Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [128]
“I have a sense of humor, too,” Lucille wrote to Richard, “but I don’t think this is a funny occasion.”
I felt thrilled & frightened at your part in this tremendous thing. No one can be really joyous. It is with horror that I listen to the death & destruction the bomb has caused… . I pray that this horrible destruction of man by man may be the climax of all such destruction… . No wonder I thought you were nervous. Who wouldn’t be, playing around in such a dangerous place.
The combination of pride and terror—the scientists, too, were feeling it that night—stirred a remarkable memory. “It reminded me of the time I was playing bridge in the living room & my child prodigy had a little fire in a trash basket he was holding outside the window.
“By the way,” she added, “I don’t think you ever told me how you put it out.”
Feynman did not stop at home on his way to Ithaca from New Mexico that fall. At some point Lucille began to realize how much damage had been done by her opposition to the marriage. Late one night, unable to sleep, she got out of bed and penned an anguished letter—a love letter from mother to son—beginning, “Richard, What has happened between you and your family? What has driven us apart? My heart yearns for you… . My heart is full to bursting & hot tears burn my eyes as I write.”
She wrote about his childhood: how much he had been wanted and treasured; how she had read him beautiful stories; how Melville had made patterns for him from colored tiles; how they had tried to invest him with a sense of morality and duty. She reminded him of the pride they had felt in all his achievements, from high school through graduate school.
More times than I can enumerate here my heart has leaped for joy because of you… . And now—now—strange harvest that I reap. We are as far apart as the poles.
Without mentioning Arline, she said she felt a sense of shame. “The fault must be mine. Some where along the way I lost you.” Other mothers, she said, had sons who loved them. Why not her? She closed with as impassioned a plea as any spurned lover could make.
I need you. I want you. I will never give you up. Not even death can break the bond between us… . Think of me sometimes & let me know that you are thinking of me. My darling, oh my darling, what more can I say to you. I adore you & always will.
He did go home for Christmas in 1945. Gradually the wound began to heal. In the meantime Feynman made some indirect efforts to find his way back into the unfinished theory that had occupied him at Princeton, but they did not lead to anything usable. The culmination of the driven, purposeful work of the past three years had left a void that he could not easily fill. He found it hard to concentrate on research. As spring came he would sit on the grass outdoors and worry about whether he had slipped past his best working years without achieving anything. He had built a reputation among senior physicists, but now, back in a world returning to normal, he realized that he had not done the normal work to go with the reputation. Since his two published papers in college—his squib on cosmic rays with Vallarta and his undergraduate thesis—his only journal publications had been accounts of the work with Wheeler on the absorber theory, already looking short-lived.
Phenomena Complex—Laws Simple
If Feynman was struggling to find his footing, Julian Schwinger was not. Since growing up at opposite ends of New York City, in neighborhoods that might as well have been a thousand miles apart, they had become competitors without either quite acknowledging it. Their routes into physics had remained