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fond of convenient lives, much less inconvenient wives,” he said. In actuality he was glad about my renunciation, since no one else would have quickly taken over the work that I didfor him (the development of dozens of Feynman diagrams, substituting for him in the group-theory course, drafting clean copies of his notes, the numerical simulations that I had to run in the evening and check in the middle of the night—all the things that enabled him to poke around on the Internet most of the time and only rarely show off at the blackboard in his office, displaying how smoothly the algebra, in all its brazen beauty, flowed from the chalk he held).
    That evening, however, descending the stairs in the institute’s most modern wing, I, too, felt an unexpected relief, even a sense of gallantry, for how I had set aside my own ambitions in support of Nora’s serenity. My emigrant colleagues might have academic glory unlocked to them and spacious offices in glass-and-metal structures, but they would live far away, far off not only from here but far off from anywhere. They would meet and marry foreign women, “convenient wives,” for the most part Nordic, with whom they would communicate in an intermediary language, French or English, like diplomats. And I? I, on the other hand, had Nora, who understood every nuance of the words I uttered and every implication of those I chose not to say. CouldI aspire to anything more than that or imagine risking it all for a grant, albeit a prestigious one? All progress made by physics from the beginning—heliocentrism and Newton’s law of universal gravitation; Maxwell’s synthetic, perfect equations and Planck’s constant; restricted and general relativity; multidimensional twisted strings and the most remote pulsars—all the glory of those discoveries taken together would not be enough to give me the same sense of satisfaction. I was mindful of the fact that romantic ecstasy was destined to last just a brief time (not Planck’s constant—that would remain forever), and I had enough experience in relationships to know that such bliss could just as quickly turn into its exact opposite—but for that evening at least I could cling to it. Returning home, I deviated from the shortest route and at the fish market bought enough fried fish to feed a family of four. There was never another mention of Zurich.
    _____
    And now here we are again. I’m back to speculating about European destinations that might reconcile my professional needs with Nora’s expectations and whichat least have an Italian elementary school for Emanuele. Durham, Mainz, Uppsala, Freiburg—none of them meet all the criteria completely, so I cross them off in succession. When I finish that list, I move on to a different one: the names of the colleagues with whom I’ll be competing for the next research grant. I check out their recent work on the Net, the number of citations they’ve gathered, I enter the data into an app and calculate the scores to compare them with mine. I have good reason to believe—with a few points in my favor, assuming the estimate is correct and excluding departmental intrigues—that I can still make it through at the next round.
    Even if that’s so, the same uncertainty will come up again in a few years, then yet again, until a stroke of luck appears (a well-timed series of broken femurs on the fifth floor of the physics faculty, for instance) or until, more likely, I decide to put aside an impractical dream and devote my energies to something more concrete. There are positions open in finance, software, business consulting: physicists are able to manage large quantities of information, they are versatile, and above all they do not complain—so they say.
    I push further for commiseration from my psychotherapist and declare myself depressed, or at least about to be. He, after describing my depression as “at most