By the Numbers Read online

  139.

  Of course we want to write what we loved reading over and over. That’s different from constructing an Object of Study, which is sort of like baiting a trap with staples or capacitors. Such contraptions subsist on the praise of those who want permission for similar self-indulgences, even though the only mice ever seen near them are mechanical.

  140.

  When you think in words, are you sure it’s your own voice you hear?

  141.

  I want to kill the guy dominating the train with his cell phone. What’s his problem, pathetic self-importance or pathetic dependence? Ah well, maybe if we still had real lives we’d all be gabbing around the fire, gossiping at the pump. What’s remarkable, after all, is not his self-important prattle but that someone is listening to it. Or so I’ve assumed: maybe there’s really no one on the other end?

  142.

  Solitude: that home water whose sweetness you taste only when you’ve been someone else too long.

  143.

  The audience is faceless, back rows disappearing into dimness, and it doesn’t talk back. Find your audience and you will blather. Write, instead, to the listener at your table for two, the one in your head whose faint blush, half-smile, glazed eyes make you correct course in midsentence, back off, explain, stop to listen.

  144.

  Fame is underwritten by those who want it to be there when it is their turn to have it.

  145.

  Old radios hummed a little before they could think what to say, their deep interiors like embers blown on. They told the great stories, in them the great stars sang. New radios, sleek and compulsively chatty, instantly repeat what they have heard. The TV, their doe-eyed younger sister, grew up adored. She wants so much to be looked at that you stare at your feet, abashed. She says Have a drink with me, and then I’m so lonely that I can love nothing. Stay for another.

  146.

  It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

  147.

  The great man’s not sure he wants you to criticize even his great rival, lest there be no such thing as greatness.

  148.

  Talking to yourself is not the same as talking to no one.

  149.

  I’m forced to admit I’m second-rate: I don’t have the genius’s certainty about who he is. And when I talk myself into that certainty? I’m third-rate.

  150.

  It’s not success but self-congratulation that the Furies scent.

  151.

  Would it have been better or worse if I could have whispered to myself back then I know the way. Follow me. But it will take 30 years.

  152.

  My best critic is me, too late.

  153.

  I look over my old books, happiest when I find a line it seems I could not have written.

  154.

  Only your unnoticed victories last: the rest are avenged.

  155.

  I’m scared of the huge ocean—what prevents it from throwing itself over me and the tiny continents? So much harder to see what’s holding others back.

  156.

  By spending so much on insurance—medical, car, fire, disability, retirement, termite, appliance—I try to make every year average. I guarantee that I’ll be perennially slightly short of cash in the hope that I’ll never be totally broke. A mortgage, broadly speaking, is also a kind of insurance—against ever having to ask Where shall I lie down? Other kinds of payments ensure more or less constant answers to the questions of who to be, who to be with, what to do, whether to live.

  157.

  What is more yours than what always holds you back?

  158.

  What I can’t do at all is no trouble. But save me from what I do pretty well with disproportionate effort and distortion of soul. For that I am in Hell.

  159.

  Is this poetry? Is the tomato a fruit? Yes to a botanist, no to someone making a fruit salad. If the world is divided into poetry and prose, this is prose. If it’s divided into fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, this is poetry.

  160.

  The gods give no credit for the good deeds I complain about doing.

  161.

  All my life I’ve been working on an excuse no one will ever want to hear.

  162.

  The sinner hopes there is no God. The just man looking at the world thinks there cannot be. The lazy man just can’t imagine anyone wanting the job.

  163.

  I’ve lived here so long I trip on what has been gone for years.

  164.

  How do you know life is not a dream? Because things change so slowly. Because you can focus on a page or dial a number, and when you go back to your study for your glasses, there they are, just where you left them. Because you can’t fly and they don’t come back from the dead. Because so often you want to believe that life is a dream.

  165.

  I shorten my life by imagining it’s too late for everything I really didn’t want to do anyway.

  166.

  No one has yet failed in the future.

  167.

  At first skepticism keeps you from being too much like everyone else, then, you hope, from being too much like yourself.

  168.

  Sure, no one’s listening, English will die in a hundred years, and the far future is stones and rays. But here’s the thing, you Others, you Years to Come: you do not exist.

