Hamnet
When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.
From the archives
·
2021
Bewilderment
Over the run of eighty minutes, I tried to convey to a coven of twenty-one-year-olds with a wide spectrum of intellectual abilities just how absurd it was for everything to spring up out of nothing. The alignment of favorable circumstances for the emergence of self-assembling molecules seemed astronomically unlikely. But the appearance of protocells almost as soon as the molten Hadean Earth cooled suggested that life was the inevitable by-product of ordinary chemistry.
"So the universe is either pregnant everywhere, or barren. If I could tell you which, beyond all doubt, would it change your study habits?"
That got a polite, Okay-Xer chuckle out of the happy few who were paying attention. But the rest had signed off. I was starting to lose them. It takes a certain kind of strangeness to hear the cosmic symphony and to realise that it was both playing and listening to itself.
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Bewilderment
Over the run of eighty minutes, I tried to convey to a coven of twenty-one-year-olds with a wide spectrum of intellectual abilities just how absurd it was for everything to spring up out of nothing. The alignment of favorable circumstances for the emergence of self-assembling molecules seemed astronomically unlikely. But the appearance of protocells almost as soon as the molten Hadean Earth cooled suggested that life was the inevitable by-product of ordinary chemistry.
"So the universe is either pregnant everywhere, or barren. If I could tell you which, beyond all doubt, would it change your study habits?"
That got a polite, Okay-Xer chuckle out of the happy few who were paying attention. But the rest had signed off. I was starting to lose them. It takes a certain kind of strangeness to hear the cosmic symphony and to realise that it was both playing and listening to itself.
Read more of this excerpt...
WORDS TO LIVE BY
1961 ·
NON-FICTION
NEW MUSIC