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»Du mein Gott! Du bist recht schnell entschlossen, Bester!« »Ja, ja! Weil ich weiß, was ich will! Der Pfarrer hat das heute auch verspürt. Wir wollen uns nichts vormachen: wir sind hier von Liberalen umringt! Alle diese Leinwandhändler sind voller Neid auf mich. Darüber bin ich mir ganz klar. Zwei oder drei von ihnen sind nahe daran, reiche Leute zu werden. Es soll mir Spaß machen, wenn sie die Kinder des Herrn von Rênal mit ihrem Erzieher auf der Stadtpromenade erblicken. Das wird ihnen imponieren. Mein Großvater hat uns oft erzählt, daß er in seiner Jugend einen Erzieher hatte ... Das kostet mich zwar hundert Taler, aber es ist für uns eine notwendige Ausgabe, um standesgemäß aufzutreten.«

»Lieber auf alles das verzichten«, sagte er sich, »als mich so weit erniedrigen, daß ich zusammen mit den Dienstboten esse! Mein Vater möchte mich offenbar dazu zwingen. Eher sterbe ich! Ich habe fünf Taler und vier Groschen in der Tasche, meine Ersparnisse. Damit laufe ich heute nacht fort. In zwei Tagen gelange ich auf Seitenwegen, wo ich keinen Gendarm zu fürchten habe, nach Besançon. Dort lasse ich mich zu den Soldaten anwerben. Nötigenfalls entwische ich nach der Schweiz. Mit der Karriere ist es dann freilich vorbei. Dann nützt all mein Ehrgeiz nichts. Lebe wohl, schöner Priesterstand, der einem alle Wege öffnet!« Julians Abscheu vor dem gemeinschaftlichen Essen mit Dienstboten lag nicht in seiner Natur. Um vorwärtszukommen, hätte er noch viel peinlichere Dinge ertragen. Dieser Widerwille rührte aus Rousseaus Bekenntnissen her, dem Buche, nach dem er sich einzig und allein ein phantastisches Bild von der Gesellschaft machte. Nur die Bulletins der Großen Armee und das Memorial von Sankt Helena ergänzten diese seine Bibel. Für diese drei Bücher wäre er in den Tod gegangen. Allen andern mißtraute er. Einem Ausspruch des alten Stabsarztes zufolge hielt er die ganze Weltliteratur für Lug und Trug, für Machwerke von Narren und Strebern.

»Das war Ihr Gebot! Sehr richtig!« erwiderte Vater Sorel. Seine Rede ward noch überlegsamer, und indem er Herrn von Rênal scharf anblickte, fügte er hinzu: »Andere Leute zahlen besser.« Das war so recht die geniale Frechheit eines Bauern der Freigrafschaft! Der Bürgermeister sah im Augenblick ganz verdutzt aus. Er faßte sich jedoch sofort, und nach reichlich zweistündigem Hin- und Hergerede, wobei kein unüberlegtes Wort fiel, siegte die Schlauheit des Bauern über die Schlauheit des Patriziers, dieweil sie bei diesem nicht Daseinsbedingung war. Julians neue Lebensweise ward in einer langen Reihe von Punkten festgelegt. Sein Gehalt solle vierhundert Franken im Jahre betragen, zahlbar jeden Ersten des Monats im voraus. »Also zahle ich ihm monatlich fünfunddreißig Franken!« erklärte Herr von Rênal. »Sagen wir: sechsunddreißig, eine runde Summe.« Und schmeichlerisch fügte der Bauer hinzu: »Ein reicher und freigebiger Mann wie der Herr Bürgermeister wird sich nicht lumpen lassen!« »Abgemacht!« sagte Rênal. »Aber nun bleibt es dabei!« Der Zorn verlieh ihm plötzlich den Ton der Bestimmtheit. Der Bauer merkte, daß er nicht weiter gehen durfte. Jetzt gewann wieder Herr von Rênal die Oberhand. Er dachte nicht daran, die sechsunddreißig Franken für den ersten Monat dem Alten anzuvertrauen, der sie am liebsten auf der Stelle für seinen Sohn eingestrichen hätte. Auch fiel Herrn von Rênal ein, daß er seiner Frau etwas Imponierendes über seine Verhandlung mit dem Bauern berichten mußte.

Julians Freund, der alte Stabsarzt, war tot. Urplötzlich hörte Julian auf, von Napoleon zu reden. Jetzt erklärte er die Absicht, Priester zu werden. Alsbald sah man ihn beständig in der Schneidemühle seines Vaters beim Auswendiglernen einer lateinischen Bibel, die ihm der Pfarrer geliehen hatte. Verwundert über die Fortschritte des jungen Menschen, verbrachte der alte Mann manchen langen Abend mit ihm, um ihn in der Theologie zu unterweisen. Julian offenbarte ihm nur fromme Regungen. Kein Mensch konnte ahnen, daß dieser bleiche, zarte, mädchenhafte Bursche den unerschütterlichen Vorsatz in sich trug, tausendmal sein Leben zu riskieren, wenn er nur sein Glück machte. Sein Glück machen! Das hieß zunächst, aus Verrières hinauskommen. Er haßte seine Heimat. Alles, was er daselbst sah, hemmte sein phantastisches Innenleben. Von klein auf hatte er Augenblicke höchster Erregung gehabt. In Wonnen träumte er sich aus, wie er eines Tages die Bekanntschaft hübscher Pariserinnen machen werde, nachdem er ihre Aufmerksamkeit durch eine außerordentliche Tat auf sich gezogen. Warum sollte er nicht von einer von ihnen geliebt werden, wie Bonaparte, noch arm, von der wunderschönen Frau von Beauharnais geliebt worden war?

Der Kirchenbau und die Urteile des Ortsrichters waren die Ursache, daß es ihm mit einem Schlage wie Schuppen von den Augen fiel. Diese Erleuchtung machte ihn wochenlang toll und durchflammte ihn schließlich mit jener Allgewalt, die die erste selbstgefundene Idee in einer leidenschaftlichen Seele erzeugt. Er sagte sich: »Als Bonaparte aus dem Dunkel hervortrat, stand Frankreich vor dem Einmarsch der fremden Mächte. Das Soldatentum war notwendig und Mode. Heutzutage sieht man Priester, die mit vierzig Jahren ein Einkommen von hunderttausend Franken haben. Das ist dreimal mehr, als die weltberühmten Divisionsgenerale Napoleons bezogen. Die Priester brauchen Helfershelfer. Da ist zum Beispiel dieser Ortsrichter, ein heller Kopf und bisher ein Ehrenmann – aber auf seine alten Tage entehrt er sich aus Angst vor einem jungen Vikar von dreißig Jahren! Ja, heutzutage muß man Pfaffe werden!«

Ohnmächtig und stark blutend blieb er liegen. Zufällig kam Frau Rênal auf einem Spaziergang mit Herrn Valenod und dem Landrat ebendahin. Als sie Julian am Boden sah, glaubte sie, er sei tot. Das ergriff sie so stark, daß Valenod eifersüchtig wurde. Seine Befürchtung war verfrüht. Julian fand Frau von Rênal zwar bildschön, aber er haßte sie gerade ob ihrer Schönheit. Denn diese war die erste Klippe, die das Schifflein seines Glückes bedrohte. Er sprach möglichst wenig mit ihr, um das Feuer zu ersticken, das ihn am ersten Tage verführt hatte, ihr die Hand zu küssen.

Der Schmerz war ihr Erzieher. Zu stolz, ihr Leid auch nur ihrer Freundin, Frau Derville, zu klagen, bildete sie sich ein, alle Männer wären wie der ihre. Roheit und brutale Unempfindlichkeit gegen alles, was nicht Geld, Vorrang oder Auszeichnung hieß, blinde Wut gegen jedwede andre Meinung, hielt sie für Dinge, die zum Manne ebenso unvermeidlich gehören wie Stiefel und Filzhut.

In Paris hätten Julians Beziehungen zu Frau von Rênal eine einfache und rasche Entwicklung gehabt. In den Großstädten ist die Literatur die Verführerin zur Liebschaft. Dem jungen Hauslehrer und seiner scheuen Herrin wäre aus dem oder jenem Roman die Erleuchtung gekommen, und selbst Operettencouplets hätten den beiden die Augen geöffnet. Romangestalten hätten ihnen die Worte vorgesprochen und ihnen die Wege gezeigt. Früher oder später hätte ein solches Vorbild Julian zur Nachahmung gereizt. Er wäre diesem Ideale unbedingt gefolgt, wenn auch vielleicht ohne jeden Genuß, vielleicht sogar mit Widerstreben.

»Meine Verehrteste, ich finde keine andern Worte als die des hochseligen Fürsten von Conde. Als er seiner jungen Gattin seinen Hofstaat vorstellte, sagte er: Alle diese Leute sind unsre Domestiken! Ich habe dir die Stelle aus den Denkwürdigkeiten des Barons von Besenval einmal vorgelesen. Sie ist eine gute Richtschnur in Standesfragen. Alles in unserm Hause, was nicht von Adel ist und Gehalt bekommt, ist Dienstbote. Ich werde mit diesem Herrn Julian ein Wörtchen reden und ihm hundert Franken geben.«

»Was soll ich ihnen nur sagen?« fragte er sich unruhig, als er der Damen gedachte. Er ahnte nicht, daß er sich in einem Zustande befand, in dem er just für Kleinigkeiten Sinn hatte, also für das, was im Leben der Frauen gewöhnlich die Hauptsache ist. Oftmals war er Frau Derville und sogar ihrer Freundin unverständlich, und er seinerseits begriff häufig nur halb, was ihm die beiden sagten. Das war die folge der Kraftfülle und, wenn man das so nennen darf, der Großartigkeit des leidenschaftlichen Innenlebens, das die Seele dieses ehrsüchtigen jungen Mannes verwirrte. In diesem Sonderling war fast Tag für Tag Sturm. An diesem Abend kam Julian in einer Stimmung in den Garten, die ihn befähigte, sich in der Gedankenwelt der beiden hübschen Frauen zurechtzufinden.

