• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Arline also made an impression on the fraternity boys when she started visiting on occasional weekends and spared Dick the necessity of finding a date from among the students at the nearby women’s colleges or (to the dismay of his friends) from among the waitresses at the coffee shop he frequented. Maybe there was hope for Dick after all. Still, they wondered whether she would succeed in domesticating him before he found his way to the end of her patience. Over the winter break he had some of his friends home to Far Rockaway. They went to a New Year’s Eve party in the Bronx, taking the long subway-train ride across Brooklyn and north through Manhattan and returning, early in the morning, by the same route. By then Dick had decided that alcohol made him stupid. He avoided it with unusual earnestness. His friends knew that he had drunk no wine or liquor at the party, but all the way home he put on a loud, staggering drunk act, reeling off the subway car doors, swinging from the overhead straps, leaning over the seated passengers, and comically slurring nonsense at them. Arline watched unhappily. She had made up her mind about him, however. Sometime in his junior year he suggested that they become engaged. She agreed. Long afterward he discovered that she considered that to have been not his first but his second proposal of marriage—he had once said (offhandedly, he thought) that he would like her to be his wife.

Her well-bred talents for playing the piano, singing, drawing, and conversing about literature and the arts met in Feynman a bristling negatively charged void. He resented art. Music of all kinds made him edgy and uncomfortable. He felt he had a feeling for rhythm, and he had fallen into a habit of irritating his roommates and study partners with an absentminded drumming of his fingers, a tapping staccato against walls and wastebaskets. But melody and harmony meant nothing to him; they were sand in the mouth. Although psychologists liked to speculate about the evident mental links between the gift for mathematics and the gift for music, Feynman found music almost painful. He was becoming not passively but aggressively uncultured. When people talked about painting or music, he heard nomenclature and pomposity. He rejected the bird’s nest of traditions, stories, and knowledge that cushioned most people, the cultural resting place woven from bits of religion, American history, English literature, Greek myth, Dutch painting, German music. He was starting fresh. Even the gentle, hearth-centered Reform Judaism of his parents left him cold. They had sent him to Sunday school, but he had quit, shocked at the discovery that those stories—Queen Esther, Mordechai, the Temple, the Maccabees, the oil that burned eight nights, the Spanish inquisition, the Jew who sailed with Christopher Columbus, the whole pastel mosaic of holiday legends and morality tales offered to Jewish schoolchildren on Sundays—mixed fiction with fact. Of the books assigned by his high-school teachers he read almost none. His friends mocked him when, forced to read a book, any book, in preparing for the New York State Regents Examination, he chose Treasure Island. (But he outscored all of them, even in English, when he wrote an essay on “the importance of science in aviation” and padded his sentences with what he knew to be redundant but authoritative phrases like “eddies, vortices, and whirlpools formed in the atmosphere behind the aircraft …”)

He was what the Russians derided as nekulturniy, what Europeans refused to permit in an educated scientist. Europe prepared its scholars to register knowledge more broadly. At one of the fateful moments toward which Feynman’s life was now beginning to speed, he would stand near the Austrian theorist Victor Weisskopf, both men watching as a light flared across the southern New Mexico sky. In that one instant Feynman would see a great ball of flaming orange, churning amid black smoke, while Weisskopf would hear, or think he heard, a Tchaikovsky waltz playing over the radio.