Glory and the Lightning Read Online Free PDF Page A

have said, repeated over and over at all times in the same experiment. All else is metaphysics and conjecture and fable and the dreams of madmen, and drunken poets.”
    “Such as Homer,” said Aspasia with that demure expression of hers which her teachers often found exasperating.
    The teacher frowned. He lifted a bundle of sticks and wagged them in Aspasia’s face, while his other pupils exchanged smiles and shifted on their wooden benches. “Here,” he said, “are ten thin sticks. A decade. All mathematics are based on the rule of ten, no matter how esoteric or what symbols are used. So, we can call this reality.” He threw the sticks into the air and let them drop on the table. They fell into a disordered pattern. Aspasia leaned forward to study them.
    Then she said, “But reality is based on causality—cause and effect?”
    “True.”
    “And the pattern, the experiment, is endlessly repeated in all respects, if it is valid?”
    “True.” The man stroked his beard and regarded Aspasia with no great pleasure, for her beauty did not entrance him and her remarks often disconcerted him, to the high amusement of the other maidens.
    Aspasia lifted the sticks and her sparkling eyes regarded the teacher enigmatically. She let the sticks drop, tinkling, on the table, and did not remove her gaze from the teacher. The sticks fell into another pattern. She studied them. “Causality, reality. The experiment is always the same, and never varies. Behold those sticks. I let them drop as you dropped them, Cipo, but they formed another pattern entirely. I will demonstrate again.” She lifted the sticks in a profound silence, which was broken only by the raucous shriek of a peacock in the garden. She let the sticks drop. They formed still another pattern. She studied them as if with surprise. “The selfsame sticks, the selfsame gesture, even to the placement of my fingers on them. Yet, the pattern is so different each time. Ten sticks, ten thousand, perhaps, differing patterns. So, reality then must have ever-changing patterns, and experiments are never the same nor the results of them, though the conditions are identical. Shall we then conclude that reality has millions of faces and never is repeated and that if an experiment can be reproduced exactly it is only a delusion and not a truth?”
    The teacher felt a desire to strike her. He said, trying to control his rage, “That is a fool’s and a woman’s reasoning. A tremor of your fingers, a bounding of your pulse, a slight wind, could destroy the exactitude of the experiment. Were you able to drop the sticks, through all eternity, with the same exactitude, under the same absolute condition, they would form an unchanging pattern.”
    “That is theory,” said Aspasia. “It cannot be proved. And have you not said that that which cannot be proved is not reality?”
    When he did not answer she continued: “Nothing remains the same. All things, all conditions, change, including the stars in their passage, and the winds in the air. Reality, then, is ephemeral, and what is real, today, is false tomorrow or even in the next moment. Poor mortals that we are! We must rule our lives in the hope that there is some changelessness in our affairs, and that causality is inevitable and reality a fact But none of this is true. We are helpless barks floating on waters of mystery and on waves which never repeat themselves, and the very stars betray us. Nothing is fixed or certain, and therein lies our distress. Our concepts of reality are subjective, not objective, for objectivity does not exist.”
    “You deny objectivity, Aspasia?”
    “Of a certainty. Our attempts at objectivity rise from our unique subjectivity, and each man has his own and none is alike.”
    “You believe in no absolute?”
    She lifted her gilded eyebrows as if with astonishment. “There is no absolute.” Her expression changed subtly. “Except, perhaps, with God, Whose reality has not as yet been proved, at