Im Morgengrau des dritten Tages nahm er Abschied von Fouqué und verbrachte den ganzen Tag in den Felsenklüften oben im Gebirge. Er fand seine kleine Höhle wieder, aber nicht seinen Seelenfrieden. Den hatte ihm Fouqués Angebot geraubt. Wie Herkules stand er am Scheidewege – nicht zwischen Laster und Tugend, sondern zwischen einem wohlgesicherten Durchschnittsdasein und dem Heldentum seiner Jugendträume. »Wirkliche Festigkeit fehlt mir«, gestand er sich in tiefstem Weh über den Zweifel an sich selbst. »Ich bin nicht aus dem harten Holze der großen Männer geschnitzt, wenn ich fürchte, daß mich ein halbes Dutzend Jahre Broterwerb um die göttliche Energie bringt, durch die der Mensch das Außergewöhnliche schafft.«

Himmelweit entfernt von der Ungebundenheit des Naturmenschen, gehörte Julian bereits zu den Sklaven der Überkultur, denen die Liebe nichts ist als eine langweilige, konventionelle Sache. Eitel und kleinlich sagte er sich: »Ich bin es mir unbedingt schuldig, bei dieser Frau zum Ziele zu kommen. Sollte ich je berühmt werden, und es würfe mir jemand diesen armseligen Hauslehrerposten vor, so kann ich andeuten, die Liebe hätte mich in diese Stellung geführt.«

Julian besaß bereits so große Virtuosität in der Beredsamkeit, die in Frankreich seit 1815 an die Stelle der Tatenlust der napoleonischen Zeit getreten war, daß ihn sein eigener Klingklang schließlich selber anödete.

»Diesem dreckigen Glück strebst du zu! Du erringst es nur, wenn du dich diesen Genossen und ihrer Weltanschauung beugst. Dann ergatterst du unter Umständen einen Posten mit 20 000 Franken Gehalt; aber, während du dir den Bauch vollschlägst, mußt du es fertigbekommen, einem armen Sträfling das Singen zu verbieten. Du gibst Diners von dem Gelde, das du seiner kargen Kost abknappst, und während du tafelst, muß er mehr denn sonst leiden ...« »Großer Napoleon«, fuhr er in seinen Gedanken fort, »wie herrlich war deine Zeit! Damals kam man durch die Gefahren der Schlachten vorwärts; heutzutage, indem man stumm und feig zusieht, wie Unglückliche geknechtet werden!«

Julian liebte ihre Söhne weit zärtlicher als der eigene Vater, und trotz seiner strengen Gerechtigkeit waren sie vernarrt in ihn. Sie fand sich damit ab, ihr geliebtes waldumrauschtes Vergy verlassen zu müssen, wenn sie Julians Frau würde. Im Geiste sah sie sich in Paris wohnen, mit der Erziehung ihrer Kinder beschäftigt, von aller Welt darob bewundert. Die Kinder, sie selbst und Julian, alle waren glücklich ... Die moderne Ehe hat sonderbare Begleiterscheinungen, Ist vor der Heirat Liebe vorhanden, so stirbt sie sicher in der Langweile des ehelichen Beieinanders. Zumal bei Eheleuten, die reich genug sind, um nicht arbeiten zu müssen, stellt sich gründlicher Widerwille gegen das geruhsame Eheglück ein. Und nur die phantasielosen Frauen gehen an Liebschaften und Liebeleien vorbei, anstatt sich kopfüber in sie zu stürzen.

Er hatte schwere Arbeit an sich selbst. Zum Beispiel machten ihm seine Augen viel zu schaffen. »Man muß sie wohlweislich an frommen Orten zu Boden schlagen. Wie dünkelhaft war ich doch in Verrières«, gestand er sich. »Ich glaubte in der Welt zu sein, aber dort, das war nur eine Vorstufe. Hier erst bin ich in der Welt, so wie ich sie vor mir haben werde, bis ich meine Rolle ausgespielt habe. In der Welt sein, heißt von wahren Feinden umgeben sein. In allen Augenblicken heucheln zu müssen, ist maßlos schwer. Die Arbeiten des Herkules sind nichts dagegen. Ein moderner Herkules war Papst Sixtus der Fünfte, gegen Ende des Cinquecento. Fünfzehn Jahre lang hat er vierzig Kardinale getäuscht, die ihn als hochmütigen lebhaften jungen Mann gekannt hatten, indem er vor ihnen den Demütigen spielte.«

»Und wenn ich auch vorwärtskomme«, sagte er sich, »so habe ich doch ein ganzes Leben in so übler Gesellschaft vor mir. Ich konkurriere mit Vielfraßen, die an nichts denken als an die Speckpfannenkuchen, die sie zu Mittag verschlingen werden, oder mit Halunken, denen wie dem Abbé Castanède kein Verbrechen zu schwarz ist... Diese Leute gelangen zur Macht. Ja, aber um welchen Preis! Der feste Wille eines Menschen vermag viel. Das weiß ich. Aber genügt der Wille, um so starken Ekel zu überwinden? Die großen Männer der Geschichte hatten es leicht. So schrecklich auch die Gefahren waren: sie fanden sie schön. Aber niemand außer mir kennt die häßlichen Dinge, die mich umstarren!«

Gegen Mittag nahm Abbé Pirard Abschied von seinen Schülern, nicht ohne eine ernste Ansprache an sie zu halten. »Wollt ihr die Ehren der Welt einheimsen«, predigte er, »wollt ihr alle sozialen Vorteile, den Genuß, zu herrschen und zu gebieten, sich über die Gesetze hinwegzusetzen und gegen jedermann ungestraft zu überheben? Wollt ihr das, oder wollt ihr euer Seelenheil? Auch der Beschränkteste unter euch ist imstande, klar den Scheideweg zu erkennen ...«

Nachdem er lange mit den Anwälten des Marquis gearbeitet hatte, fuhr er ab nach Paris. Beim Abschiednehmen von ein paar guten Bekannten hatte er die Schwäche, zu bekennen, daß er sich während der fünfzehnjährigen Leitung des Seminars genau hundertfünfundsiebzig Taler gespart habe. Da umarmten ihn die Freunde unter Tränen. Hinterher sagten sie zueinander: »Diese Flunkerei hätte sich der gute Abbé sparen können. Sie ist wirklich zu lächerlich.« Die von Geldgier blinden Durchschnittskreaturen vermochten nicht zu begreifen, daß Pirard die Kraft zu dem zehnjährigen Kampfe gegen die jesuitischen Geheimbündler just aus seiner Ehrlichkeit geschöpft hatte.

Man wird dich eines schönen Tages zu Dingen mißbrauchen, die in der Presse gebrandmarkt werden. Wenn du am Pranger stehst, werde ich wieder von dir hören. Meiner Ansicht nach ist es selbst in materieller Hinsicht besser, in einem anständigen Holzgeschäft zweitausend Franken im Jahre zu verdienen, dabei aber sein eigner Herr zu bleiben, als viertausend Franken von einer Regierung zu beziehen, und wäre es die des Königs Salomo.« In diesen Einreden sah Julian nur die Beschränktheit des kleinen Mannes. Ihm aber schien sich endlich der Weg in die große Welt aufzutun. Nach Paris zu kommen, das er sich von Intriganten und Heuchlern höherer Art bevölkert vorstellte, von Leuten, die ebenso höflich waren wie der Bischof von Besançon und jener Kardinal, der ihm in Hohen-Bray begegnet war: dies Glück verscheuchte ihm alle Bedenken.

»Was für eine Schande wäre es für mich, wenn ich mich hinauskomplimentieren ließe!« sagte er sich. »Die Reue darüber würde mir mein ganzes Leben vergiften. Sie wird mir nie schreiben, und Gott weiß, wann ich je wieder in diese Gegend komme!« Von diesem Augenblick an war alles Hohe und Hehre aus seinem Herzen gewichen. Ein angebetetes Weib dicht neben sich, saß er in demselben Gemache, in dem er einst so glücklich war, in tiefdunkler stiller Nacht; er wußte, daß sie seit einer Weile weinte; er fühlte am Wogen ihres Busens, daß sie krampfhaft schluchzte, und doch wurde er mit einemmal ein kalter, herzloser, lauernder Beobachter, kaum anders als im Seminarhofe unter den schlechten Witzen seiner ihm körperlich überlegenen Kameraden.

»Du wolltest auf dem Lande leben«, meinte der andre, »ohne am Leben und Treiben deiner Nachbarn Interesse zu zeigen, ja ohne ihr Geschwätz anzuhören, das war ein Riesenfehler!« »Er soll wieder gutgemacht werden. Schloß Montfleury steht zum Verkauf. Wenn's sein muß, will ich fünfzigtausend Franken dabei fahrenlassen. Ich werde froh sein, wenn ich diese Teufelsecke der Niedertracht und Heuchelei hinter mir habe. Ich will mir Friedsamkeit und Einsiedlertum dort suchen, wo sie einzig und allein in Frankreich gedeihen: im Dachstock eines Hauses von Paris mit dem Blick auf die Champs-Elysees.«

Selten verriet sich ein offenbarer Mangel an Rücksicht, aber Julian hatte bei Tisch schon zwei oder drei kurze Gespräche zwischen dem Marquis und seiner Frau mit angehört, die für den oder jenen Tischgenossen peinlich waren. Dieses adelsstolze Ehepaar machte kein Hehl aus seiner aufrichtigen Mißachtung gegen jedermann, dessen Vorfahren nicht bereits zum höchsten Hofadel gehört hatten. Julian machte die Wahrnehmung, daß das Wort »Kreuzzug« das einzige war, was den Ausdruck tiefen Ernstes und echter Hochachtung auf ihre Gesichter lockte. Die gewöhnliche Achtung hatte immer einen Anflug von Herablassung.

