Over Sukkos, I read A Separate Peace by John Knowles. This was a book I'd been assigned to read back in ninth grade, but the homoerotic undercurrents of the story freaked me out so much at the time that I couldn't properly concentrate on it very well and so I faked my way through most of the schoolwork that was assigned with the novel. Of course, I was all the more freaked out because it seemed like I was the only one seeing that sort of theme, and so part of me assumed I was just being gutter-minded and reading stuff into the book that wasn't there. Now that I've been around the block a few more times, I'd since discovered that it wasn't just my wild imagination at work, and so I was happy to take a second, fresh look at this marvelously well-written book.

Without question, there's absolutely not even the smallest explicit mention actual homosexual activity or fantasy in the story. But equally without question is the intensity of Gene's feelings toward Finny, and not just platonic feelings of admiration. The eloquent imagery of Gene's narration whenever describing Finny's exquisite physicality is probably the closest the book gets to an explicit illustration of the nature of Gene's love for Finny. There are also a couple of very sly, teasing, on-the-side references to gayness, the most striking of which is Finny's hilariously pink shirt. Gene declares to Finny with open shock that it makes him "look like a fairy!" And Finny responds with perfectly unflustered aplomb at that idea, idly wondering what would happen if he "looked like a fairy to everyone." While the greater point being made is Finny's lovable irrepressibility, I can't help but feel like the author is toying with the reader with such allusions. It think it's just delightfully droll.

But while the hints of homosexuality in the novel may range from scandalous to amusing in the reader's mind, it wouldn't be all that important to the book's deeper meaning if it weren't for the insight it lends us into Gene's psychology. The central difficulty in understanding A Separate Peace is Gene's motivation for surreptitiously causing the accident that crippled Finny. The rest of the story after that flows pretty clearly and comprehensibly, with Gene progressing through various stages of attempting to atone for this climactic action. But the reason for Gene's action is far from clear. On my first reading, I found this point to be the most puzzling mystery of the story. A significant part of Gene's own inner torment is caused by his own inability to understand what motivated him to commit such a deed. The best that he can come up with is that it was "just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that's all it was." While I wouldn't disagree with the irrational nature of Gene's motive, I think a closer look at the events and emotions leading up to the accident can paint a much more detailed and useful picture of why Gene shook Finny out of the tree.

So let's review what was going on right before Finny's accident: one morning, Gene managed to cook up the theory that Finny was jealous of Gene's academic ability and was therefore secretly sabotaging Gene's studies with Finny's adventurous and rule-flouting hijinks under the guise of their close friendship. The hatred that Gene secretly nursed in response to this imagined enmity lasted for several weeks before Gene's delusion was shattered. Immediately after this sudden realization of Finny's purity of heart, that Gene committed his fateful act of betrayal. But this only deepens the conundrum. An act of violence against your best friend is only more incomprehensible when you've just been reconciled with him.

We'll have to probe even further back before the knot will begin to unravel. After all, why would Gene make the foolish mistake of suspecting his best friend of sabotage in the first place? Everything we were ever given to know of Finny's character only spoke of sportsmanship, integrity, and faithful, innocent, freely-given love. And why does the loss of this jealous suspicion cast Gene down into such a confused state of emotional turmoil? To find an answer we'll have to explore what took place immediately before Gene invented this paranoid fantasy: the trip to the beach. The day on which Finny cheerfully persuaded Gene to spontaneously cut classes for a bike ride to the seashore resulted in the experience which embodied the highest and deepest expression of their friendship that was ever realized. Lying next to each other on the sand before falling asleep under the stars after a very full day and night of simple boardwalk pleasures, Finny does an amazing thing: he tells Gene that he is his best friend. I can't describe Gene's reaction any better than the author does:

It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

It is no coincidence that Gene's inability to express his true feelings toward Finny immediately precedes Gene's neurotic jealously. The above quote makes it obvious that Gene's true emotions were not something that he could not face consciously. His psyche reacted by attempting to reverse the forbidden love into hatred. But this defense mechanism ultimately could not survive long against Finny's undeniable goodness. And now we can finally see a clear path to Gene's unconscious motivation for shaking Finny out of the tree: when left with no other choice, the only way that Gene could deal with a love that he could not express was to attempt to destroy the object of that love.

What separates this story from a mere tragedy of love gone awry is the symbolism of the character of Finny. The insurmountable problem that Finny represents to Gene is not just a love that is forbidden by deep cultural taboo, but the problem of a love that is too beautiful, too good, too pure, too perfect to exist in the "real" world, a world of adulthood, a world of war, deprivation, senseless cruelty. A Separate Peace forces the reader to ask the question, "What can we possibly do when we re convinced that the very structure of the entire world denies with almost the inevitibility of logic that which is truly precious and dear?" Finny was a Peter Pan whose Never-Never-Land was crumbling beneath his feet. Only Gene perceived this impending doom of adulthood, and this perception ultimately drove his every action in the story.

The final, aching question that the novel leaves undecisively answered is whether Gene actually managed to save any of the preciousness that Finny represented. Did Finny ever transcend the dull, grey, inhumanity which the war exemplified? Did Finny attain salvation despite his tragic death, or perhaps even because of it?

This past Shabbos was a quiet one, and I mostly just caught up on some reading. Most notably, I went back and read the end-notes for The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. I'd finished the main text earlier this week, but I wanted to collect all the end-notes to see if anything terribly interesting was hidden within. The book was quite enjoyable. As its subtitle suggests, it is about "Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory." This was particularly interesting to me since until reading this book I didn't know much about string theory other than that it is a cutting edge branch of physics that, though still in its infancy, promises to heal the pernicious rift that divides relativity theory and quantum mechanics and provide us with a unified view of the rules that govern the universe's most fundamental machinery.

