“True scholars often work in loneliness, compelled to find reward in the awareness that they have made valuable, even beautiful contributions to the cumulative structure of human knowledge, whether anyone knows it at the time or not.”

George F. Kennan

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I.   A DIVINE LENS

Fred Glidden walked his dog, Erdos, at the edge of the woods. The field had grown tall with weeds and flowers; darting insects buzzed and hummed as the pair made their way along the fragrant path. The Institute for Advanced Study lay beyond the man-made lake where someone had driven sturdy metal hooks into a couple of trees at the edge of the water.

He removed his turquoise, Mayan hammock from an old gym bag, and tethered it between the trees. Erdos, stretching his slim, muscular body in the sun, curled up beneath the hammock and slept throughout the afternoon, until it was time to return to their sparse dwelling in the housing development that was constructed as a hive for scholars at the opposite end of the forest. 

Glidden would lay there for hours, as platinum fish leapt from the water in discrete flashes of light; often, he peered through the loosely woven hammock fibers, his eyes watching the world as if through a sieve; and, he would sort his thoughts in this manner, swaying slightly in his blue cradle above the lake. At the end of the day, his brain was a divine lens through which he was able to access his vision, consisting of a rare connectedness of all things, seemingly without previous relationship.

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II.   THE SMARTEST MAN IN THE WORLD

Davis Schroedinger was probably one of the few students in her class at the Twickenham School who readily admitted to having no real goals. She had been accepted early to Princeton, which happened to be the school at the end of her street. She had a broad, heart-shaped face, with Brazil nuts for eyes and pale yellow skin. Her hair was like blond wood, smooth and polished above slim shoulders. She spoke quietly and carefully as if she were explaining a passage of text she had finished reading aloud to you. Davis moved quickly, her mind and body, trim and efficient. She looked picture-perfect holding a tennis racket, but inside her was an introverted, mousy-haired girl in black-rimmed, bottle-glass spectacles.

She dismissed her standing as an exemplary student, for Davis believed that it was her obsession which truly distinguished her: She had an undivinable secret, and that secret was the secret of her obsession with, arguably, the “smartest man in the world.” She stalked images of him on the Internet, covering her walls with photos, posters, articles, and interviews.

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III.   SOLVING FOR LOVE

In Davis’ romantic fantasies, they lay side-by-side on her plaid stadium blanket under a willow tree beneath the Institute clock. Glidden was the key to all the unanswered questions; he was the only man whom she believed was capable of bringing everything together. Discussing the Theory of Everything brought her an indescribable feeling of completeness, a wholeness which encompassed a nearly sacred sense of luminous integrity.

Fred’s metallic monotone bathed her in a special light. As he continued to speak, always with his pinpoint-pupiled eyes laser-trained just beyond her, it was as if he were slicing through a quantum array of leptons and quarks; cutting through transcendent zones with the light-blade of his mind; ferreting out dimensions glimmering like hot and cold rubies; offering as transport, the scintillations of smooth, blue celestial filaments, quivering and blinking like fiber-optic flora; witnessing those temporal flickerings, as time raced, flashing through space, across a dozen centuries, pasts and futures co-mingling, separating, recombining, dissolving; Glidden, reaching through one dimension, to seize her pulsing heart; replacing it, seamlessly, in another.

She laughed at herself, all too conscious of her own folly; but, it was also as if she were laughing at a kind of universal joke, a “cosmic joke” as people are wont to say; an ineffable and monumental jest, one which was equally serious and always brought her back to herself. Her strange obsession with Glidden was more a matter of a play of hybrid energies, heterotic rather than heteroerotic (she enjoyed wordplay), not really a sexual thing at all, but a quirky, romantic manifestation of her fascination with the vibrations of clockwise and counterclockwise closed strings, existing in separate dimensions and uniting in one. Beautiful.  Irresistible. Symmetrical. Compact.

Beyond physics, mathematics, philosophy, and religion, Fred Glidden had solved for love. Everything else in her life became for Davis, longitudinous, a bleak Flatland, an emptiness stretching out before her, barely occupying time or space.

“There must be more than this!” she thought, dangerously; for her life had become a rocket pitching ever-higher through the fluctuating, passionate chaos which characterized her soul. Despite all of this, she was still profoundly cognizant: There had to be a connector; a Higher Truth, which wed all disparate forces.

In her daydreams, they walked together beneath the sun, across a shimmering ‘scape of Unified Fields, until Glidden and Schroedinger finally approached the place where superstrings begin, in that wilderness at the very twinkling of Creation. As they looked into each others’ eyes, Erdos began to bark.

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IV.   PARALLEL WORLDS 

Davis’ parents lived their own lives. Her dad was a corporate executive who worked for Morse and Frankenthaler in Manhattan.  Her mother wrote specialized textbooks (“Used as supplements to actual literature” read the Fast Track  profile in Learning Curve  Magazine) for the Olympiad (Cultivating A Classic Mind™) Gifted and Talented Programs. Brandon and Patricia Schroedinger, of course, knew nothing about the goings on behind the closed door of their daughter’s room. They respected her privacy, probably because they associated it with study; her quiet time, which she had always required plenty of, was her own.

“Hey, Dad,” Davis nodded to her father, passing the kitchen on her way upstairs, “have you seen my green jacket? I tossed it on the chair by the little table in the foyer, last night.”

“I left it on the landing, right outside your room, thinking you’d grab it on your way out this morning. Didn’t you see it as you came downstairs?” Her father put down The New York Times and looked at her over his reading glasses. “By the way, what are you having for breakfast these days? The orange juice seems to last for an entire week. Aren’t you eating here in the morning, anymore?”

“No time.” she said. “I usually get a roll and coffee at Frist Hall before the Bio seminar. We’re meeting across the green, and it’s super-convenient.”

“Okay, honey. Did you see the article from the Science section of the paper that I left for you on the dining room table? I didn’t get the opportunity to read it, but it’s something about string theory. It looks like something you might enjoy.”

“Uh, thanks, Dad. I’ll check it out later. Really tired. Think I’ll just go upstairs, and turn in for the night. Carl Fischer and I had something at the cafeteria, and then I rode my bike over to the U-Store.”

“Who?”

“You know. That guy from my AP classes at Twick who came over last Saturday with the DVDs.”

“Nice fellow.”

“He’s okay. Goodnight, Dad.”

“Goodnight, then. Sweet dreams.”