»Welch ein Unglück für mich«, dachte sie, »daß es heute keinen wirklichen Hof gibt wie den der Katharina von Medici oder Ludwigs XIII.! Ich fühle mich den größten und kühnsten Dingen der Welt gewachsen. Zu was könnte ich einen Fürsten und Helden begeistern, der zu meinen Füßen schmachtete, einen Mann vom Schlage Ludwigs XIII. Ich würde ihn in die Vendée führen, und von da sollte er sein Königreich wiedererobern. Dann gäbe es keine Verfassung mehr... Und Julian sollte mir zur Seite stehen! Was fehlt ihm? Name und Geld. Er würde sich einen Namen machen und Reichtum erwerben. Dem Croisenois fehlt nichts, aber er wird sein Lebtag nichts weiter sein als ein halb liberaler, halb royalistischer Herzog, ein farbloser Mensch, jedwedem Extrem stets fern. Folglich wird er immer und überall die zweite Rolle spielen. Welch große Tat ist im Augenblick, wo man sie unternimmt, nicht ein Extrem, eine Utopie? Erst wenn sie vollführt ist, erscheint sie dem Durchschnittsmenschen überhaupt möglich.

»Julian ist ziemlich aufrichtig gegen mich«, sagte sie sich. »In seinem Alter und in seiner schlechten Lage, noch dazu, wo ihn solch erstaunlicher Ehrgeiz quält, bedarf er einer Freundin. Vielleicht bin ich ihm diese Freundin. Denn von Liebe entdecke ich in ihm keine Spur. Bei der Verwegenheit seines Charakters hätte er mir seine Liebe längst gezeigt.«

»Es freut mich, daß Sie nicht abreisen«, sagte der Marquis, als die geschäftliche Besprechung zu Ende war. »Ich habe Sie gern um mich.« Julian ging. Die letzten Worte des Marquis bedrückten ihn. »Und ich Schelm will seine Tochter verführen! Vielleicht ihre Heirat mit Croisenois vereiteln, die dem Marquis das Glück der Zukunft ist! Denn wenn er selber nicht Herzog wird, so will er wenigstens seine Tochter im Besitze der Herzogskrone sehen.« Einen Augenblick dachte Julian daran, nach dem Languedoc abzureisen, trotz Mathildens Brief, trotz der dem Marquis gegebenen Erklärung. Aber bald verflackerte dieser letzte Funke von Pflichtgefühl. »Eigentlich bin ich doch ein guter Kerl«, sagte er sich. »Ich, der Plebejer, habe Mitleid mit einer hocharistokratischen Familie! Ich, der ich in den Augen des Herzogs von Chaulnes ein Domestik bin! Der Marquis ist ein Krösus. Und wie vermehrt er sein Riesenvermögen? Wenn er im Schloß munkeln hört, daß anderntags ein Staatsstreich stattfindet, verkauft er seine Staatspapiere. Und ich, den eine stiefmütterliche Vorsehung in die niedrigste Klasse der Gesellschaft gestellt hat, ich habe ein edles Herz, aber keine tausend Franken Zinsen im Jahre. Das heißt, ich bin bettelarm, jawohl, buchstäblich bettelarm! Und da sollte ich mir ein Vergnügen versagen, das sich mir bietet? Soll vorbeigehen an einem klaren Quell, der meinen Durst stillen kann in der Glut der Wüste der Mittelmäßigkeit, durch die ich mich mühselig schleppe! Hol mich der Teufel! So dumm bin ich nicht. Jeder für sich in dieser Wüste des Egoismus, die man das Leben nennt!«

»Es ist höchste Zeit«, hob Herr von La Mole von neuem an, »daß es in Frankreich zwei Parteien gibt, aber nicht nur dem Namen nach, sondern wirklich zwei säuberlich geschiedene Parteien. Auf der einen Seite die Zeitungsschreiber, die Wähler, die öffentliche Meinung, mit einem Worte: die Jugend und alles, was blaue Wunder von ihr erwartet. Während sie sich am Lärm ihrer eigenen hohlen Worte berauscht, haben wir den realen Vorteil, das Budget zu verzehren...« Wiederum erfolgte ein Zwischenruf.

An etwas zu denken, das in keiner Beziehung zu Fräulein von La Mole stand, war er nicht imstande. Ehedem, bei Frau von Rênal, hatten ihn seine ehrsüchtigen Träumereien und kleinen Eitelkeitserfolge dem reinen Zustand der Verliebtheit entzogen; Mathilde ließ nichts neben sich aufkommen. Wenn er in die Zukunft schaute, sah er immer nur sie. Und allerwegen in dieser Zukunft erblickte er Erfolglosigkeit. Er, der in Verrières voller Überhebung und Hochmut gewesen, war der lächerlichsten Bescheidenheit verfallen. Noch vor drei Tagen hätte er den spionierenden Pfaffen am liebsten ermordet. Jetzt in Straßburg hätte er jedem Kinde recht gegeben, das in Streit mit ihm geraten wäre. Wenn er an die Widersacher und Feinde zurückdachte, die er im Laufe seines Lebens gehabt hatte, war es ihm, als hätte er – Julian – immer unrecht gehabt. An diesem Wandel seiner Selbstbeurteilung war einzig und allein der Umstand schuld, daß seine zügellose Einbildungskraft, die ihm bisher glänzende Zukunftsbilder vorgegaukelt hatte, mit einem Male zu seiner unversöhnlichen Feindin geworden war.

»Sie sehen aus wie ein Trappist. Sie übertreiben den Grundsatz von der Würde, den ich Ihnen in London doziert habe. Eine trübsinnige Miene ist gegen den guten Ton. Man muß gelangweilt aussehen. Wenn man traurig aussieht, zeigt man damit, daß einem etwas fehlt, daß einem irgend etwas mißglückt ist. Das heißt: man zeigt sich inferior. Sehen Sie hingegen gelangweilt aus, so ist jeder, der vergeblich sucht, Sie für sich einzunehmen, der Inferiore. Begreifen Sie, wie stark Geringschätzung imponiert!«

Der Gegensatz zwischen der zur Schau getragenen Oberflächlichkeit von Julians mündlichen Äußerungen und der wunderbaren, geradezu apokalyptischen Tiefe seiner Briefe war es, der Eindruck auf Frau von Fervaques machte. Besonders gefiel ihr die Länge der Sätze. »Das ist etwas ganz andres als der sprunghafte Stil, den dieser unmoralische Mensch, der Voltaire, in die Mode gebracht hat!« dachte sie.

Von Stund an war ihre Liebe zu Julian, ihr ganzes Gefühlsleben durchzittert von etwas Vagem, Bangem, Grauenhaftem. Die Leidenschaft, deren eine inmitten der Überkultur einer Weltstadt groß gewordene kühle Seele überhaupt fähig ist, hatte ihren Höhepunkt erreicht.

Erst nachdem dieser Brief abgegangen war, kam Julian einigermaßen zur Besinnung. Jetzt fühlte er sich grenzenlos unglücklich. Jene großen Worte: In acht Wochen bin ich tot! rissen ihm seine ehrgeizigen Hoffnungen mit Stumpf und Stiel aus dem Herzen. Der Tod an und für sich war ihm nichts Schreckliches. Sein ganzes Leben war ein Gang nach Golgatha gewesen, und nie hatte er im einzelnen Leid das Endziel des Lebens vergessen.

Als die beiden fort waren, versank Julian in schmerzliche tränenlose Grübelei. Alles erschien ihm trüb und trostlos. Es war ihm zumute, als höre sein Herz auf zu klopfen. Das war das grausamste Erlebnis, das ihm seit seiner Freveltat widerfuhr. Jetzt sah er den Tod vor sich in aller seiner Häßlichkeit. Alle seine Illusionen von Seelengröße und Heldentum waren zerstoben wie Wolken vor dem Sturm. Diese qualvolle Stimmung währte mehrere Stunden. Gegen solche Seelenvergiftung gibt es physische Heilmittel, zum Beispiel Champagner. Aber Julian hielt es für feig und verächtlich, seine Zuflucht dazu zu nehmen.

Es gibt kein natürliches Recht. Das ist veralteter Blödsinn, albernes Gerede von Staatsanwälten, deren Vorfahren selber Gauner waren. Es gibt nur ein Recht: die Macht, die diese oder jene Handlung unter Strafandrohung verbietet. Natürlich ist nichts als die Kraft des Löwen oder das Bedürfnis, das der verspürt, der Hunger hat oder friert. Die Leute, die man zu ehren pflegt, sind nichts weiter als Halunken, die das Glück gehabt haben, nicht in flagranti ertappt zu werden.

Ich sitze einsam und verlassen in meiner Zelle. Aber ich bin nicht einsam über die Erde gewandelt. In mir lebte und webte die mächtige Idee der Pflicht. Die Pflicht, die ich mir selber gesetzt, mit Recht oder mit Unrecht, war mir der feste Stamm eines Baumes, an den ich mich stützte im Sturm. Ich habe geschwankt. Wind und Wetter haben mich geschüttelt. Ich war ja nur ein Mensch. Aber ich habe mich nicht zu Boden werfen lassen!

