Gauging my ignorance from my look of puzzlement, Charles undertook to act as my professor. Most significantly, it allowed him not to lose face. He explained to me that the psychoanalyst Carl Jung held that absolute knowledge existed, that it took the form of a collective unconscious made up of archetypes accessible to the unconscious of every individual. These archetypes were themes universally found across human cultures. One can find ogres, for instance, in the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen as well as in the legends of India and of Papua New Guinea. There exists a vast repertoire of ideas common to all mankind, transcending individual societies or epochs. Our personal experiences provide only the seasoning to this archaic soup. I saw no difference between this and religion, except that devils and angels were expelled from heaven to make room for fairies and witches. But if I had to communicate with this extrasensory world that my husband so cherished, I much preferred it to be one that included the Madonna. The arid kingdom of mathematics had never struck me as a barrel of laughs either. Whatever these overcultivated men might say, their verbal acrobatics mainly provided an excuse for not grappling with reality.
“Collective unconscious, God, concepts … Defining the world of ideas matters very little to me. My goal is to get there. By means of the mind. By means of logical bridges. Or following intuition. My unconscious tells me which path is most charged with meaning. It considers a less censored set of possibilities and spotlights ideas that my reason would never agree to explore.”
“Then what are the criteria that your unconscious uses in judging the relevance of an idea?”
“I stick to my own discipline, Mr. Jessup. I am susceptible to a certain kind of beauty. Mathematical elegance.”
“A very subjective notion and a perfectly obscure one to nonmathematicians.”
“I am not so sure, Robert. Every person is innately drawn to simplicity, perfection. Clearness. The need for contact with immanence is universal.”
Theolonius squirmed with pleasure in his chair.
“Magnificent how everything assumes embodiment, don’t you agree? An exploration of vibratory fields, with the physical sciences and the science of the soul in harness, intent on a single quest. The ultimate quantum communion!”
Oppenheimer squashed out his cigarette under Jessup’s nose.
“Quantum mechanics studies physical phenomena on the scale of the atom and of subatomic particles. Period. While Pauli and Jung may have noted correspondences between physics and psychology, they have never equated the two disciplines. Most of the time, it’s a question of semantic bridges. Not of substantial links. But I do understand that it can be very tempting to use our vocabulary to impress the untutored.”
“Are you calling into question the principle of synchronicity?”
“Don’t turn a subjective phenomenon into a postulate. Or a theorem. Any causal link between two personal experiences remains a happenstance, even if the particular resonance it sets up within a person’s unconscious is incontrovertible.”
“That resonance is the absolute proof of a manifestation of immanence! Our drive to find meaning in an event implies the preexistence of such a meaning. Why else would nature give us the ability to question ourselves?”
“The term ‘absolute proof’ is inappropriate. And are you sure you mean ‘nature’ and not ‘culture’? Why shouldn’t we hope for meaning where there is none? It wouldn’t be the first time mankind had gone on a vain quest.”
“God has injected a maximum of meaning into the world, giving multiple values to the same events, a function on a multitude of levels.”
“If you are going to bring God into the debate, then we can have nothing more to say to each other, Gödel!”
“I’ve known you to be more spiritual, Robert. Where have you put your copy of the Mahabharata?”
“I am sometimes distrustful of these ideas, because they provide a basis for charlatanism. The thirst for meaning, which everyone feels, makes some people an easy prey. It is too easy to go from synchronicity to coincidence and premonitions, to mediums …”
“Then you take me for a charlatan, Mr. Oppenheimer.”
“I also don’t set much store by labels. In the best case, you imagine a spiritual door where others are looking for a nice, neatly packaged answer. If memory serves, there is even a pathology associated with this. Apophenia. The tendency to see symbols or meaningful patterns in random data.”
Charles could see his own goods being sold at clearance prices. He opted for irony.
“Apophenia is a natural tendency. We distort reality to make it conform with our vision of the world. I know a specialist in this. My wife!”
Putting both hands around her husband’s neck, Beate tried to strangle him. For a moment, I had had the impression that he was implicating Kurt, who was a past master at distorting reality. I had often enough seen him build cathedrals out of sand, mixing trivial details with great principles. He created a universe in his own image, both powerful and fragile, logical and absurd.
“Before Beate kills me for real, I would like to point something out to you, Robert. Which is that psychoanalysis does not propose pretty answers. Quite the opposite, it gives us solid questions!”
“It hardly gives them to us, dear friend. Your sessions are far from being free.”
I decided to lead the conversation onto smoother terrain. The first commandment for a harmonious meal had been broken long before: Never talk about religion or money at table! If they started to discuss politics, our little lunch would be totally ruined. I assumed the role of silly entertainer and suggested that we attempt some actual experiments in parapsychology. Kurt would go along with this. We often indulged in this kind of game. He used to say that in the distant future, people would be surprised that twentieth-century man had discovered elementary physical particles without ever imagining the existence of elementary psychical factors. I had no idea exactly what he meant, but I was very good at telepathy. After living with a man for thirty years, guessing his thoughts is a question of simple survival. Not surprisingly, all the guests were enthusiastic.
“I have been training for some time in ptarmoscopia … predicting the future with sneezes. I get excellent results.”
Everyone laughed. I’d managed to put Carl Jung back on the shelf of dubious ideas where he belonged.
“And what do you call divination based on our wives’ moods?”
Erich Kahler suddenly appeared at the table, invigorated by his nap.
“Good sense, Charles, plain good sense! Did I miss anything?”
“Adele, I think I hear the telephone ringing.”
Running toward the living room, I tripped over Penny, who was sleeping on the doorstep. I patted her in apology. What a lovely afternoon! It gave me enormous pleasure to see Kurt so lighthearted and talkative. I looked back to savor his smile again.
I put the phone down softly. I stood there motionless, listening to the happy sounds of voices from the garden, breathing in these last minutes of happiness.
When the shade of the poplar reached the dog, I went to Kurt. I put my hand on his shoulder. Everyone was silent. Before I’d even spoken, I saw two large tears form in my friend Lili’s eyes.
“Albert has ruptured an aortic aneurysm. He’s been taken to the Princeton hospital.”
45
When the last of the dessert tarts had disappeared, Virginia invited her guests to regroup around the living room sofas. Anna decided to slip away from the crowd of smokers and visit Ernestine in her lair. The pantry had been renovated: it glistened with chrome and stainless steel. Only Tine’s collection of old china had survived. Anna had learned her first words of French there: sucre, farine, sel, sugar, flour, salt. The kitchen was spotless. To all appearances indolent, Tine organized her domain with military precision. No one was allowed to get in her way when she was cleaning up. But Anna enjoyed preferential treatment; as a child she had spent long hours watching Tine’s rubber-gloved hands at work. She had listened to Tine talk about her country, about poetry and the latest neighborhood gossip, and she had sat and read beside her, lulled by her Creole songs. She also liked Tine’s little rituaclass="underline" once the dishes were all put away, Ernestine allowed herself a small glass of punch and a cigarette.