It starts by explaining the most salient concepts of both quantum mechanics and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. It then goes on to illustrate how relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible with each other and why this might bug us so much. The second two thirds of the book is devoted to a gloss of the various aspects of string theory: a history of its development, an explanation of how it reconciles quantum mechanics with relativity, a high-level tour through the concepts of string theory and their remarkable consequences, a discussion of how this controversial and unconfirmed theory might one day be verified, and a view of the severe mathematical obstacles physicists must overcome in order to extract useful predictions from string theory.

Oddly enough, my favorite part of the book was the introductory parts that dealt with relativity and quantum mechanics. Since both of these branches of physics have been extremely well developed and confirmed with astounding accuracy in the past century, I've had plenty of exposure to these theories both through my formal education and my independent recreational exploration. So this familiar material should have been old hat to me. But Brian Greene surprised me by providing expositions that gave me fresh insights into these pillars of modern physics.

My favorite little gem was his explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which made the principle make sense for me in a way that it never did before. It's so simple: since every method of measurement boils down to poking something with one or more particles, the only way you can measure position without disturbing velocity is to poke very, very lightly. But the only way to poke so very lightly is to use probing particles of very low frequency (since lower frequency means lower energy). But since low frequency means large wavelength, the gentleness of your poking has come at the cost of precision in measuring position, since you've only narrowed the position down to the large space covered that long wavelength. You can only measure position precisely by using particles with short wavelength, whose high energy completely screws up your velocity measurement. So you're stuck having to choose one or the other.

I was also especially charmed by a surprising perspective on special relativity that the text helped me discover: everything in the universe is travelling at the speed of light and is forever fixed in this speed, not just photons and other such massless particles. We're just used to thinking otherwise because the massy objects of our everyday experience have most of this speed directed in the dimension of time; all of it, in fact, when an object is stationary in space. Whenever we get our bodies moving through the familiar three dimensions of space, we aren't really changing our speed through spacetime at all: we're just stealing some speed away from the direction of time (thus slowing down our clocks whenever we move), just like turning your moving automobile from facing north to facing north-east only converts part of its north-south motion into east-west motion without changing the overall speed. Thinking about the universe in such delightfully unconventional ways is what I really love about modern physics.

The stringy majority of the book was also good, but wasn't nearly as satisfying since those ideas were explained with a lot less completeness and a lot more vagueness. Of course, this fact is inevitable for at least two reasons. First, string theory is far from completely understood by the very scientists developing it (that's what it means to be cutting-edge), so the author certainly can't give you answers which nobody has yet. Second of all, the mathematics behind the parts of string theory that are well-understood are far too complicated to be explained without bloating up the text to gargantuan proportions and completely losing the audience of the layperson in the process. Thus, I can completely forgive this book for sacrificing precision in the name of comprehensibility. The Elegant Universe serves quite effectively in the role of introducing non-physicists to this fascinating frontier of science, and if it's whetted my appetite for a more detailed exploration of the finer details and mathematics, then that can only be counted in its favor.

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That's really the only interesting thing I did all Shabbos.

I just finished reading the sci-fi anthology that Seth got me for my birthday. It was a bit uncomfortable to read for a while there, because it got infused with kerosene fumes from my fire-spinning equipment on the bus ride home from Justin's wedding. But in the end, it was well worth the occasional choking fit, and by now it hardly smells at all.

As I predicted, Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" was my favorite of the bunch: a heart-wrenching moral parable that doesn't preach in the slightest. C. J. Cherryh's "Pots", a story centered around archeology which is not only intellectually intriguing but actually has a little exciting action, was a close second. Karen Joy Fowler's "Face Value" was poignant and haunting in a way I loved. Equally heart-breaking was Theodore Sturgeon's "A Saucer of Loneliness." I loved the intense quirkiness of Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and R. A. Lafferty's "Eurema's Dam" not just because they were cute, but because they did a great job of turning familiar preconceptions upside-down, using their absurdities as effective tools rather than mere gimmicks. "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bison was touching in a mild and slightly weird way. I'm surprised that I don't remember Ray Bradbury's "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" from The Martian Chronicles: either it's a martian story that wasn't included or my memory isn't as good as I'd like to think. Either way, it's classic Bradbury, of which you just can't get enough. Similarly, "Dogfight" was a wonderful reminder of everything I love about William Gibson, especially with Neuromancer still fresh in my mind. Although Michael Swanwick co-authored "Dogfight", it feels like pure Gibson, but maybe I just can't detect Swanwick's flavor because I'm less familiar with his work. It seemed like I had read Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies--" before, but I think I had only read about it in an essay about science fiction which detailed its rather complicated gimmick of a time-travel paradox. I suppose I might as well have read it, because the story is basically nothing more than its gimmick, flavored with a hard-boiled-private-detective motif and more casual misogyny than I'd prefer to tolerate. (I expected better from a story about a transsexual.) Isaac Asimov's "Robot Dreams" was short and sweet and not a little bit chilling, but I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't reminded me of that utter travesty involving Will Smith. And Frederick Pohl's "The Tunnel under the World" made me wonder yet again why so many people were so amazed by the ontological speculation of that silly Matrix movie. Although the idea of the whole world being an illusion is genuinely interesting and far from hackneyed, it had been explored several times already in both film and print by the time The Matrix came out, usually with better execution, although without the glitzy special effects.

Rebecca's passing on the latest Harry Potter to me, so that will occupy me for the next few days at least. I stopped reading George Orwell's 1984 a couple weeks ago because it was too depressing, but I intend to restart it sometime soonish. My old linear algebra textbook has been keeping me busy on the long summer Shabbos afternoons lately, and I'm close to half-way through. (Even though it's not a terribly long book, my brain tends to melt in extreme heat.)