Außer in den Augenblicken, da ihn Mathildens Gegenwart ablenkte, lebte Julian gänzlich seiner Liebe. Jede große und ungeheuchelte Leidenschaft hat seltsame Wirkungen. So kam es, daß Frau von Rênal die Sorglosigkeit und friedsame Heiterkeit ihres Geliebten allmählich teilte. »Weißt du«, sagte Julian zu ihr, »damals auf unsern gemeinsamen Spaziergängen in den Wäldern von Vergy, da hätte ich so glücklich sein müssen wie jetzt. Aber ein ungestümer Ehrgeiz entführte meine Seele gewaltsam in ein Traumland. Statt deinen holden Leib, der meinen Lippen so nahe war, an mein Herz zu drücken, ließ ich mir die Gegenwart durch Gedanken an die Zukunft rauben. Ich malte mir tausend Kämpfe aus, die ich bestehen zu müssen wähnte, ehe sich mir ein ungeheures Glück erschlösse... Genug! Ich wäre gestorben, ohne das echte Glück zu erfahren, wenn du nicht zu mir in mein Gefängnis gekommen wärst!«

»Wer weiß«, sagte er zu Fouqué, »ob wir nach dem Tode nicht doch Empfindungen haben. Ich möchte gern in der kleinen Grotte ruhen – ja, ruhen ist das rechte Wort dafür – hoch in den Bergen über Verrières. Ich habe dir wohl erzählt, daß ich dort in der Grotte mehrmals die Nacht verbracht habe. Meine Blicke schweiften weithin über die reichen Gefilde Frankreichs, während mir der Ehrgeiz die Seele durchloderte. Der Ehrgeiz, das war damals meine Leidenschaft!

A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else. When Chinese point to new cities that shimmer at night with drone displays, or metropolises connected to each other by a glistening high-speed rail network, their pride is real. Call it propaganda of the deed, but one way to impress a billion-plus people is to pour a lot of concrete.

The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping—heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.

The Biden administration was staffed by many graduates of Yale Law, who were willing to ignore the logic of the invisible hand. Instead, they roll up their sleeves to perform surgery on the American economy, one case at a time, devising a subsidy scheme for one corporation or bringing an antitrust case against another. Lawyers create so many complications that the rules governing everything from health care and housing to banking have become incomprehensible.

In the words of one 1991 paper written by a trio of economists, “Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow more slowly

If your child is virtually destined to become a normal adult, however, you should rethink that groan—especially if you’re happy with the way you and your spouse turned out. Odds are, your kids will painlessly inherit your brains, success, charm, and modesty.

Half a century from now, your children will remember how you treated them. If you showed them kindness, they probably won’t forget. If you habitually lost your temper, they probably won’t forget that, either. Out of all the wishes on the Parental Wish List, “good memories” are one of the few that clearly depend upon how you raise your child. Don’t forget it.

Twin and adoption research on young children’s intelligence always finds nurture effects. The younger the child, the more parents matter. A team of prominent behavioral geneticists looked at major adoption studies of IQ. They found moderate nurture effects for children, versus none for adults. Suppose an adoptee grows up in a family with a biological child in the 80th percentile of IQ. During his childhood, we should expect the adoptee to have a higher IQ than 58 percent of his peers. Nurture effects were largest for the youngest kids under observation, four- to six-year-olds. An average child of this age raised in a high-IQ home will typically test higher than 63 percent of his peers. Not bad—but it doesn’t last. The Colorado Adoption Project provides an especially vivid illustration of fade-out. Nurture effects were already visible when the children were one to two years old and peaked when they were three to four years old. Toddlers adopted by parents in the 80th percentile of IQ scored about 7 percentage points higher than average. By the time the adoptees were age seven, however, two-thirds of this nurture effect was gone. By twelve, nothing was left. As the researchers bluntly concluded, “Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle childhood or adolescence.”

When people learn about twin and adoption research, they often object, “If this is true, how come parents haven’t figured it out for themselves?” At least part of the answer is that parents’ firsthand observation is directly misleading. When they try to mold their kids, the short-run effects are obvious to the naked eye. It is tempting to assume that these short-run effects add up—and explain why children turn into their parents. Without twin and adoption methods, we would never have discovered that the “obvious” effects of parenting are mostly a plausible, powerful illusion.

When parents reflect on the science of nature and nurture, they need to keep this moral in mind. Do not be alarmed when twin and adoption studies conclude that your children’s future is outside your control. They’re not saying that your children will do poorly. They’re saying that your children will probably turn out fine, whether or not you’re a great parent. If anything, the truth should come as a great relief. If I thought that my sons’ future depended primarily on my actions, I’d fret, “We should be reading another book,” every time we sat down to watch The Simpsons.

Shouldn’t parents worry that if they add another member to the family, the children they already have won’t have the support they need to succeed? Not really. Yes, the Korean adoption study provides solid evidence that kids who grow up in bigger families are slightly less successful. If you have another baby, expect the children you already have to complete six fewer weeks of education and earn 4 percent less income. Compared to the value of having another brother or sister, however, the downside is tiny. Compared to the value of being that brother or sister, the downside isn’t worth mentioning.

With the important exception of babies, children are the safest people in the United States. My seven-year-olds may look vulnerable, but they are almost twelve times as safe as I am, and over 100 times as safe as their grandparents. The twins’ annual chance of death is 16.3 out of 100,000, which means their chance of staying alive is 99.9837 percent.

One careful study of elder care found that each additional child substantially cut the chance of ending up in a nursing home.

Avoiding petty interference is one thing, but it hurts to stand idly by when you believe that your grandchildren’s welfare is in danger. Just keep matters in perspective. If your grandchildren’s parents are severely abusing them, don’t just speak up; take action. Otherwise, think twice before intervening. Keep thoughts like “You’re raising him wrong” and “You’re spoiling him rotten” to yourself. Remember the central lesson of twin and adoption research: Even if your kids are moderately bad parents, your grandchildren will probably still turn out fine. Before you speak up, ask yourself: Would adoption agencies consider your grandkids’ parents fit to adopt? If so, correcting their deviations from your ideal of parenting is imprudent.

Another diplomatic way to reward fertility is to set up trusts for your grandchildren—and make your children the trustees. The parents will eventually use the trust to pay for expenses like college that otherwise would have come out of their own pockets. You’re effectively giving more to the children who gave more to you. Yet officially, you’re treating your children equally.

Pushy, inconsiderate, loud, mean, and miserly people are bad at being selfish. While they’re acting on selfish impulses, they fail to carefully weigh how other people will respond to their behavior. They’re like restaurants with bad food and bad service. Once word gets around, no one wants anything to do with them.

In the United States, one cycle of in vitro fertilization costs about $12,000—and that’s when the mother uses her own egg and carries her own baby. It sounds expensive, yet it’s infinitely cheaper than it used to be. In 1970, in vitro was beyond the reach of billionaires, for the technology did not exist. The surprising lesson is that innovation reduces the true price of babies by turning what money can’t buy into what money can buy.

Selfishly speaking, surrogacy is more than another fertility treatment. It’s practically magic: Women no longer have to choose between pregnancy and childlessness. And while many women treasure their pregnancies, the experience definitely gets mixed reviews. If you love kids but dread pregnancy, surrogacy is a historic opportunity to painlessly create life.

I’m not the only one to have found something fishy in the fact that more treatment has not resulted in less depression. A group of academic researchers recently noticed the same. They published a peer-reviewed paper titled “More Treatment but No Less Depression: The Treatment-Prevalence Paradox.” The authors note that treatment for major depression has become much more widely available (and, in their view, improved) since the 1980s worldwide. And yet in not a single Western country has this treatment made a dent in the incidence of major depressive disorder. Many countries saw an increase.

If you want to improve a kid’s mental health, locking up her smartphone might be a start. At a minimum, smartphones take a teen further from the world of in-person friends and activity likely to bolster her sense of well-being. They are undoubtedly responsible for exacerbating a variety of social contagions, from tic disorders to gender dysphoria. But banish the smartphone and fix a generation? I’m not so sure. Youth mental health has been in decline, after all, for the last five or six decades.

For most problems, Ortiz says, individual therapy has almost no proven benefit for kids. “The evidence is pretty clear that parent-based approaches are more effective.” Meaning, a therapist should treat a kid’s anxiety by treating the kid’s parents.

“Trying to get the patient to consider their past and how it went wrong, and what could have gone better and how should it be different, what can happen, what’s the most likely outcome and so on—a lot of these different interventions are actually worry- and rumination-increasing interventions,”

I asked Kennair how we could be sure that young people weren’t simply more “open” about their poor mental health? Kennair’s response was elegant and astonishing: being overly prone to talking about your emotional pain is itself a symptom of depression. “If you do this”—habitually give voice to your negative thoughts or personal problems—“you’re co-ruminating at least. But I believe they are ruminating more. And rumination is the major predictor for depression.”

Hang around families with young children for an afternoon, and you’ll hear parents check that their kids are enjoying their ice cream, excited about school the next day, that they had fun at the park. In so many ways, we signal to kids: your happiness is the ultimate goal; it’s what we’re all livin’ for. According to the best research, we have it all backward. If we wanted our kids to be happy, the last thing we would do is to communicate that happiness is the goal. The more vigorously you hunt happiness, the more likely you are to be disappointed.

A generation ago, kids might have identified with what Cody calls their “strengths”: the jock, the popular kid, the math team member, the beauty queen. But today, that’s verboten. “Identifying with your strengths now isn’t seen as too cool because some people may manipulate you into thinking that you’re privileged because of it.” What’s wrong with identifying with your struggles? “Well, I see that they don’t try to solve it.” Cody took pains to explain that he wasn’t talking about the severely depressed—just the average kid. Once they get the validation from other students for their mental health crises, “they don’t break out of that rut,” he said.

“Kids today are always under the situation of an observer,” said Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College and author of the classic introductory textbook on psychology. “At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.”

“When psychologists do research where they want to add an element of stress, and they want to compare people doing something under stress versus no stress, how do they add stress? They simply add an observer,” Gray said. “If you’re watched by somebody who seems to be assessing your performance, that’s a stress condition.”

Most American generations endured national hardships. But there was no rash of suicides among young southerners during the Civil War nor during Reconstruction. None among teens during the Great Depression, though they did see suicide among the adults of the time. Nor was there a rash of suicide among young adults following Pearl Harbor, when so many of them were sent off to war. Not during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world might actually have blinked out like a Zenith TV on the fritz, nor during the endless waves of disillusionment that accompanied the Vietnam War. The Boomers who fancy themselves having confronted some of the ugliest chapters in American history—segregation, Vietnam, Watergate—are usually the first to acknowledge that they could, and did, initiate a positive change.

