Part 8 (1/2)
”Isn't it? I love the Inuit mind-set,” he goes on. ”So human-centered. Of course, it was still what Meredith-you remember Meredith-used to call a web of significance. Do you know what I mean?”
She shakes her head.
” 'Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun'-Max Weber. She loved that. 'Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.' ”
Not slipping-just repeating himself as if in lecture hall. Hattie smiles.
”Of course, we all do spin webs, but at least the Inuit web was more than a denial of death. As so many are,” he goes on.
”Religious webs, especially.”
”Yes. Not exclusively, of course.” He gestures with his hands. ”But religious webs, especially, yes, with all that emphasis on the afterlife. Whereas the Inuit web was about fish. Boats. Survival. This life.”
”As opposed to immortal achievement?” She does not mean to sound cutting. Still, she is relieved when he does not answer but simply looks at her a moment with his mouth open, his fingers lightly pressing his lower lip against his teeth-a private thing he did all the time in his teens, but that she hasn't ever seen him do once since, not even at the lab.
”Do you see,” he says suddenly, ”what a waste of time all this is? How gloriously inefficient I've been?”
Attached to one sawhorse is a wooden placard, with what appears to be the boat's name branded on it: DISCONCERTED.
”I'm trying to force myself off task,” he says. ”My life having turned into one long concerted effort.”
”You were turning into Anderson.”
He laughs. ”Who's waiting for his n.o.bel now, you know, for his genome work.”
”The n.o.bel your dad didn't get.”
”Miss Confucius!” He laughs again, open-mouthed. ”How have I lived without you?”
”Though he didn't want it anyway, did he?” She swivels some more, stretching her back.
”He did and he didn't. He always said he wanted his picture to hang in the halls of his alma mater; you know how they have that long line of scientists. But with his picture facing in, he used to say, so that it wasn't about glory. So that it was about his contribution and his place.”
”And was it?” She stops. ”Hung face-in, I mean.”
”Of course not. Though you know, I don't think he really would have minded. He wanted to be a person who didn't care about status. He admired people like that. But it was probably the one thing he failed at-getting past it.”
”The way you're trying to get past it now.”
He gazes at her in the half-dark, his arms crossed, one finger held up to his smiling lips. She is still, she can see, his favorite student.
”Unlike Anderson,” she goes on, ”who's picked up the torch for your father-even going on from cytogenetics to the genome.”
”Isn't it almost too-what did you use to say in China?”
”Filial?”
”Precisely-filial. Isn't it almost too filial? I do love that word. Fili-al.” He laughs. ”The sort of translation that amounts to a nontranslation, don't you think? I mean, what does that mean to a Westerner? It was good to see you at Dad's burial, by the way, even if you left without saying h.e.l.lo.”
She grips the soft saddle.
”Most un-Confucian of you.”
”Well, you know, I was never the Confucian you all made me out to be, to begin with,” she ventures casually.
More interest than surprise. ”Did we push you?” He cups his knees with his hands.
She shrugs and swivels some more-the stool squeaking in one direction but not the other, she notices.
”Of course, our brains have a tendency to sharpen contrast, as you know,” he begins, and she knows what he is going to say next before he says it: Witness lateral inhibition. The way the eye neatens up the edges of things. The way it suppresses any blurring data it may be receiving-any contradiction. And of course, it's all true-how the mind seeks clarity, how the sharpening goes down to the cellular level. And, more, how the brain makes ”sense” of the cleaned-up data-how it constructs a ”world” out of the world using certain rules of thumb. She hears him out. But then she says, ”No one wants to be boxed up, Carter,” and that's that. ”Anyway, I survived.” And it's true, of course. Whatever anger she once felt about this is distant and wavery now. Edgeless, as if some lateral inhibition for emotion's been turned off. ”It was just plain rude to leave your father's burial the way I did. I'm sorry.”
”You were avoiding me and ambivalent about my father.”
There's no denying it.
”As were many, by the way,” he says. ”Legions, even, we might say.”
A fly promenades down one of the boat's ribs; she shoos it away.
”But as you were saying.”
”As I was saying. Yes. Meredith used to say, you know, that I worked on the eye in order to avoid seeing.”
”Seeing what?”
”Any number of things. For example, that I didn't really care about science.”
”But of course you cared about science.”
” 'Happy is the man,' she used to say, 'who can wrap himself in his web of significance and die in it.' She said I was a man who didn't even make his own web. That I wrapped myself in my father's web, like Anderson. That I wanted my picture hung in the same hall as my father, because that was what mattered to him. She became a judge, you know.”
”Meredith?”
”Appellate. Which she always said was the most boring kind, but if I ever knew why, I can't remember now.” It's getting dark; he stands to pull the light cord, which is weighted at the bottom with what looks to be his old wooden pocket knife. ”When she left me she left the bench, too, and became a Buddhist. Said she was becoming too compa.s.sionate to be a good judge anyway.”
”Poor Meredith always was so helplessly kind.”
He laughs again, his bald head lit up now, his shadowed face ghoulish. ”Precisely. The Dalai Lama came to her school, and she became just fascinated-started going from one retreat to another. As if Buddhism isn't a web of significance? I don't know. She gave a lot of money away, saying she didn't see how there could ever be justice as long as we had capital acc.u.mulation. Possessions.”
Hattie's toes kick against the inside of her walking shoes. ”Do you think she was right?”
”I think she had the makings of a totalitarian,” says Carter. ”Then she died without asking for me once. As if I were this Terrible Mistake. This guy who refused to confront what his own research showed. You know the drill.”
” 'Vision is a tool geared toward action, not truth.' ” She straightens her back.
Carter lifts his chin. ”Precisely. It distorts as much as it presents, giving but a most partial understanding of reality in toto. And so on.”
”First lecture of the semester.”
”I obviously don't disagree with her. Her take, though, was that we will do anything to maintain the illusion that the world we apprehend is reality. For example, I might believe myself to care about truth and the advancement of knowledge, but that would only be my self-serving illusion, beyond which lay a deeper truth. To wit-”