It’s a beautiful fall afternoon. The sun is low, shining through the trees, highlighting the red and gold of the foliage. I look at the vine-covered walls of the library and the Greek columns of the science building, and, silhouetted against the setting sun, the remains of the old cannery.
I notice students, in twos and threes, walking along carrying their knapsacks and schoolbags, some talking earnestly, others laughing. A girl on a bicycle rides by. Two boys are throwing a football back and forth on the quad, and there’s a small group gathered under a tree listening to a young man playing a guitar. As he sings, his head tilts this way and that, in an exaggerated semblance of emotion, and it’s easy to see his deep satisfaction and repulsive narcissism, and I feel nothing but contempt for him. He looks so full of himself, the center of everyone’s attention.
I watch the rapt expressions on the faces of the students— among them one very pretty girl— and I imagine the young man sleeping with her that night, and after making love, while sitting naked on the bed, her asking him to take out his guitar and play for her again.
I know an experience like this is no longer possible for me, and my envy and rage and contempt overtake me. And I realize that the exquisite perfection of mathematics and physics— that all the theorems, equations, algorithms, random variables and quadrilaterals— are meaningless when compared to an obnoxious young man playing a guitar under a tree surrounded by adoring students, especially one very pretty girl who longs to make love to him…unless it is possible for me to mathematically prove that life exists after death, that if this question that haunts us all can be successfully addressed through the mediation of numbers, it will be worthy of a Nobel Prize that will change my life forever. I’ll become an international celebrity, my work translated into hundreds of languages across the globe, and people will admire me the way those students idolize that callow, egotistic, young guitar-playing buffoon.
