The sea

I look at them. These 8500 physicists who gather in Baltimore, to hawk old ideas and spark new trains of thought. It's a frenetic bazaar, a flurry of feet from one projection room to another. Usually, a new face, but sometimes the pleasure of an old acquaintance. I appreciate the intellectual democracy. With few exceptions, everybody has the spotlight for ten minutes, afterwhich one is firmly nudged out. Good idea? Bad idea? It doesn't matter. You have six hundred seconds to capture the imagination of jaded scientists, to seduce them from facebook-induced catatonia. A good idea cannot stand on its own, it takes clarity and charisma to make it viral.


Nietzsche: A very popular error, having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is having the courage for an attack on one's convictions! ... there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark that you place after your special words and favorite doctrines than all the solemn gestures and trumps before accusers and law courts.

I look at them. Faces eager to make an impression, to find that special partner who appreciates the backalleys and subtleties in an original thought. And I am one of those faces. We are a sea of isolated currents, sometimes mingling to form great whirlpools, othertimes rejecting and dissipating into silence. How humbling, to be a wisp of a current, to be swallowed in this sea.


I let my life play in fastfoward. The evergreen cast are these faces, and each year they will return, to play variations of the same role. Their lines will be slightly different, and their characters may grow in stature, or diminish. Yet the essence is the same, the deep longing. How repulsive, the sameness. Yet this same sameness, it must eventually save us from loneliness.