In Free Fall(55)
“You remain impassive. You’re tough, Detective. In an interrogation—yes, I know, you’re just asking a few questions—everything has to come out, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you what I’m really working on. I’ll bet that you didn’t cotton on to any of the intellectual crimes committed daily at my desk while you were searching it. Yogi tea—a nice touch!
“Please record my confession herewith. I am a scientist, but not a materialist. What I am, I still do not know. In any case, I see not only space and time but also matter itself as the product of a collaboration between mind and reason. My world does not consist of fixed objects but of complex processes. All states of being and continuous forms are simultaneous and therefore timeless. What we see of them are merely clips, scenes from a spool of film running through the time projector inside our heads. They show us reality as a dance of concrete objects.
“Try this experiment, Schilf. Pack a camera and go to the top of a tall building one night. Choose an exposure of a few seconds and take a photograph of a crossroads. What do you see? The lights of cars and streetcars as straight or wavy lines. A network of lines. The longer the exposure, the denser the network.
“Take this cup. Imagine that you can photograph it from high above, with an exposure of a million years. It will not show as a cup, but as an impenetrable mesh. There will be a frayed, lighter patch in the middle where clay is formed in the earth. Around it will be the traces of the human beings who mine the clay and work it into porcelain. The forming of the cup. The transport of it. The use of it. Its disintegration. The material it is made of going back into circulation. You also see—we’re very high up and we have the ultimate bird’s-eye view of things—you also see the stories of how all the people involved in producing and using the cup come into existence and fall away. And the stories of their forebears as well as all those who are descended from them, and so on. You would see—no, don’t look away, look at the cup! You would see that this cup transcends time and space and is quite simply connected with everything, because everything is quite simply part of the same process. And if you were able to increase the exposure to an infinite degree, and the distance from which you view it to an infinite distance, you would see reality as it really is. Everything flowing into everything else, outside of both space and time. A tightly woven carpet by the bed of a god who does not exist. Amen.
“Are you still there? Can you hear me? I didn’t want to alarm you. Do you have a headache? Should I get some pills?
“Of course it’s fine. It always is. That is one of the things I’ve learned in the last few days.
“Allow me a final comment. A couple of words on coincidence, the mention of which makes your eyes light up. If you, Schilf, as I suspect, are also not a materialist, you will be able to make something of the following connection.
“Let us assume that a human being stands before reality like someone walking along the shore of a peaceful lake. The smooth surface of the water reflects a familiar world and hides what is beneath. Now a large bough floats to the surface, and only the tips of two separate branches emerge from the water in different places. The person by the lake will not perceive this as a bizarre coincidence. He will quite rightly assume that the branches are connected to one another beneath the water. Without realizing it, he has understood what coincidence is.
“You haven’t drunk your tea, Detective. Are you about to go?”
[5]
THE DETECTIVE, WHOSE EYES HAVE OF COURSE been anything but blank throughout, thinks it quite unlikely that Sebastian has said all this. But the professor would certainly have said something, and Schilf has filled in the rest himself. He had stirred his tea through the entire lecture, as if expecting to hear another death sentence. Now he stands up, swaying lightly, like a doll struggling to maintain its balance. Fighting his headache, he waits for one of the questions that are the purpose of his visit to surface.
“Who described you as esoteric?” he finally asks.
“Oskar,” Sebastian says.
He looks at the detective through pale eyes. He has some color to his face now, and the way in which his fingers are playing a piano sonata on his lap shows that the talking has done him good.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s an excellent question.”
Leaning his head back, Sebastian listens, as if he is trying to pick out the right answer from the song of the titmice in the wisteria. Favorite person, they twitter, favorite person.
“A great physicist, who is working on a new particle accelerator in Geneva. If you’re interested in physics, you should go. The very bowels of the universe are studied there.”