metamorphoses. The particles were at the
heart of the action. Which didn’t mean that the origin of this one in particular had
to be sought exclusively at the beginning: she could have emanated from any state of
the Universe, even the most recent. The infinitesimal birth of that nosy little
globule could have taken place in a flare from the surface of Alpha Centauri or a
pan used to fry a dove’s egg in China, in a child’s tear or the curvature of space,
in hydrogen, blotting paper, a desire for revenge, a cube root, Lord Cavendish, a
hair, or the unicorn . . . The catalog that God had to flick through, so to speak,
was inordinately long. Not for the first time, it was borne home to Him that
omnipotence is limited by
l’embarras du choix
. Words were his only guides
in that great chaotic enumeration. At bottom, it was a question of language. There
weren’t any things in reality, only words, words that cut the world into pieces,
which people end up taking for things. God didn’t need to use words Himself, but
when He had to intervene, when, as in this case, He wanted to imprint something on
human memory, He had no choice but to take part in the linguistic game. He regarded
it as a challenge. It was quite a bit harder for Him than it would have been for a
grammar teacher, because He had to consider all languages, living, dead, and
potential (each of them carved the world up differently, and, viewed from above,
their coincidences, divergences, and overlaps formed a superintricate
patchwork).
Cutting to the chase: it has taken longer to formulate the problem than He took to
solve it. As if He’d pressed a button, the particle had her birth certificate, which
also served as an invitation to the party, to which she would return for her debut.
And here, the Creator made an exception: He who keeps no secrets kept one on this
occasion. He didn’t tell anyone what He had chosen as the particle’s origin. And
that, ever since, has been the profound little mystery that runs through God’s Tea
Party.
The Musical Brain
I WAS A KID—I would have been four or five years old. This
was in my hometown, Coronel Pringles, at the beginning of the 1950s. One night, it
must have been a Saturday, we’d gone to have dinner at the hotel; we didn’t eat out
often, not that we were really poor, though we lived pretty much as if we were
because of my father’s austere habits and my mother’s invincible suspicion of any
food she hadn’t prepared herself. Some obscure combination of circumstances had
brought us to the hotel’s luxurious restaurant that night and seated us, stiffly and
uncomfortably, around a table covered with a white cloth and laden with silver
cutlery, tall wineglasses, and gold-rimmed porcelain dishes. We were dressed up to
the nines, like all the other diners. The dress codes in those days were relatively
strict.
I remember the continual to-and-fro of people getting up and carrying boxes full of
books to a small table like an altar at the far end of the room. Most of them were
cardboard boxes, though there were wooden boxes too, and some were even painted or
varnished. Sitting behind the table was a little woman wearing a shiny blue dress
and a pearl necklace, with a powdered face and white hair combed into the shape of a
feathery egg. It was Sarita Subercaseaux, who later on, throughout my time there,
was the high school’s headmistress. She took the boxes and examined their contents,
making notes in a record book. I was following all this activity with the keenest
attention. Some of the boxes were too full to be properly closed, others were half
empty, with only a few books knocking around inside, making an ominous sound. Yet it
wasn’t so much the quantity of books that determined the value of the boxes, though
quantity did matter, as the variety of titles. The ideal box would have been one in
which all the books were different; the worst (and this was the most frequent case),
a box containing nothing but
heart of the action. Which didn’t mean that the origin of this one in particular had
to be sought exclusively at the beginning: she could have emanated from any state of
the Universe, even the most recent. The infinitesimal birth of that nosy little
globule could have taken place in a flare from the surface of Alpha Centauri or a
pan used to fry a dove’s egg in China, in a child’s tear or the curvature of space,
in hydrogen, blotting paper, a desire for revenge, a cube root, Lord Cavendish, a
hair, or the unicorn . . . The catalog that God had to flick through, so to speak,
was inordinately long. Not for the first time, it was borne home to Him that
omnipotence is limited by
l’embarras du choix
. Words were his only guides
in that great chaotic enumeration. At bottom, it was a question of language. There
weren’t any things in reality, only words, words that cut the world into pieces,
which people end up taking for things. God didn’t need to use words Himself, but
when He had to intervene, when, as in this case, He wanted to imprint something on
human memory, He had no choice but to take part in the linguistic game. He regarded
it as a challenge. It was quite a bit harder for Him than it would have been for a
grammar teacher, because He had to consider all languages, living, dead, and
potential (each of them carved the world up differently, and, viewed from above,
their coincidences, divergences, and overlaps formed a superintricate
patchwork).
Cutting to the chase: it has taken longer to formulate the problem than He took to
solve it. As if He’d pressed a button, the particle had her birth certificate, which
also served as an invitation to the party, to which she would return for her debut.
And here, the Creator made an exception: He who keeps no secrets kept one on this
occasion. He didn’t tell anyone what He had chosen as the particle’s origin. And
that, ever since, has been the profound little mystery that runs through God’s Tea
Party.
The Musical Brain
I WAS A KID—I would have been four or five years old. This
was in my hometown, Coronel Pringles, at the beginning of the 1950s. One night, it
must have been a Saturday, we’d gone to have dinner at the hotel; we didn’t eat out
often, not that we were really poor, though we lived pretty much as if we were
because of my father’s austere habits and my mother’s invincible suspicion of any
food she hadn’t prepared herself. Some obscure combination of circumstances had
brought us to the hotel’s luxurious restaurant that night and seated us, stiffly and
uncomfortably, around a table covered with a white cloth and laden with silver
cutlery, tall wineglasses, and gold-rimmed porcelain dishes. We were dressed up to
the nines, like all the other diners. The dress codes in those days were relatively
strict.
I remember the continual to-and-fro of people getting up and carrying boxes full of
books to a small table like an altar at the far end of the room. Most of them were
cardboard boxes, though there were wooden boxes too, and some were even painted or
varnished. Sitting behind the table was a little woman wearing a shiny blue dress
and a pearl necklace, with a powdered face and white hair combed into the shape of a
feathery egg. It was Sarita Subercaseaux, who later on, throughout my time there,
was the high school’s headmistress. She took the boxes and examined their contents,
making notes in a record book. I was following all this activity with the keenest
attention. Some of the boxes were too full to be properly closed, others were half
empty, with only a few books knocking around inside, making an ominous sound. Yet it
wasn’t so much the quantity of books that determined the value of the boxes, though
quantity did matter, as the variety of titles. The ideal box would have been one in
which all the books were different; the worst (and this was the most frequent case),
a box containing nothing but
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