Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman [7]
A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic?
In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
• 4 May 1905
It is evening. Two couples, Swiss and English, sit at their usual table in the dining room of the Hotel San Murezzan in St. Moritz. They meet here yearly, for the month of June, to socialize and take the waters. The men are handsome in their black ties and their cummerbunds, the women beautiful in their evening gowns. The waiter walks across the fine wood floor, takes their orders.
“I gather the weather will be fair tomorrow,” says the woman with the brocade in her hair. “That will be a relief.” The others nod. “The baths do seem so much more pleasant when it’s sunny. Although I suppose it shouldn’t matter.”
“Running Lightly is four-to-one in Dublin,” says the admiral. “I’d back him if I had the money.” He winks at his wife.
“I’ll give you five-to-one if you’re game,” says the other man.
The women break their dinner rolls, butter them, carefully place their knives on the side of the butter plates. The men keep their eyes on the entrance.
“I love the lace of the serviettes,” says the woman with the brocade in her hair. She takes her napkin and unfolds it, then folds it again.
“You say that every year, Josephine,” the other woman says and smiles.
Dinner comes. Tonight, they dine on lobster Bordelaise, asparagus, steak, white wine.
“How is yours done?” says the woman with the brocade, looking at her husband.
“Splendidly. And yours?”
“A bit spicy. Like last week’s.”
“And, Admiral, how’s the steak?”
“Never turned down a side of beef,” says the admiral happily.
“Wouldn’t notice you’ve been at the larder much,” says the other man. “You’ve not put on one kilo since last year, or even for the last ten.”
“Perhaps you can’t notice, but she can,” says the