The Goddess of Small Victories by Yannick Grannec Read Free Book Online Page A

those they’d entertained about their own omnipotence. His positivist friends wanted to boil down the
unsayable
, what human language cannot address. In mathematics, limiting research to the discipline’s mechanism was an illusion; Kurt had produced a corrosive result from the very language intended to provide consolidation.
    He had never been a blind disciple of the Vienna Circle, even proving to be a wolf in their fold, but his world was a small one and he needed a place for himself in it. He needed the positivists for stimulation, to keep from being carried along by the zeitgeist. This might also have been what he liked about me: mycandor. I accepted my intuition as a natural phenomenon. He was attracted by my legs, but he stayed with me for my radiant ignorance. He would say, “The more I think about language, the more astounded I am that people manage to understand each other.” He never spoke in approximations. Surrounded as he was by clever talkers, he preferred keeping silent to being in error. He liked humbleness in the face of truth. This virtue he had to the point of toxicity: unwilling to make a misstep, he would forget to take any step at all.
    The bomb was truly a bomb, but its action was delayed. I wasn’t the only one who had trouble understanding it. The very tools he used in his proof were innovations, and even the most gifted mathematicians needed time to absorb their import. At the long-awaited conference, Kurt was overshadowed by the titans of physics—Heisenberg, for instance. The polymath von Neumann spoke in support of him, but a transcript of the conference didn’t even mention Kurt.
    Within a few months, however, his discoveries started to gain notice and then became impossible to ignore, witnessed by the fact that any number of adversaries tried to find a flaw in his argument. The radius of the bomb extended across the Atlantic and came back to us in the form of a lecture contract at Princeton University, meaning we would probably be separated. Meanwhile I saw him invaded by a sense of doubt, which was never to leave him again.
    He started to feel misunderstood. Him, the boy genius, the little ball of sunshine. The brilliant taciturnist among the wordy, the political, and the clever. He thought he had reached an island of peace and a gathering of the like-minded. He had made loyal friends there, no doubt, but he had also found hate in unexpected quarters and, just as painfully, indifference. I wasat his side, tender and attentive, but I was entering a battle with few weapons to hand: you don’t fill a metaphysical vacuum with apple strudel.
    The world around us was decaying. He had managed to remainder the century well before its term. Doubt and uncertainty were now to be its foundation. He was always ahead of his time.

9
    Anna arrived at Adele’s room in a muck sweat; visiting hours were almost over.
    “You’re late, it’s not like you.”
    “I’m glad to see you too, Mrs. Gödel.”
    Still wearing her raincoat, she held out a cardboard box printed with the name of a wonderful Princeton delicatessen. Adele lit up when she saw its contents. “Sacher torte!” The young woman handed her a plastic spoon decorated with a blue ribbon. Adele immediately carved into the cake and spooned an enormous wedge into her mouth.
    “My Sacher torte was better. But you’ve got talent. You know how to talk to old ladies.”
    “Only undeserving old ladies.”
    “Show me even one who is deserving and I’ll eat the box as well! So, how are you coming along? Have you freed yourself from the nets and snares of this Calvin Adams?”
    “I won’t hide the fact that he’s very worried.”
    “Not about my health, that is certain. I am his black cloud, his little thorn.”
    “You’re not exactly a planetary priority.”
    “I’m well aware of that! And you? Why are you clinging to me as you do? Is your position so precarious?”
    “I take great pleasure in our conversations.”
    “Just as I enjoy