Amanda sits in her corner, her torso at seventy degrees to the bottom of her chair, the laptop open before her on the ottoman. I'm over here in my corner with Bleak House, just finishing the chapter wherein Elizabeth recovers from her illness and notices that Charlotte Neckett ("Charley"), who has nursed her, has removed from the room the mirror: her looks are gone. That will be enough for tonight. We have a built-in bookshelf in my corner and I reach in at eye-level and pull out a pristine paperback, Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, the six easiest chapters from his Lectures on Physics, of which his biographer, James Gleick, says that not since Newton had a scientist given such a comprehensive account of reality. I begin skimming and come, on page 4, to this:
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world. . . .
I replace it and pull out the fat one next to it, The 9/11 Commission Report, which begins: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States." I've read sections of it before but would like to read the whole thing. I turn some pages and read, regarding the hijacking of United 175, the report of Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, a passenger on the flight, placed a cell phone call to his father at 9:00:
It's getting bad, Dad--A stewardess was stabbed--They seem to have knives and Mace--They said they have a bomb--Passengers are throwing up and getting sick--The plane is making jerky movements--I don't think the pilot is flying the plane--I think we are going down--I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building--Don't worry, Dad--If it happens, it'll be very fast--My God, my God.
The call cut off. The elder Hanson turned on his television set and watched as, at 9:03:11, the airplane from which his son had just called crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
I replace that book next to The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene, the "Catholic novelist." I've never read anything he wrote but would like to. It's next to Word Freak, about the Scrabble subculture, another one I'd like to read. Next to that is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I take that off the shelf and begin reading.
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of the rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces.
I want to read the whole shelf and think of Stingo, the narrator of Sophie's Choice, who says that the prospect of spending some time alone with the Manhattan white pages stirs up in him a longing almost erotic in its intensity. I"m not that far gone, but I know what he's talking about.
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