  169.

  That one thing in Life I’m meant to do?—well, I have to finish this first.

  170.

  Closing a door very gently, you pull with one hand, push with the other.

  III. By the Numbers

  By the Numbers

  One, says the bell,

  and one and one.

  The window no one sees through

  is the sun.

  One and then two

  will count up shoes,

  two then one

  counts seconds down.

  Three is a crowd,

  three four your slim

  fingers on a glass

  (plus thumb).

  Crows argue:

  Five, eight, FIVE.

  (Owl doubts:

  two one, two who?)

  Clock separates

  with six six six,

  the click

  of icy sticks on sticks.

  Seven’s the heaven

  that eight is late for,

  and nine’s a tulip

  tense in wind.

  Or ten is hands

  lined with journeys,

  and nine means one

  has fallen behind.

  Eight times this page

  in half and in half

  my strength can fold

  (or only seven).

  And six, then five,

  the deer like smoke

  fade through pines

  dark rises in.

  And quarry’s four,

  or hunted coeur,

  and three is odd,

  they say, the crowd

  that heart counts up

  or heart counts down,

  old juggler dropping

  one one one…

  And countless you!

  The moon, a door

  you stand half in,

  lights one dark shoe.

  Birds in Rain

  Studious silence in the trees.

  Later they will tunefully dispute

  whether the drops came down in twos or threes.

  Are We Alone?

  or

  Physics You Can Do at Home

  The simplest and most popular cosmological

  model today predicts that you have a twin in a

  galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here…

  In infinite space, even the most unlikely events

  must take place somewhere.

  *

  Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence have at

  least partially scanned for Earth-level radio

  trans
mitters out to 4,000 light-years… and

  for… advanced civilizations out to 40,000 light-

  years… The lack of signals is starting to worry

  many scientists.

  That momentary tightening of your voice

  over your cheerfully expiring cup of steam, maybe it’s nothing—

  always the vanishingly small but nonzero probability

  all protons in the room might decay spontaneously,

  a little run in the sheer black of the universe

  unzip to the utter nothing of the Beginning.

  Ninety minutes is the length of a mood, according to scientists,

  and the lifespan of a universe. One wrong turn and the metropolis

  in the rear view goes dark, the love that turns wrong never was.

  In the advanced geometry of gravity wells and higher dimensions

  two points apparently close may be separated by eons,

  parallel realities by less than the thickness of a page,

  though an unturnable page. Two sitting together may be infinitely distant,

  while two on different continents staring into books may startle

  as the lines of their gazes cross glancingly deep in the planet.

  If space is infinite, as it may well be, and if you and I

  are protons arranged in a pattern of, once again, vanishingly low

  but not zero probability, as we certainly are,

  mere odds say we have twins in a galaxy 10 to the 1028 meters from here,

  which is a very long walk, though even so you may feel their gray light

  in the back of your mind, the blur in your shoulders of being shadowed,

  since certain processes, such as the expansion of space itself, quantum entanglement,

  (which Einstein called spooky action at a distance), hope, portent and embarrassment,

  unlimited by the speed of light, can be virtually instantaneous.

  The odds say somewhere C, the heroine I loved, is on my side of the page,

  and somewhere I never read her book, and somewhere I wrote it,

  since everything has happened somewhere, everything has happened once,

  though more locally astronomers have scanned for simple radio transmissions

  out to 4,000 light-years, and for supercivilizations to 40,000, and the silence

  is starting to worry them (but I am worried more about that inter galactic sense

  that someone has already lived my life—but how?—or I am living it for someone—who?),

  and even more locally Heisenberg says I cannot know both your position and momentum

  though you cell me saying where, and from your breathlessness I guess how fast.

  On the largest scale ordinary matter is outnumbered five to one by Dark Matter,

  not a single particle of which has yet been detected, though a million

  stream through an area the size of a quarter, your eye, your lips, each second—

  yes, another form of touch we failed to guess at, chargeless,

  interacting with us only through gravity, which is what holds us together,

  but is sadly by orders of magnitude the weakest force in the universe:

  for example, I lift my cup, countering the entire gravitational field

  of the earth’s six sextillion tons with a calorie of electrochemical energy

  I maybe flossed from my teeth and swallowed all unawares.

