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What do you mean? I asked. There was an outdated calendar on the wall from the Columbus Museum of Art, turned to the month of May, showing an Edward Hopper painting of a woman sitting alone in her bed. I couldn't help staring at it.
Why not bottle rockets? she asked. Or campfires?
Because those don't work. I remember feeling a
Listen to me, Tom. My mother placed a hand on my chin and turned my head until I was facing her. Her hair seemed gold in the right light, the same way the woman's did in the Hopper painting. It's u
I don't. What does it matter?
Because every desire has its proper object.
It sounded like something I'd been told once at Sunday school. What's that supposed to mean?
It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldn't. The world confuses them into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn't belong. She adjusted the neck on her sundress, then sat beside me. All it takes to be happy is to love the right things, in the right amounts. Not money. Not books. People. Adults who don't understand that never feel fulfilled. I don't want you to turn out like that.
Why it meant so much to her, this correct aiming of my passions, I never understood. I just nodded in a solemn way, promised that I would never sing about precious metals again, and sensed that my mother was pacified.
But precious metals were never the problem. What I realize now is that my mother was waging a bigger war, trying to save me from something worse: becoming my father. My father's fixation on the Hypnerotomachia was the essence of misguided passion to her, and she struggled with it until the day he died. She believed, I think, that his love for the book was nothing but a perversion, a crooked deflection, of his love for his wife and family. No amount of force or persuasion could correct it, and I suppose it was when she knew she'd lost the battle to realign my father's life that she brought the fight to me.
How well I kept my promise, I'm afraid to say. The stubbor
January came, and Colo
Paul quickly made sense of it, using our success with Moses and his horns: each spike of long, solitary chapters provided a riddle; the riddle's solution, its cipher, was then applied to the run of short chapters following it, yielding the next part of Colo
We divided the labor between us. Paul hunted for riddles in the longer chapters, leaving each one behind for me to solve. The first I tackled was this: What is the smallest harmony of a great victory?
It makes me think of Pythagoras, Katie said when I told her over pound cake and hot chocolate at Small World Coffee. Everything with Pythagoras was harmonies. Astronomy, virtue, math…
I think it has to do with warfare, I countered, having spent some time at Firestone looking at Renaissance texts on engineering. Leonardo, in a letter to the Duke of Milan, claimed he could build impenetrable chariots, like Renaissance tanks, along with portable mortars and great catapults for use in sieges. Philosophy and technology were merging: there was a mathematics to victory, a set of proportions to the perfect war machine. It was only a small step from math into music.
The next morning, Katie woke me at 7:30 to go jogging before her 9:00 class.
Warfare doesn't make sense, she said, begi
I grumbled as we passed the Dinky train station on our way to the west of campus, envying the stray passengers waiting for the 7:43. Ru
So what are you suggesting? I asked.
She didn't even seem to be breathing hard. We'll stop at Firestone on our way back around. I'll show you where I think you should look.
It continued like that for two weeks, waking at dawn for calisthenics and brainteasers, telling Katie my half-baked ideas about Colo
What should I do? I asked one night after Katie left, when the frustration was almost too much. I was getting a tiny kiss on the cheek after each morning run, which, all things considered, hardly covered my expenses; and now that I was spending more and more time on the Hypnerotomachia, and getting by on five or six hours of sleep a night, an entirely new sort of debt was accruing. Tantalus and his grapes had nothing on me: when I wanted Katie, all I got was Colo
For once, though, Gil and Charlie spoke with one voice: Be patient, they said. She's worth it.
And, as usual, they were right. One night in our fifth week together, Katie eclipsed us all. Returning from a philosophy seminar, she stopped by Dod with an idea.
Listen to this, she said, pulling a copy of Thomas More's Utopia from her bag and reading from it.
The inhabitants of Utopia have two games rather like chess. The first is a sort of arithmetical contest, in which certain numbers take others. The second is a pitched battle between virtues and vices, which illustrates most ingeniously how vices tend to conflict with one another, but to combine against virtues. It shows what ultimately determines the victory of one side or the other.