The great Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz notes that the trauma narrative is plotted backward—from present adult dissatisfaction to the epiphany of a childhood spent in a dysfunctional family. “What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation,” Illouz writes. “The nature of the tautology is obvious: any present predicament points to a past injury.”

“Self-consciousness,” or what Peterson calls “self-reflection on the feeling state,” and neurotic suffering are virtually indistinguishable, clinically and psychometrically. “Insofar as you’re thinking about yourself, you’re depressed and anxious,” Peterson said. “There’s no difference between thinking about yourself and being depressed and anxious. They are the same thing.”

The “authoritative parent,” however, is loving and rule based. She attempts to direct the child’s activities in a rational manner, encourages a give-and-take with her child, but “exerts firm control at points of parent-child divergence.” Where her point of view on a household rule ultimately conflicts with that of her child, she wins. She maintains high standards for her child’s behavior “and does not base her decisions on group consensus or the individual child’s desires.” In studies that still manage to chagrin therapists, Baumrind found that authoritative parenting styles produced the most successful, independent, self-reliant, and best emotionally regulated kids; it also produced the happiest kids—those less likely to report suffering from anxiety and depression. This is a remarkably sturdy research finding: kids are happiest when raised in a loving environment that holds their behavior to high standards, expects them to contribute meaningfully to the household, and is willing to punish when behavior falls short. And it flies in the face of virtually everything therapists and parenting books now exhort.

Mayan parents on the Yucatan Peninsula; Inuit in northern Canada; and hunter gatherers in Tanzania. These parents invite their toddlers to help them with the housework; do not overly praise their kids; exert a calm, steady authority; and let their kids take risks and fail, so that they become strong. Doucleff even reluctantly admits that in nearly every culture around the world—including those she admires—parents give the errant child a brisk spanking. Doucleff envies these cultures—their confident closeness with their children; the happy, competent, generous, chore-doing kids they are raising.

In so many liberal American families today, she said, parents disavow their authority, give children endless choices, and constantly solicit kids’ opinions on major life decisions. But the hunger for authority and boundaries is profoundly connected to a child’s sense of self and well-being. It does not dissipate simply because parents fail to supply it.

Ortiz believes acts of independence can help alleviate even unrelated fears. Of his method with kids, he has joked, “So you’re scared of the dark? Go to the deli and buy me a half a pound of salami.” The child’s feeling of efficacy that results from completion of this sort of task, he says, makes kids stronger in every sense: braver, less anxious, more willing to try things that are hard, and, remarkably, less of a constant burden to their stricken parents. So far, he says, the results are promising.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of childhood is to allow kids to take risks—things that involve getting all kinds of hurt—and to practice the skills they will need as adults while they are still safely under their parents’ roofs. Childhood exists to allow kids to hazard an unpredictable friend, lose a ball game, stand up to a bully, pick themselves up, offer another kid a hand.

Pilots, policemen and firefighters describe their work as “long periods of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of sheer panic.”

Developing situation awareness is primarily the process of getting attuned to the dynamics of the background. Anything left over and unexplained is the foreground: raw material for active engagement.

Today I have a stable pace-setting routine that I use whenever I start cooking. I move clean dishes from the dishwasher to the cabinet and move dirty ones from the sink to the dishwasher. Remember the metaphor of the child on a swing? This is an example of adding a jolt of energy to what you might call the ‘kitchen cycle” to lift its emotional state. Dishes in the cabinet are like an energized swing at its highest point. Dishes in the sink are like a swing that has slowed to a stop.

The idea that all conversations must aspire to an ideal of respectful active listening is about as interesting to the student of decision-making as a musical piece with no dissonance is to a composer. The full spectrum of healthy conversational tempos ranges from leisurely, uninterrupted taking-of-turns with active listening, through impatient and interruptive finishing of each other’s sentences and violent agreement, to violent disagreement.

If your team has a weekly meeting, should you schedule it on a Monday when situation awareness is low but energy is high, or on Wednesday when the opposite holds, or on Friday, when distraction rules, but you have the momentum of whatever was accomplished between Monday and Thursday on your side?

A mental model is a dynamic, unstable and partially coherent set of beliefs, desires and intentions held together by narratives that weave through the current realities, possible histories and possible futures of a situation.

As in the world of Newton’s laws, steady movement in an enactment is neither interesting nor realistic, and as with Newton’s laws, to change momentum, you need forces. The forces that act on mental models arise from internal stresses, other mental models, and interactions with reality-data (particularly through the addition and falsification of beliefs). The analogy between physics and decision-making is valuable because it helps us calibrate the complexity of the underlying phenomena. Newton’s laws govern relatively simple phenomena such as a swinging pendulum or the Moon orbiting the Earth. They also govern extremely complex phenomena such as the weather, avalanches and ocean currents. The laws have much greater predictive power in the simple cases, but are just as valid for the more complex cases. Real-world decision-making phenomena are closer to weather systems in their complexity. Loose beliefs, desires and intentions create an atmosphere of drag and friction for those that have coalesced into mental models. Broad-strokes rhythms, along with the low-level movement of individual beliefs and desires, create the continuously changing background. In the foreground, possible worlds and theories of situations being created and destroyed cause the larger discontinuous jumps. The rising and sinking of mental models in and out of your awareness creates the biggest discontinuities of all.

If you think of multiple mental models within your mind as conversation partners, dialectics give you a way to think about individual, inside-your-head decision-making as well (another use of Minsky’s “Society of Mind” metaphor that we encountered in Chapter 1). If you include Nature as a potential conversation partner, you get to ideas such as Marx’s dialectical materialism, Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction and Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts. The two notions of Jihad in Islam (one signifying internal struggles of the mind, and the other signifying worldly “holy war”) are both dialectics. Dialectics give rise to theories of science, engineering, culture, religion, politics and economics. Processing this cartload of philosophical ideas is clearly beyond the scope of this book. Fortunately, we will not need to. The main reason you should be aware of these ideas is calibration. Do not look for theories of swinging pendulums or moons orbiting planets. To understand decision dynamics, you will need to study things as complex as the weather, and as subtle as philosophy. While pendulum-level decision-science theories, such as game theory, can be useful in understanding very specific situations, using them as generic theories of decision-making can lead to a false sense of clarity and security.

Your most stable beliefs, the ones that actually modulate your behavior, aren’t about life purposes; they are about momentum management. You are more likely to switch religions than to switch from an impatient to a patient temperament.

Once you learn enough of another person’s patterns through mimicry, you may be able to find a match to one of your favorite broad-strokes archetypes. Perhaps your boss is approximately a fox or a hedgehog. If you find that your archetypes are getting very richly defined, and fit no template you know of, perhaps you should write a novel and create memorable archetypes for others to learn from. I still wonder where Dickens came up with Mr. Micawber.

During liminal passages, we are caught in the situational emptiness between rich narrative contexts, so the only thing we can do is indulge in existential musing. The musing can be either pleasurable or painful, and you can engage in it in either self-aware or self-indulgent ways. It can be so painful that you might be tempted to avoid it by getting drunk, or so addictive that you might get trapped for an extended period, possibly the rest of your life, reluctant to move on to the next deep story. This is one way to understand narcissism: it is falling in love with yourself at a particular liminal passage to such an extent that you are unwilling to submit yourself to further transformative experiences.

We’ve identified learning, in the most general sense, as the process of constructing a mental model from scratch. This process is open-ended and has no goals beyond hardwired biological ones. It is unsupervised, uncertain, unbounded, unstructured, and mostly unrewarding. In more familiar terms, there are no teachers, safety belts, syllabi, grades or prizes.

Whether we are self-aware or deluded each of us through introspection continually re-examines, prunes, consolidates and compresses our doctrine into a minimal set of self-evident and mutually independent beliefs. Introspection as a process is uncannily like trash compaction: your head fills up with unrelated, irreducible beliefs. It does not matter how thoughtful your doctrine is. The larger it gets, the more rigid and constrained your behavior becomes. This is why the word doctrinaire is synonymous with rigid. A growing doctrine is a path of increasing entropy.

The sophisticated novel reader or movie-goer gradually loses his ability to identify with, and vicariously experience, the patterns of energy and emotion experienced by the protagonists of formulaic stories. You can tire of riding the same roller coaster repeatedly. The fact that deliberately crafted stories, as opposed to real-world events, contain cues that help us anticipate peaks and troughs, ends up blunting our responses to them. When individuals and cultures age, storytellers must work harder to trigger experiences of the same intensity.

You typically have to do something in order to provoke a reaction from the environment. Such provocation reveals useful information that can drive an enactment forward. The classic example of this phenomenon is language acquisition. When a child points to a cow and says “doggie,” and is corrected by a parent, a concept is learned and a hypothesis is refined. Progress is much faster than with pure listening, but at the cost of mistakes made along the way. This creates a bootstrapping conundrum: how can you act meaningfully when you don’t know much about the situation, and do not have relevant, well-developed mental models? The answer, as we saw briefly in Chapter 4, is that you cannot. You must act meaninglessly, or in other words, randomly. Unstructured learning behaviors are random to a lesser or greater extent depending on the maturity of the active mental models.

This element of necessary improvisation makes opportunistic decision patterns the most demanding and creative kind. This is one reason William Gibson’s portrayal of Wintermute, an artificial intelligence program in his classic cyberpunk novel The Neuromancer, is so effective. Wintermute reflectively explains its behavior to the human protagonist of the story: “I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn’t my basic mode, really. I improvise. It’s my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see… “

Unlike its cousin space, time is a very intimate dimension. The entire world can share an instant of time in a way that it cannot share a location in space. There is a reason we remember 9/11 first as a date and only then as a place. Rhythms in time bind us more closely than patterns in space.

