Swinging in the dark

Tonight I went for a walk with my dog to swing on the rope-swing atop Albany Hill. I watched the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge vanish and reappear from behind the Eucalyptus trees, and looked up at the crescent moon and the stars, sensing the cool air on my face, a little dizzy as I spun slowly around. I felt rather lonely after having dinner with a new friend, another conversation cut short by my skepticism.

You are a theoretical physicist who wants to find that everything is made from different arrangements of one or maybe four kinds of stuff, not hundreds. This is the dream of physics that again and again proves either wrong or mired in complexity. I wish I had touched your tattoo, in the design of an atom, binding you to your chosen path. I wish I had let you know how I felt touched by your dream. I wish I was better at making connections than breaking them.

We are perhaps all bound together like the particles in an atom but can never can fully bridge the gap between us because of some stronger force, experiencing at best slippery moments of connection that jostle us against each other like flotsam and jetsam in a stream. Little moments of coming together like stars in a lifetime of darkness, that make us imagine what it would be like to be a stream of light intertwining with another stream, a web of light glowing across the night sky.

Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that in High School I had a crush on my physics tutor, who was a post-doc theoretical physicist at the time and then ended up going back to his family business, running a sweatshop for cheap clothes. You and he came from the same island. I love islands, the proximity of the sea, the beaches, the sense of being constantly on the edge.

We are the stuff that dreams are made of. We are as clay in the hand of the maker, at his whim to broaden and at his whim to shorten. The best we can do is hold on to each other.

Last summer, I e-mailed a friend about how I had met an old man on the hill. He wanted to talk and tell me his story. I listened for a while, then my phone rang, and he said 'in my day we came up here to be alone. Now you carry your friends in your pocket.' I made my excuses and left, feeling bad afterwards that I could have made a real connection with this man but instead I was drawn back to the humdrum of everyday dreams. The story helped me reconnect with my friend at the time, but now we are losing touch.

Now I feel lost. I am trying to focus on real connections, unmediated by electronics. I was so happy when, walking back from the hill, a friend returned a call on my cellphone. But e-mail was swallowing up too much of my time. Who knows if blogging will be any better? Teaching 6th graders about the Day of Atonement, some kids were bragging about how long they had fasted. I asked why we fast, and they didn't really know. To torture the soul, I explained. Then I said that I plan to have a cellphone fast as well, and their eyes goggled. I couldn't do that, they all said.

Although some had said they believe in the story of creation, only one knew how to retell it and that she learned elsewhere. None of those who believed in evolution could retell that tale. We live in an era of soundbites and tags, all we have to do is remember some key words and we can look it up on the internet. But we are creatures of connection, and we feel lost without our internal narratives. No wonder we reach out all the time for the most tenuous of links.