a life of domestic service. You could sit in a coffeehouse all day and late into the night if you wanted to, smoking, chatting, drinking bitter coffee, and maybe playing a game of chess. Though there was always the question of what sustained these people in a material sense—whether they had homes and self-renewing bank accounts or slept on the beach. There was no way to judge by the way anyone looked.
I admired Marina, more so than any of my previous friends, because I knew that of the two of us she was the true Nietzschean, the one who understood better than I did that hilarity is the best response to absurdity. Tell her that we live in the detritus of the Big Bang on some two-bit planet in an undistinguished galaxy—not that I ever put it in quite those words—and she’d roll her eyes and smile as if this tragic circumstance might offer some possibilities for fun. Tell her that we are each individually doomed to death and she might get inspired by an ad on the bus for an attractive and moderately priced cemetery. “It’s never too soon to start thinking about these things,” she said loudly enough to make our fellow passengers squirm, “and what a reasonable price!” If I could control my giggling, I would respond with a riff into what would happen as the city ran out of space to contain the steady onslaught of the dead. Would it become necessary to start digging up lawns? People looked away and once or twice changed their seats. No one ever joined in.
But she was slippery too, a “phony” was how my mother put it, though my mother was not privy to any actual evidence. If I asked Marina about something she’d told me the week before, she might deny it or say she’d forgotten it or never meant it anyway. She told me with a certain amount of pride that she had fashioned three distinct personalities that she adopted to suit the setting, which was of course one way to beat the “personality tests,” but it left me to guess which Marina I was dealing with from one moment to the next—the good schoolgirl, the prankster, or the fledgling young artist. I had been convinced that she was some sort of creative genius until the afternoon she showed me a poem she had written—something about the moon and soft breezes, I think—which, my limited French and Latin suggested, was the same poem, only in English, as the one in the Spanish textbook that lay open on her desk. When I asked her about this, she shrugged in a way meant to make me feel like a dolt for failing to grasp some obvious principle of poetic convergence.
Was it really possible to communicate with anyone—at least about anything important? In that first summer in Los Angeles I reported in my journal:
It was lunchtime at school. I had been reading, apart from my friends. Then I looked up, saw that the grass was green, the sun was warm, and was happy. I rejoined my friends, who were engaged in the most abstract of discussions, abstract because it was so trivial as to be completely unrelated to reality. [They were probably talking about grades and upcoming tests.] So I spoke. I told them, smiling, that it made no difference, none at all, so be happy. They laughed, not from enlightenment and relief, but from surprise. I looked around at the faces all around and realized again what a wall there is between me and them, them and them.
Or I might be on a bus, studying my fellow passengers for signs of independent conscious existence. “Some read,” I noted, “some look out the window, and I look at them. I would like to say, ‘Here we are, you people, this time and place and us in it will never be again. Wake up!’ But the bus has already moved, and some people have to get off.”
What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, “Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here?” I wanted them to come pouring out of their houses and cars calling out, “Look at this! Just look at this! Do you see what I see? The strange juice rising in the grass and the trees, the great freely given, unearned beneficence of the sun?” In my fantasy some of them would buttonhole strangers for the first serious conversations of their lives. Others would throw their arms out and their heads back and scream at the sky in alternating terror and ecstasy. Passersby would hug. Tears of recognition and amazement would be shed. It would be the end of loneliness and falsity and the beginning, after all these wasted years, of whatever it is we are supposed to be doing here. And if they didn’t want to respond so demonstratively, then all I asked was a wink here and there, a carefully folded note. “People,” I wrote, “why don’t you make some sign?”
I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, but I was becoming Prince Myshkin—a holy fool—though with flashes of Zarathrustra, meaning that my grip on the ordinary was slipping away. I studied, read, kept my clothes clean and ironed, showed up for work on time, first at the TV repair place and later as a waitress. But something was pulling at me, something that now seemed so unstoppable, resounding, and obvious that I was no longer reticent about it in my journal. The episodes of dissociation, which had subsided in the gloom of Lowell, were increasing in both frequency and intensity, meaning that I was again seeing things as they actually were, without, as I wrote, “the superimposed fantasy”:
Often I have sudden jolts when the realness of things is lost. Then things are as if I was just born and had never seen them before. It is an adventure [although] I am delighted when the ground I step on turns out to [still] be there and the sunlight doesn’t materialize into a clashing noise or stream of liquid.