Watch a modern information worker through the glass the next time you walk past a coffee shop. All you can see is typing, mouse-wielding and cell-phone use. Information work blurs, and sometimes eliminates, the distinction between thought and action, and elevates the role of decision-making above both. Frederick Brooks, in his 1975 classic, The Mythical Man Month, noted that “the programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.” Today every sort of information work is acquiring the pure thought-like characteristics Brooks first noticed in programming. In these conditions, separating work into thought and action is less useful than it used to be. Work is simply whatever we must do to get from one decision to the next.

Tempo has three elements: rhythm, emotion and energy. Western musical concepts surrounding tempo – adagio, andante, allegro and presto – convey more than mere pace. They also indicate mood and energy.

Watch out when anyone (including you) says he wants to do something big, but can't until he raises money.   It usually means the person is more in love with the idea of being big big big than with actually doing something useful. For an idea to get big big big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn't need funding.   If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It'll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you'll be in the game. You'll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line.

When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won't understand. They'll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way.   But that's forgetting about the joy of learning and doing.

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I don’t find that writing and publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path. Perhaps I’m just too painstaking a type of person, but I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I’d never know what running means to me.

I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue. On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days. When I’m sad I think a little about sadness. When I’m happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.

My only strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can take a lot physically. I’m more a workhorse than a racehorse.

To start the bar I’d borrowed as much as I could from every place that would lend me money, and I’d almost repaid it all. Things were settling down. Up till then, it had been a question of sheer survival, of keeping my head above water, and I didn’t have room to think of anything else. I felt like I’d reached the top of some steep staircase and come out to a fairly open place and was confident that because I’d reached it safely, I could handle any future problems that might crop up and I’d survive. I took a deep breath, slowly gazed around me, glanced back at the steps I’d taken here, and began to contemplate the next stage.

Most people I knew were flat out against my decision, or else had grave doubts about it. “Your business is doing fine now,” they said. “Why not just let someone else run it for a time while you go and write your novels?” From the world’s viewpoint this makes perfect sense. And most people probably didn’t think I’d make it as a professional writer. But I couldn’t follow their advice. I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do. I just couldn’t do something clever like writing a novel while someone else ran the business. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.

After I closed the bar and began my life as a novelist, the first thing we—and by we I mean my wife and I—did was completely revamp our lifestyle. We decided we’d go to bed soon after it got dark, and wake up with the sun. To our minds this was natural, the kind of life respectable people lived. We’d closed the club, so we also decided that from now on we’d meet with only the people we wanted to see and, as much as possible, get by not seeing those we didn’t. We felt that, for a time at least, we could allow ourselves this modest indulgence.

Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he retired from running and became manager of the S&B company team. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today, like you don’t want to run and would rather just sleep in?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!”

Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger.

If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.

At certain points in our lives, when we really need a clear-cut solution, the person who knocks at our door is, more likely than not, a messenger bearing bad news. It isn’t always the case, but from experience I’d say the gloomy reports far outnumber the others. The messenger touches his hand to his cap and looks apologetic, but that does nothing to improve the contents of the message. It isn’t the messenger’s fault. No good to blame him, no good to grab him by the collar and shake him. The messenger is just conscientiously doing the job his boss assigned him. And this boss? That would be none other than our old friend Reality.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.

We see some bacteria with folded internal membranes, others with no cell wall and a modestly dynamic cytoskeleton, yet others with straight chromosomes, or multiple copies of their genome, or giant cell size: all the beginnings of eukaryotic complexity. But bacteria always stop well short of the baroque complexity of eukaryotes, and rarely if ever combine multiple complex traits in the same cell. The easiest explanation for the deep differences between bacteria and eukaryotes is competition. Once the first true eukaryotes had evolved, the argument goes, they were so competitive that they dominated the niche of morphological complexity. Nothing else could compete. Any bacteria that ‘tried’ to invade this eukaryotic niche were given short shrift by the sophisticated cells that already lived there. To use the parlance, they were outcompeted to extinction. We are all familiar with the mass extinctions of dinosaurs and other large plants and animals, so this explanation seems perfectly reasonable. The small, furry ancestors of modern mammals were held in check by the dinosaurs for millions of years, only radiating into modern groups after the dinosaurs’ demise. Yet there are some good reasons to question this comfortable but deceptive idea. Microbes are not equivalent to large animals: their population sizes are enormously larger, and they pass around useful genes (such as those for antibiotic resistance) by lateral gene transfer, making them very much less vulnerable to extinction. There is no hint of any microbial extinction, even in the aftermath of the Great Oxidation Event.

I mentioned earlier that there are a thousand or more different species of archezoa. These cells are bona fide eukaryotes, which adapted to this ‘intermediate’ niche by becoming simpler, not bacteria that became slightly more complex. Let me stress the point. The niche is viable. It has been invaded on numerous occasions by morphologically simple cells, which thrive there. These simple cells were not outcompeted to extinction by more sophisticated eukaryotes that already existed and filled the same niche. Quite the reverse: they flourished precisely because they became simpler.

The crucial point is that these two domains, the bacteria and the archaea, are extremely different in their genetics and in their biochemistry, but almost indistinguishable in their morphology. Both types are small simple cells that lack a nucleus and all the other eukaryotic traits that define complex life. The fact that both groups failed to evolve complex morphology, despite their extraordinary genetic diversity and biochemical ingenuity, makes it look as if an intrinsic physical constraint precludes the evolution of complexity in prokaryotes, a constraint that was somehow released in the evolution of eukaryotes. In Chapter 5, I’ll argue that this constraint was released by a rare event – the singular endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes that we discussed in the Introduction. For now, though, let’s just note that some sort of structural constraint must have acted equally on both of the two great domains of prokaryotes, the bacteria and archaea, forcing both groups to remain simple in their morphology throughout an incomprehensible 4 billion years. Only eukaryotes explored the realm of complexity, and they did so via an explosive monophyletic radiation that implies a release from whatever these structural constraints might have been. That appears to have happened just once – all eukaryotes are related.

Why do viruses, spores and tardigrades not fall to pieces, conforming to the universal decay dictated by the second law of thermodynamics? They might do in the end – if frazzled by the direct hit of a cosmic ray or a bus – but otherwise they are almost completely stable in their non-living state. That tells us something important about the difference between life and living. Spores are not technically living, even though most biologists would classify them as alive, because they retain the potential to revive. They can go back to living, so they’re not dead. I don’t see why we should view viruses in any different light: they too revert to copying themselves as soon as they are in the right environment. Likewise tardigrades. Life is about its structure (dictated in part by genes and evolution), but living – growing, proliferating – is as much about the environment, about how structure and environment interrelate.

ATP works like a coin in a slot machine. It powers one turn on a machine that promptly shuts down again afterwards. In the case of ATP, the ‘machine’ is typically a protein. ATP powers a change from one stable state to another, like flipping a switch from up to down. In the case of the protein, the switch is from one stable conformation to another. To flip it back again requires another ATP, just as you have to insert another coin in the slot machine to have a second go. Picture the cell as a giant amusement arcade, filled with protein machinery, all powered by ATP coins in this way. A single cell consumes around 10 million molecules of ATP every second! The number is breathtaking. There are about 40 trillion cells in the human body, giving a total turnover of ATP of around 60–100 kilograms per day – roughly our own body weight. In fact, we contain only about 60 grams of ATP, so we know that every molecule of ATP is recharged once or twice a minute.

The energy of respiration – the energy released from the reaction of food with oxygen – is used to make ATP from ADP and Pi. That’s it. The endless cycle is as simple as this: ADP + Pi + energy ATP We are nothing special. Bacteria such as E. coli can divide every 20 minutes. To fuel its growth E. coli consumes around 50 billion ATPs per cell division, some 50–100 times each cell’s mass. That’s about four times our own rate of ATP synthesis. Convert these numbers into power measured in watts and they are just as incredible. We use about 2 milliwatts of energy per gram – or some 130 watts for an average person weighing 65 kg, a bit more than a standard 100 watt light bulb. That may not sound like a lot, but per gram it is a factor of 10,000 more than the sun (only a tiny fraction of which, at any one moment, is undergoing nuclear fusion).

Forms of growth that at first glance seem to have little in common, such as photosynthesis in plants, and respiration in animals, turn out to be basically the same in that they both involve the transfer of electrons down such ‘respiratory chains’. Why should this be? Life could have been driven by thermal or mechanical energy, or radioactivity, or electrical discharges, or UV radiation, the imagination is the limit; but no, all life is driven by redox chemistry, via remarkably similar respiratory chains.

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is a huge storm, an anti-cyclone several times the size of the earth, which has persisted for at least a few hundred years. Just as the convection cells in a kettle persist for as long as the electric current keeps the water boiling and steam evaporating, all these dissipative structures require a continuous flux of energy. In more general terms, they are the visible products of sustained far-from-equilibrium conditions, in which energy flux maintains a structure indefinitely, until at last (after billions of years in the case of stars) equilibrium is attained and the structure finally collapses. The main point is that sustained and predictable physical structures can be produced by energy flux. This has nothing to do with information, but we’ll see that it can create environments where the origin of biological information – replication and selection – is favoured.

All living organisms are sustained by far-from-equilibrium conditions in their environment: we, too, are dissipative structures. The continuous reaction of respiration provides the free energy that cells need to fix carbon, to grow, to form reactive intermediates, to join these building blocks together into long-chain polymers such as carbohydrates, RNA, DNA and proteins, and to maintain their low-entropy state by increasing the entropy of the surroundings.

Right across the entire living world, there are only six different ways of fixing carbon – of converting inorganic molecules such as carbon dioxide into organic molecules.

The fit between the geochemistry of alkaline vents and the biochemistry of methanogens and acetogens is so close that the word analogous does not do it justice. Analogy implies similarity, which is potentially only superficial. In fact, the similarity here is so close that it might better be seen as true homology – one form physically gave rise to the other. So geochemistry gives rise to biochemistry in a seamless transition from the inorganic to the organic. As the chemist David Garner put it: ‘It is the inorganic elements that bring organic chemistry to life.’

