The Incalculable Lightness of Being
As I age, I find myself speaking much more than I used to when I was younger. I feel a need to exchange ideas with others, to try to understand how they think, what lies within them, and what they can teach me. At times, I stop to listen, and I could listen for a long time, were it not interrupted by the discomfort of appearing inert. This feeling, this need, is even greater with my younger students. It’s as if I were trying to say, “Listen! I know I won’t be here much longer. I want to tell you this. It was the cold winds, the difficult paths I walked, and the strange and complicated experiences that led me to speak to you this way.”
I was talking about the theory of relativity in the last class, and the students listened more attentively than I ever imagined possible. Because not only was I “explaining” the theory, if one could imagine someone who hasn’t built a line of reasoning on their own explaining something, but I was mixing the theory with Einstein, the young man who wanted to understand the world but ended up enslaving his own wife, possibly even the creator of the Theory of Relativity, Mileva Einstein.
It later occurred to me, and I said: “How could this genius, a brilliant and imaginative man in his second marriage, marry his cousin? And all the other women he could have met outside his family circle? Why did and still do geishas exist in Japan? Because man was made to know the delicacy of a woman, all her nuances, feelings, expectations, and the ability to romanticize her life.”
Indeed, today I tend to talk a lot, but I am bothered by the current world, on the brink of unparalleled transformation, with AI and the possibility of instant communication opened up by recent discoveries in quantum mechanics. So much knowledge and potential wisdom, and yet when we look up at the world, we see a veil of corruption, a world that’s apathetic and dominated by the worst.
We must discover how to be human again. Perhaps that process also involves speaking a lot. With others and ourselves.
Originally published at http://soulofmatter.wordpress.com on June 16, 2023.