But now gradually a new philosophical doubt took hold of me. How could I know these glimpses of what seemed to be an underlying reality were “real” when they too were products of my “mental processes”? “My ignorance is unfathomable,” I wrote, “infinite. If I sat down, if I was capable of sitting down and doing some logical reasoning, and followed each circular thought, and figured it all out, I would be desperately unhappy. For the truth which comes from logic is bitter. Everything I do or think is mocked cruelly by that which I cannot alter—the fact of my death.” Or as I put it somewhat more elegantly a few months later, “This is a difficult time. I am Nietzsche’s rope dancer and the rope is imaginary. If I look down for an instant and see that there is nothing there, I’m lost.”
When someone wanders so far from the flock, people, in their collective vanity, tend to blame the flock. Anyone who wanders off must have been actively pushed away—by family dysfunction, social disappointment, sexual rejection, whatever. Or maybe it was the wanderer’s fault, and, like one of Conrad’s characters, she lost her way because she failed to cultivate the appropriate intraspecies bonds; she forgot about love. Either way, the idea is that what happens to people is all about people; no other factors merit consideration. Try telling a therapist or other member of the helping professions that you are menaced by hazy sunlight or that the sumac trees growing like weeds along railroad tracks fill you with dread, and he or she will want to hear accounts of childhood abuse. This is the conceit of psychiatry and unfortunately of so many novels, even some of the best and most riveting ones: that except for the occasional disease or disaster, the only forces shaping our lives are other humans, and that outside of our web of human interactions there is nothing worth looking into.
Of course we are shaped by our mutual dependency, and to a degree that is almost embarrassing. I have no argument with that. Other than certain insects, humans are the most social of animals. Infants who are not cuddled or held die of a syndrome called “failure to thrive.” Seemingly successful adults can be driven to depression or suicide by a lover’s rejection or an accumulation of professional slights. Which is to say that we are “hive” animals or—to invoke a more extravagant biological metaphor—we are the individual nuclei studded throughout a syncytium of shared protoplasm, utterly dependent on each other for structure and nutrients. To be pinched off from the main body of the community is to risk real damage, and one form the damage can take, I’m willing to concede, is an inability to enter wholeheartedly into what is socially defined as real.
So yes, I was a product of the peculiar dynamics of the tiny group of humans I lived with, and the fact that we moved so often only amplified their impact. As a family, we were designed for frictionless mobility with no competing long-term bonds—to friends, for example, or community institutions—that might have diluted our dependency on one another, as either antagonists or potential allies and sources of approval. And it was clear, a few months into our stay in California, that our little encampment was in a state of advanced disrepair. My father had withdrawn to a point where I had to wonder why he had bothered to bring us along with him from Lowell. Maybe he had already taken up with the secretary who was to become his second wife, because when he was around, he appeared to be in the grip of a vast and terrible thought, leaning on one elbow, smoking and staring off in silence. His withdrawal further tormented my mother, who in turn spread the torment around. But I’d been watching this asymmetric power struggle for as long as I’d been able to take mental notes, and it no longer held any interest for me. What had changed for me with our move to California was not the family dysfunction but the physical environment.
In Los Angeles there just seemed to be less detail per square foot of the visual field. A palm tree is simple, for example, a mere stick figure compared to an oak, and at least from a distance, stucco is featureless compared to shingles or brick. There was nothing on the surfaces that made up my visual field to anchor my attention, and these surfaces were almost always alarmingly bright. Los Angeles gets 329 sunny days a year, compared to Boston’s 230, with Boston being an approximation for Lowell. That’s ninety-nine more days of photic aggression, of sharp outlines and the harsh planes that made up buildings and roads. There was no hiding here, and none of the false coziness engendered by snow or long days of rain. If something was trying to get to me—not that I thought that anything was—but if something was coming at me from a distance, there was no longer much cloud cover to keep it at bay.
