Oubliette

We can’t stop here. This is bat country. –Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

When I was in grad school, people would ask me what I wanted to do with my degree. I’d tell them, “frame it.” Why such a  tongue-in-cheek response? Well, to put it simply, it started with missing wedding rings. Let me explain.

 ***

I was sixteen. The halls were colder, but wider than the ones of my high school. The students stood, mostly quiet, with their glances fixated on the cork board postings of roommate requests, large televisions for sale, and one motorcycle ad. I watched the professors move up and down the hallway in the same determined motion that wooden ducks move side-to-side at carnival shooting games. The professors’ eyes fixated on the floor, their fingers bare. There was no wedding band for most of them. Their clothes fit awkwardly, their gazes, if they made eye contact, projected something missing that I couldn’t quantify.

The students in my physics class showed up one-by-one. One was a man who must have been in his early thirties and who looked somewhat like a body builder, but with Bill Clinton’s hair. Another was Dennis Jackson: a younger man, strong country accent, shit-eating grin, vocal and jocular. And there was an attractive girl; maybe her name was Melissa. 

I felt excited. The first day of my first physics class was about to start; it was something that I had looked forward to throughout the summer (as Randy Pausch said in his Last Lecture, “I guess you can tell the nerds early.”) But it would not be long before my observations extended beyond those of undergraduate mechanics.  

As the semester progressed and the cold reality of equations and simplified diagrams passed through my purview, I began to wrestle with my own relativity. Melissa sat only a few seats away. But to a sixteen-year-old, alone at university, she might as well have been a galaxy away. And a subtle inner voice began to speak in tones of gray, without lyric expression or musicality:

This is what we have for you. You will explore with the logical recesses of your mind. One day you will confine yourself to the lower levels of a windowless building, exhuming ideas from the mix of the universe, eating your lunch in a one-hour time slot—the same every day—and when you come home, the rooms of your house will be echo chambers for silence. Don’t worry if your heart is dead. That’s not what we value. –The World 

***

When I was eight years old, I wrote my first paper on nuclear fusion. I thought then that I wanted to be a plasma physicist. There’s a certain simplicity in the unchecked idealistic notions of youth. Images of science and research likely resemble something closer to a comic book movie than the climate-controlled diligence of a lab. But I knew that The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory had made great strides in nuclear fusion research. It was a glimmer in my eye—unlimited cheap clean energy. And the magic of the science fascinated me: a one hundred million degree compressed plasma, contained only by a magnetic field. 

In only eight more years after that first paper, I’d notice the missing wedding rings. And not just the rings, but something missing on a deeper level. Perhaps it was a reflection of something I feared missing in myself. In truth, I can’t judge them. Marriage isn’t important to everyone nor does everyone balance intellectual and emotional pursuits on the same scale. But in my sixteen-year old mind, I was already on my way to a fate I feared, found in reflections of the lives around me. I walked the halls alone. If my eyes were to keep off the floor, it took a conscious effort. And there were piles of books ahead, years ahead. I craved something...less certain. 

When you stumble upon a path that seems right, look as far down the path as you can see. If you see an array of lights, a resplendent city on a hill, and signs along the way, then stand and contemplate. If the road looks manageable, if it looks certain that you can make it, and if the signs all point the way, then go no further. Be certain that it is not the right path... because you can see too far, the road is too certain, and most of all, it requires no faith. –An Inner Voice 

The world is full of voices, and so are we. It would be years before I learned to discern them. As a wide-eyed teenager, confused into fullness of possibility, I felt the sharp stagnance of choice. And not long after, I felt the failure of paralysis. In my twenties, motivated by the fear of Stephen King’s Langoliers at my heels, I blazed through university and ran straight into grad school. I pushed the lab cart up the incline until I could finally hear that voice again. 

The irony does not escape me. As much as I felt I was fighting the world, I was at least as much fighting myself. And my own finger is still bare. But I know I couldn’t have gone any other way. Had I gone the way of the world's voices, I may have found a ring, but I know the fit would have been wrong. 

And while I swing my machete, carving out this path into the unknown, those professors may still roam the cold halls where the fluorescent lamps flicker at sixty cycles per second. Their hands still unadorned, bereft of any sparkle or unity, painted only by the white dust of their trade. Perhaps for them, they reached the destination they always wanted. I hope that’s true. But for me, my destination remains hidden, and I continue to walk the only path I could ever walk, no matter where it leads.