Leaving the World Read Free Page A

instructing his rival: ‘ Einstein, don’t tell God what to do. ’
    Reading about all this (as the sun came up on another nuit blanche ), I found myself siding with Heisenberg and Bohr. Though everything in life is, physically speaking, composed of elementary particles, how can we ever really know where a certain particle – or that combination of particles known as an action, an event, another person – will bring us? Einstein, don’t tell God what to do  . . . because in a wholly random universe, He has no control.
    But what struck me so forcibly about the Uncertainty Principle was the way it also made me trawl back to that New Year’s Day in 1987 – and how, in my mother’s mind, Heisenberg was right. One launched particle – my dismissive comments about marriage – results in a logical, terrible outcome: divorce. No wonder that she embraced this empirical doctrine. Without it, she would have had to face up to her own role in the breakdown of her marriage.
    But she was spot on about one thing: had that particle not been launched on that given night, the result might have been a dissimilar one . . . and both our lives might have turned out differently because of that.
    I think about that a lot these days – the idea of destiny as nothing more than a random dispatch of particles which brings you to places you never imagined finding yourself. Just as I also now understand that uncertainty governs every moment of human existence.
    And when it comes to thinking that life works according to linear principles . . .
    Well, another physicist back in the twenties, Felix Bloch, proposed the idea that space was a field of linear operations. Heisenberg would have none of it.
    ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Space is blue and birds fly through it.’
    But stories work best when told in a sequential, linear way. And this story – my story – needs to be told sequentially, as life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards. And the only way I can make sense of what has happened to me recently is by trying to find some sort of significance lurking behind the haphazardness of it all. Even though, having just written that, I know that I am articulating a contradiction.
    Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things. It’s all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Part One

One
    W HERE TO START ? Where to begin? That’s the big question looming over all narrative structures, and something we analyzed ceaselessly in graduate school. What is the point of departure for a story? Unless you’re writing a big cradle-to-grave saga – ‘ To begin my life at the beginning of my life ’ – a story usually commences at a moment well into the life of the central character. As such, from the outset you’re traveling forward with this individual through his tale, yet are simultaneously discovering, bit by bit, the forces and events that shaped him in the past. As David Henry, my doctoral advisor, was fond of reminding his students in his lectures on literary theory: ‘All novels are about a crisis and how an individual – or a set of individuals – negotiates said crises. More than that, when we first meet a character in a narrative, we are dealing with him in the present moment. But he has a back story, just like the rest of us. Whether it’s in real life or on the page, you never understand somebody until you understand their back story.’
    David Henry . Maybe that’s a good point of departure. Because the accidental set of circumstances that landed David Henry in my life sent it down a path I would never have thought possible. Then again, we can never predict where a particle will go  . . .
    David Henry. Back at the start of the 1970s, when he was a young professor at the university, he’d written a study of the American Novel, Towards a New World , that was noted immediately for its accessibility and its critical originality. Around the same time, he also