Four billion years ago, the oceans were probably mildly acidic (pH 5–7), while the hydrothermal fluids were equivalent to today, with a pH of about 9–11. Sharp pH gradients could therefore have been as much as 3–5 pH units in magnitude, which is to say that the difference in proton concentration could have been 1,000–100,000-fold. For the sake of argument, imagine that the proton concentration inside the cell is similar to that of the vent fluids. That gives a difference in proton concentration between the inside and the outside, so protons will flow inwards down the concentration gradient. Within a few seconds, though, the influx should grind to a halt, unless the protons that flow in can be removed again. There are two reasons for this. First, the concentration difference swiftly evens out. And second, there is an issue with electrical charge. Protons (H+) are positively charged, but in seawater their positive charge is counterbalanced by negatively charged atoms such as chloride ions (Cl–). The problem is that protons cross the membrane much faster than chloride ions, so there is an influx of positive charge that is not offset by an influx of negative charge. The inside of the cell therefore becomes positively charged relative to the outside, and that opposes the influx of any more H+. In short, unless there is a pump that can get rid of protons from inside the cell, natural proton gradients can’t drive anything. They equilibrate, and equilibrium is death.

In the broadest of terms, prokaryotes explored the possibilities of metabolism, finding ingenious solutions to the most arcane chemical challenges, while eukaryotes turned their back on this chemical cleverness, and explored instead the untapped potential of larger size and greater structural complexity.

But now think about a population of bacterial endosymbionts. The same general principles apply – this is just another population of bacteria, albeit a small population in a restricted space. Bacteria that lose unnecessary genes will replicate slightly faster and tend to dominate, just as before. The key difference is the stability of the environment. Unlike the great outdoors, where the conditions are always changing, the cytoplasm of cells is a very stable environment. It may not be easy to get there, or to survive there, but once established, a steady and invariable supply of nutrients can be relied upon. The endlessly circular dynamic of gene loss and gain in free-living bacteria is replaced with a trajectory towards gene loss and genetic streamlining. Genes that are not needed will never be needed again. They can be lost for good. Genomes shrink.

Transfer the remaining mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, the argument goes, and the cell will die in time, no matter how carefully crafted the genes may be to their new home. The mitochondrial genes must be right there on site, next to the bioenergetic membranes they serve. I’m told the political term is ‘bronze control’. In a war, gold control is the central government, which shapes long-term strategy; silver control is the army command, who plan the distribution of manpower or weaponry used; but a war is won or lost on the ground, under the command of bronze control, the brave men or women who actually engage the enemy, who take the tactical decisions, who inspire their troops, and who are remembered in history as great soldiers. Mitochondrial genes are bronze control, decision-makers on the ground.

How could an error catastrophe be averted? Simply by inserting a barrier in the way, according to Martin and Koonin. The nuclear membrane is a barrier separating transcription from translation – inside the nucleus, genes are transcribed into RNA codescripts; outside the nucleus, the RNAs are translated into proteins on the ribosomes. Crucially, the slow process of splicing takes place inside the nucleus, before the ribosomes can get anywhere near the RNA. That is the whole point of the nucleus: to keep ribosomes at bay. This explains why eukaryotes need a nucleus but prokaryotes don’t – prokaryotes don’t have an intron problem.

Imagine 100 genes lined up on a chromosome that never recombines. Selection can only ever discriminate the fitness of the whole chromosome. Let’s say there are a few really critical genes on this chromosome – any mutations in them would almost always result in death. Critically, however, mutations on less critical genes become nearly invisible to selection. Slightly harmful mutations can accumulate in these genes, as their negative effects are offset by the big benefits of the few critical genes. As a result, the fitness of the chromosome, and the individual, is gradually undermined. This is roughly what happens to the Y chromosome in men – the lack of recombination means that most genes are in a state of slow degeneration; only the critical genes can be preserved by selection.

The practical difficulties with hermaphrodites gives away part of the problem: neither partner wants to bear the cost of being the ‘female’. Hermaphroditic species such as flatworms go to bizarre lengths to avoid being inseminated, fighting pitched battles with their penises, their semen burning gaping holes in the vanquished. This is lively natural history, but it is circular as an argument, as it takes for granted that there are greater biological costs to being female. Why should there be? What actually is the difference between male and female? The split runs deep and has nothing to do with X and Y chromosomes, or even with egg cells and sperm. Two sexes, or at least mating types, are also found in single-celled eukaryotes, such as some algae and fungi. Their gametes are microscopic and the two sexes look indistinguishable but they’re still as discriminating as you and me.

There is no real competition between cells that are all genetically the same. That’s how our own cells are tamed, so that they cooperate together to form our bodies. All our cells are genetically identical; we are giant clones. But genetically different cells do compete, with some mutants (cells with genetic changes) producing cancer; and much the same happens if genetically different mitochondria mix in the same cell. Those cells or mitochondria that replicate the fastest will tend to prevail, even if that is detrimental to the host organism, producing a kind of mitochondrial cancer. That’s because cells are autonomous self-replicating entities in their own right, and they are always poised to grow and divide if they can. French Nobel laureate François Jacob once said that the dream of every cell is to become two cells. The surprise is not that they often do, but that they can be restrained for long enough to make a human being. For these reasons, mixing two populations of mitochondria in the same cell is just asking for trouble.

One possible underlying basis is metabolic rate. Even the ancient Greeks appreciated that males are, literally, hotter than females – the ‘hot male’ hypothesis. In mammals such as humans and mice, the earliest distinction between the two sexes is the growth rate: male embryos grow slightly faster than females, a difference that can be measured within hours of conception, using a ruler (but definitely don’t try that at home).

All this implies that growth rate is the real force behind sexual development, at least in mammals. The genes are just holding the reins, and can easily be replaced over evolution – one gene that sets the growth rate is replaced by a different gene that sets the same growth rate. The idea that males have a faster growth rate corresponds intriguingly to the fact that temperature determines which sex develops in amphibians and reptiles such as alligators.

Imagine you can fly. Gram per gram, you have more than twice the power of a cheetah in full flight, a remarkable combination of strength, aerobic capacity, and lightness. You have no hope of getting airborne if your mitochondria are not practically perfect. Consider the competition for space in your flight muscles. You need myofibrils, of course, the sliding filaments that produce muscle contraction. The more of these you can pack in, the stronger you will be, as the strength of a muscle depends on its cross-sectional area, like a rope. Unlike a rope, however, muscle contraction has to be powered by ATP. To sustain exertion for much more than a minute requires ATP synthesis on the spot. That means you need mitochondria right there in your muscle. They take up space that could otherwise be occupied by more myofibrils. Mitochondria also need oxygen. That means capillaries, to deliver oxygen and remove waste. The optimal space distribution in aerobic muscle is around a third for myofibrils, a third for mitochondria, and a third for capillaries. That’s true for us, and cheetahs, and humming birds, which have by far the fastest metabolic rates of all vertebrates. The bottom line is we can’t get more power just by accumulating more mitochondria. All this means that the only way birds can generate enough power to remain airborne for long is to have ‘supercharged’ mitochondria, able to generate more ATP per second per unit of surface area than ‘normal’ mitochondria.

The cost of high aerobic capacity is low fertility. More embryos that could have survived some lesser purpose must be sacrificed on the altar of perfection. We can even see the consequences in mitochondrial gene sequences. Their rate of change in birds is lower than in most mammals (except bats, which face the same problem as birds). Flightless birds, which don’t face the same constraints, have a faster rate of change. The reason that most birds have low rates of change is that they have already perfected their mitochondrial sequence for flight. Changes from this ideal sequence are not readily tolerated, so are typically eliminated by selection. If most change is eliminated, then what remains is relatively unchanging.

A sluggish flux of electrons in respiration betokens a poor compatibility between the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. The respiratory chains become highly reduced and leak free radicals. Cytochrome c is released and membrane potential falls. If I were a bird, this combination is the trigger for apoptosis. My offspring would die in embryo again and again. But I’m a rat and I don’t want that. What if, by some biochemical sleight of hand, I ‘ignore’ the free-radical signal that heralds the death of my offspring? I raise the death threshold, meaning I can tolerate more free-radical leak before triggering apoptosis. I gain an immeasurable benefit: most of my offspring survive embryonic development. I become more fertile. What price will I pay for my burgeoning fertility? Certainly I’m never going to fly. And more generally, my aerobic capacity will be limited. The chance of my offspring having an optimal match between mitochondrial and nuclear genes is remote.

I think we can reasonably conclude that complex life will be rare in the universe – there is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other form of complex life. It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity. I can’t put a statistical probability on that. The existence of Parakaryon myojinensis might be encouraging for some – multiple origins of complexity on earth means that complex life might be more common elsewhere in the universe. Maybe. What I would argue with more certainty is that, for energetic reasons, the evolution of complex life requires an endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes, and that is a rare random event, disturbingly close to a freak accident, made all the more difficult by the ensuing intimate conflict between cells. After that, we are back to standard natural selection. We’ve seen that many properties shared by eukaryotes, from the nucleus to sex, are predictable from first principles. We can go much further. The evolution of two sexes, the germline–soma distinction, programmed cell death, mosaic mitochondria, and the trade-offs between aerobic fitness and fertility, adaptability and disease, ageing and death, all these traits emerge, predictably, from the starting point that is a cell within a cell. Would it all happen over again? I think that much of it would

But that tree has mitochondria too, which work in much the same way as its chloroplasts, endlessly transferring electrons down its trillions upon trillions of respiratory chains, pumping protons across membranes as they always did. As you always did. These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 1021 protons per second, every second, without pause. Your mitochondria were passed on from your mother, in her egg cell, her most precious gift, the gift of living that goes back unbroken, unceasing, generation on generation, to the first stirrings of life in hydrothermal vents, 4 billion years ago. Tamper with this reaction at your peril. Cyanide will stem the flow of electrons and protons, and bring your life to an abrupt end. Ageing will do the same, but slowly, gently. Death is the ceasing of electron and proton flux, the settling of membrane potential, the end of that unbroken flame. If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest. This energy flux is astonishing and unforgiving. Any change over seconds or minutes could bring the whole experiment to an end. Spores can pull it off, descending into metabolic dormancy from which they must feel lucky to emerge. But for the rest of us … we are sustained by the same processes that powered the first living cells. These processes have never changed in a fundamental way; how could they? Life is for the living. Living needs an unceasing flux of energy. It’s hardly surprising that energy flux puts major constraints on the path of evolution, defining what is possible. It’s not surprising that bacteria keep doing what bacteria do, unable to tinker in any serious way with the flame that keeps them growing, dividing, conquering. It’s not surprising that the one accident that did work out, that singular endosymbiosis between prokaryotes, did not tinker with the flame, but ignited it in many copies in each and every eukaryotic cell, finally giving rise to all complex life. It’s not surprising that keeping this flame alive is vital to our physiology and evolution, explaining many quirks of our past and our lives today. How lucky that our minds, the most improbable biological machines in the universe, are now a conduit for this restless flow of energy, that we can think about why life is the way it is. May the proton-motive force be with you!