  Yes, since 1998 it has been known that gravity is failing us

  and the expansion of the universe, governed by a principle of distraction called Dark Energy,

  which constitutes 72% of everything, though like Dark Matter it is so far undetected,

  is accelerating, proving… what escapes me… and this sense of things going downhill

  faster than expected is the cause for what we previously thought was our baseless worry

  and the true answer to the formerly soothing question What’s the worst that could happen?

  But let’s get practical. At sublight speed I may not catch my train this morning,

  the fauna are comfortably repetitive, the same cars pass, numbered the same,

  and I can’t see the galaxies fleeing. For all I know, some nights they steal closer, just as

  though I take the entropy of the body for granted, it can’t be measured in the short run,

  and maybe sometimes in half-darkness, when the machines aren’t looking,

  we grow younger for a while. But large trends, the odds say, cannot be resisted indefinitely.

  Yes, the odds talk unstoppably… they say intelligent species have arisen

  very near us and are gone, and will arise again very near, maybe here, when we are gone,

  and the practical problem is only that space travel is slow and civilizations merely a blink

  in the life of the universe, so even though they have looked for us, and even now

  are on their way, and though we have looked for them, well, the central issue in cosmology

  and several less arcane disciplines is that there simply isn’t enough time,

  and if we ever find them, which odds say we won’t,

  they will, odds are, be dead and gone. And if they find us, any of them—

  and odds are many will—we will be gone, surely long dead and gone.

  And the odds say… sorry… the odds keep saying disconnected possibilities,

  so fast they are simultaneous, for example that a quintillion atoms

  in your body are replaced every second, changing practically nothing,

  and that the universe may be the 3-d sheen on a wineglass of 4 + n dimensions,

  and all the information on the Internet, considered as electrons, weighs a millionth of an ounce,

  less than a fingerprint, a tear, and in the modern world time is the accumulation of information,

  which is officially the same as the loss of information, which is time,

  and somehow always at the end a hand raised Oh sorry a question we do not have time for,

  because we are late for something else we apparently have time for.

  If classical physics held, electrons would wind down and crash into the nucleus in nothing flat,

  trees holding out their arms would drop them to their sides in weariness,

  and matter from sheer boredom would dissipate, but somehow we persist,

  which is why I stayed home to watch the snow wash all connections out of the air,

  and now, behind each stone and tree and behind my eyes, caverns narrowing into ellipses

  deepen a little. All is further. Not sure I could move the hand at the end of my arm…

  The closer you approach a black hole, the greater the weight of inevitability,

  hardly time for a single decision, a single digit in the phone number you dreamily

  and repetitively tried to dial all night—for help was it?—

  though to an observer your vastly redshifted descent seems to take forever,

  whereas standing right here your motion towards earth’s center is continuously impeded,

  since everything by nature—the atom, the mind—is trying to fall down a hole too small for it.

  More practically, the vacuum is a foam of particles and antiparticles arising and canceling each other,

  just as my silence is words and antiwords canceling each other unspoken.

  You could hear this faintly in the small hours, except for the turnpike whine,

  because it’s a big empty universe, averaging only five atoms per cubic meter,

  though wherever we are is by definition very crowded. I think of walking out in the snow

  which would then be very, very crowded, for though the air seems clear, glassy with silence,

  odds say in every breath there’s at least one atom of the breath of everyone who ever lived

  and if to breathe them is to hold them all in mind,

  which I hope is true… but surely this feeling of a thought be
ing too big to think

  is the accelerating expansion of the universe, which means I should try less and less

  to think it, and be still like a tree letting stars and snow stream through its branches,

  for scientists agree that not to think is to think everything, which is what the universe excels at,

  though with its expansion proceeding at a rate unguessable when we were young,

  and the Law of Conservation of Mattering decreeing that the absolute quantity of mattering is fixed,

  it follows that things on the average matter less and less.

  Moreover Relativity says the faster you think, trying to keep up, the slower your time moves

  in relation to a stationary observer, so if you are habitually close to the speed of light, like this,

  those you loved will be agèd or dead when you finish with what you thought you had to do,

  so here I am again after what seemed a minute’s silence but could have been millions of your years.