“Something”? Up until now I had thought of the dissociative experience as a “place,” but since I had no control over my access to it, there was the possibility of some being or agency that swooped down to take me there. If I had no power over the experience, then maybe something else did. But of course there were no candidates to fill such a role. You might say that the major lesson of my upbringing so far was that there was nothing “out there”—no God, no reliable others, and no help coming, or, for that matter, any threats other than those of human invention. So my uncanny “jolts,” or sudden fissures in reality, could not represent interventions by some alien being. Rationally speaking, they were nothing more than brief breakdowns of normal perceptual processes, and were ultimately explainable, like everything else, in terms of cellular and molecular interactions. Science confirmed that the universe was dead or at least made up of tiny dead things, mindless particles following their destinies.
Science—straightforward, reductionist, Newtonian high school science—should have kept my feet on the firm ground of communal reality. Or so you might think, because there’s no room in it for abnormal perceptions of the kind that can’t be shared in a few words or mathematical symbols. In fact, I can imagine science being used as therapy for all sorts of alienation-related psychological disorders. What better way to bring an errant mind back into the fold than to give the patient a stopwatch, a ball, and an inclined plane and tell her she can have lunch as soon as she comes up with something interesting to report? Or send a young romantic off to observe a sunset with the instruction that he is not to come back with some mush about glory and uplift; just stick to wavelengths, temperature, and angles of light. That’s what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner—or more sociable—than that?
But science wasn’t working out that way for me, and not because I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t take the high school course in biology, but I did qualify, on the basis of my grades, for what amounted to some kind of biology aversion therapy. This involved long bus trips to Saturday morning lectures on the subject of taxonomy, meaning the similarities between sketches of different creatures—mostly, as I recall, mollusks, although the vertebrates too were presented as so totally immobilized that they might as well have been encased in shells. Since Darwin went unmentioned, these similarities implied no genealogical connections, and I could see no more reason to focus on the sorting of creatures into species and subspecies than to discuss the way the lecturer arranged items in her chest of drawers. If there was any motion in the realm of “living things” (a fascinatingly oxymoronic notion in itself)—any creeping or running or lunging or reaching—the work of biologists was to replace it with a static series of slides, and this I figured they could do perfectly well without any help from me.
As for high school physics, all it offered was a view from which, as far as I could determine, “matter’s chief property is inertia,” meaning that the physical world was dead—a huge corpse deposited, for unknown reasons, in the middle of space-time. Let go of a rock and it falls; planets keep tumbling through their orbits; x is always tethered meekly to y. Pendulums swing and water flows downhill. All pretty dull until you reflected on the fact that all this motion arose from something totally occult, a “force” of some kind—which was what? A silent, invisible, odorless manifestation of will, but whose will, and what was it striving toward?
Chemistry was a far more potent distraction, my refuge from the barrenness of physics, trigonometry, and family. Maybe because it was the closest thing I could find to my father’s erstwhile field or maybe because I was actually good at it—good enough anyway to have won a copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics with my name emblazed on its cover for achievement in ninth-grade science—but I couldn’t get enough of chemistry. “All I think of is chemistry, chemistry, chemistry,” I wrote:
I am a supersaturated solution, I’m a filter paper who’s had too much. Chemistry is the last thing I think of at night and at 6:30 AM my first conscious thought is about the occurrence of aluminum. And this is only the introduction to the preface to the beginning of the most elementary chemistry. It’s not blood in my veins, it’s a colloidal suspension.
Of course if I had really been a science prodigy, I would have been doing chemistry and not just reading about it. I would have been like Linus Pauling, who as a high school boy ransacked junkyards to build equipment for his home chemistry lab. I possessed a chemistry set—of the kind that was popular in the fifties and seemingly designed, with its many readily opened vials of toxic materials, to exterminate budding scientists. But it just gathered dust on a shelf, which is probably a good thing, since of course I had no source of water in my bedroom and no way of washing, say, uranium dust off my hands.
I was attracted to chemistry the way some people were attracted to Tolkien, because it offered an alternative world full of drama and intrigue. Physics wanted to squeeze the life out of nature, but chemistry revealed that underneath the calm surface of things there exists a realm exempt from brute gravity, where atoms and molecules are in constant motion, pushing and jostling, dancing and mating—activities acknowledged in first-year physics only as “friction”—the irritating stickiness of things, which to a physicist is a kind of imperfection. But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules—the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called “primitive” societies—with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo. Somehow, out of all this invisible turmoil, the gross material world was supposed to assemble itself, because that’s what the world was—really was, in a scientific sense—an ever-shifting alliance of particles, a concatenation of unwilled, more or less automatic events.
All of which amounts to an admission that my mind often wandered as I struggled through long problem sets involving, for example, reaction rates and equilibrium constants. And remember that in those days before handheld calculators almost every problem required some recourse to log tables or the tortured algorithm of long division, providing plenty of openings for the kind of useless philosophical digression available to a person who would rather not be scratching out numbers with a pencil, who would rather be reading novels. Science “works,” of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, was it really a great improvement over mythology? Why do we insist that theories “work,” when they might just as well sit around and look pretty?
I couldn’t help observing that for every advance in science—explaining why the seasons change or lightning rips open the sky—some perfectly competent goddess or demiurge is put out of work, a hypothesized spirit dies, or a living thing surrenders its autonomy. Take an amoeba, creeping along a glass slide one pseudopod after another. Do you think it moves because it “wants” to? No, its movements represent chemotaxis—the action of small molecules on its cell membrane, leading to tugs and pulls on the protein scaffolding within, the zipping and unzipping of polymers—and it is this sequence of events that generates the motion. To “understand” the amoeba, in a scientific way, is to turn it into a jerry-rigged contraption that could theoretically be synthesized from reagents in a test tube. Any other interpretation of its motion—say, in terms of “wanting” or desire—would represent the dread crime of “anthropomorphism.”
But what was there to do if not science? Science fiction had helped lure me into it, if only because it made science seem like a pure outgrowth of imagination, without any of the drudgery of making measurements and calculating results. Sputnik also played a role, because it meant that from 1957 on, all bright young Americans, even the girls among them, needed to be steered in the direction of rocket-making skills, beginning with physics and chemistry. (At least no teacher ever said, “Wow, you’re good. Have you thought of a career in art history?”) Then there was my father’s irresistible influence—not only his love of science, but his abandonment of it. The sins of the father were visited on the daughter, and if he wasn’t going to find the cure for acne or some astounding way of generating electricity out of room-temperature granite, then I was going to have to do it for him. That was the implication of his “sacrifice”: The dream of pure science had to be postponed to the next generation, and since neither of my siblings showed the slightest interest, it was I who inherited the obligation.
Besides, as far as I could see, any subject other than science, like history or literature, was just a matter of reading, which I could do on my own. Literature was my default activity—what I did when I wasn’t doing anything else and often, to my mother’s vexation, even when I was. I could prop up a book to read while I was brushing my teeth or washing the dishes, and there was no reason to stop just because someone entered the room. Reading was entertainment; science was work, and everyone had to work; that was obvious. The alternative was to be like my mother, driven to madness by the pressure of unchanneled energy.
If science had admitted that amoebae could have intentions, that oxygen atoms actually lust after hydrogen atoms, I might have felt a little less lonely. But the purpose of science was to crush any sign of autonomous life, or at least of intention, outside of the scientific observer him- or herself. This was the universe as seen from high school physics class, enriched by rumors of relativity: everything reduced to particles rolling around on the wrinkles of space-time, the billiard table of classical physics augmented by Einstein into some vast funereal topography, like the gently furrowed surface of a sunless sea on the distant planet of a dying star. All of which made the question why ever more urgent. Why was there anything at all? Why interrupt the perfection of universal Nothing with the momentary clutter and confusion of Something? If everything else was already dead or determined, how to account for this minuscule perturbation that was conscious human life, or at least my conscious human life? Why, O Lord, didn’t you just go right on sleeping?