The work of packing the sledges continued the next day, and in the afternoon Shackleton called all hands together into the center of the circle of tents. His face was grave. He explained it was imperative that all weight be reduced to the barest minimum. Each man, he said, would be allowed the clothes on his back, plus two pairs of mittens, six pairs of socks, two pairs of boots, a sleeping bag, a pound of tobacco—and two pounds of personal gear. Speaking with the utmost conviction, Shackleton pointed out that no article was of any value when weighed against their ultimate survival, and he exhorted them to be ruthless in ridding themselves of every unnecessary ounce, regardless of its value. After he had spoken, he reached under his parka and took out a gold cigarette case and several gold sovereigns and threw them into the snow at his feet. Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it: “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone. And the face of the deep is frozen.” Then he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.

They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat. And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

Killing the seal was usually a bloody business. Wild had brought from the ship a revolver, a 12-gauge shotgun, and .33-caliber rifle, but ammunition was limited. As a result, the men killed the seals by hand whenever possible. This involved approaching the animal cautiously, then stunning it across the nose with a ski or a broken oar and cutting its jugular vein so that it bled to death. Sometimes the blood was collected in a vessel to be fed to the dogs, but most often it was allowed to run out into the snow. Another technique was to brain the seal with a pickaxe. But the two surgeons discouraged this practice, for it often left the brains inedible and they were prized as food because they were believed to be high in vitamin content. In the beginning a few of the men, particularly little Louis Rickenson, the chief engineer, were squeamish about this seemingly cold-blooded method of hunting. But not for long. The will to survive soon dispelled any hesitancy to obtain food by any means.

And so November was drawing to a close. They had been on the ice just a month. And for all the trials and discomforts, these weeks of primitive living had been peculiarly enriching. The men had been forced to develop a degree of self-reliance greater than they had ever imagined possible. After spending four hours sewing an elaborate patch on the seat of his only pair of trousers, Macklin wrote one day, “What an ingrate I have been for such jobs when done for me at home.” Greenstreet felt much the same way after he had devoted several days to scraping and curing a piece of sealskin to resole his boots. He paused in the midst of his task to write in his diary: “One of the finest days we have ever had . . . a pleasure to be alive.” In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

The following day was December 31. McNeish wrote: “Hog-many [the Scottish feast of New Year’s] & a bitter one too, beings adrift on the ice instead of enjoying the pleasures of life like most people. But as the saying is, there must be some fools in this world.” James recorded: “New Year’s Eve, the second in the pack & in much the same latitude. Few people are having a stranger one. . . .”

“As we sat there, cramped, crowded and wet,” wrote Macklin, “we wondered how we were going to face the month ahead of us, which was the . . . very least we could hope for before relief.” And this, he admitted, was a “most optimistic” expectation, based upon a half-dozen assumptions—the first among them being that the Caird would actually get through. On this score, their general feeling, at least outwardly, was confident. But how else might they have felt? Any other attitude would have been the equivalent of admitting that they were doomed. No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

It was obvious that the burden of responsibility Shackleton had borne for sixteen months had nibbled away somewhat at his enormous self-confidence. He wanted to talk and to be assured that he had acted wisely. He confided to Worsley that the decision to separate die party had been a desperately difficult one, and he abhorred having to make it. But somebody had to go for help, and this was not the sort of responsibility which could be delegated to another person. As for the journey itself, he seemed strangely doubtful, and he asked Worsley’s opinion of their chances. Worsley replied that he was sure that they would make it, but it was evident that Shackleton was far from convinced. The truth was that he felt rather out of his element. He had proved himself on land. He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements—and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated. It gave Shackleton a feeling of uneasiness. He now faced an adversary so formidable that his own strength was nothing in comparison, and he did not enjoy being in a position where boldness and determination count for almost nothing, and in which victory is measured only in survival.

Two days of good weather had worked their magic, and among the entire crew there was a growing feeling of confidence, subtle but unmistakable. In the beginning, South Georgia had existed only as a name—infinitely distant and lacking in reality. But no more. They were even at this moment less than 250 miles from the nearest point on South Georgia. And having already covered 450 miles, the distance that remained was at least conceivable. Three days more, or maybe four at the most, should see them there, and then it would all be over. And so that peculiar brand of anxiety, born of an impossible goal that somehow comes within reach, began to infect them. Nothing overt, really, just a sort of added awareness, a little more caution and more care to insure that nothing preventable should go wrong now.

»Verstehen Sie nicht? Ich habe meine tiefsten Gefühle einer Illusion geschenkt!« »Glauben Sie denn, dass das Objekt der Liebe bei anderen Menschen tatsächlich existiert?« »Ist das eine Frage?« »Sicher. Für die meisten Menschen existiert das, was sie lieben, nur in ihrer Fantasie. Das Objekt ihrer Liebe ist nicht der Mann oder die Frau aus der realen Welt, sondern was er oder sie in ihrer Vorstellung ist. Die echte Person ist nur eine Schablone für die Erschaffung eines Traummanns oder einer Traumfrau. Irgendwann entdeckt man dann den Unterschied zwischen der Schablone und dem Traumbild. Wenn man sich mit diesem Unterschied anfreunden kann, bleibt man zusammen, wenn nicht, trennt man sich. So einfach ist das. Sie unterscheiden sich von der Mehrheit der Leute nur in einem Punkt: Sie kommen ohne die Schablone aus.« »Ich bin also nicht krank?« »Nur insofern, wie es Ihre Freundin formuliert hat: Sie haben eine Gabe für Literatur. Wenn Sie das eine Krankheit nennen wollen, meinetwegen.«

Mit dem geschulten Blick des Politikers identifizierte Tyler ihn sofort als Angehörigen der armseligsten sozialen Schicht, deren Armut eher geistiger als materieller Natur war, als einen dieser kleinkarierten Spießer, wie Gogol sie in seinen Romanen so treffend karikiert hatte: Kleinbürger, die trotz ihrer erbärmlichen gesellschaftlichen Stellung um ihr Ansehen besorgt waren und ihr ganzes Leben mit der peinlich genauen und pünktlichen Verrichtung trivialer Dinge verbrachten. Sie scheuten jede Kreativität und waren stets bemüht, bloß keine Fehler zu machen. Dabei fürchteten sie so sehr, unangenehm aufzufallen, dass sie nicht einmal einen Blick nach oben durch die gläserne Decke zu den höheren sozialen Schichten riskierten. Tyler hatte für diesen Menschenschlag nur Verachtung übrig. Man konnte gut und gerne auf sie verzichten, und der Gedanke, dass sie die Mehrheit der Weltbevölkerung ausmachten, die er retten sollte, verursachte ihm Übelkeit.

Angenommen, im Universum gäbe es viele große Zivilisationen, womöglich so viele wie sichtbare Sterne. Unzählige Zivilisationen also, die zusammengenommen die kosmische Gesellschaft bilden. Kosmosoziologie wäre dann die Wissenschaft von der Natur dieser universalen Gesellschaft. Auf diese Weise könntest du deine beiden Fächer miteinander verbinden. Im Gegensatz zur Humansoziologie liefert die Kosmosoziologie mathematisch viel genauere Ergebnisse. Überlege nur: Alle Elemente von Chaos und Beliebigkeit in der komplexen Struktur der Zivilisationen des Universums werden durch die enorme Distanz gefiltert, sodass die Zivilisationen von uns aus betrachtet über Parameter verfügen, die sich relativ leicht mathematisch erfassen lassen. Damit erhältst du ein rationales Ergebnis und kannst zunächst wie in der euklidischen Geometrie einige einfache, offensichtliche Axiome aufstellen und auf der Grundlage dieser Axiome eine ganze Theorie etablieren. Erstens: Überleben ist das oberste Gebot jeder Zivilisation. Zweitens: Zivilisationen wachsen und dehnen sich ununterbrochen aus, aber die im Kosmos verfügbare Materie bleibt konstant. Ich habe darüber schon mein ganzes Leben nachgedacht, aber mit niemandem darüber geredet. Ich weiß auch nicht, warum ich jetzt darauf komme … Aber das ist noch nicht alles. Damit du aus diesen beiden Axiomen eine grundlegende Vorstellung von Kosmosoziologie entwickeln kannst, musst du nämlich noch zwei weitere wichtige Konzepte mit einbeziehen: Zweifelsketten und technologische Explosion.

Die Zeit lässt sich nicht aufhalten. Wie eine scharfe Klinge schneidet sie durch Hart und Weich und drängt in aller Stille unerbittlich voran. Nichts kann sie aus der Ruhe bringen, doch sie selbst verändert alles.

Eines Tages vielleicht wird die Menschheit oder jemand anders die Gesetze der Natur so gründlich erforscht haben, dass sie nicht nur ihre eigene Realität, sondern gleich das gesamte Universum verändern können. Diese Leute werden jedes Sternensystem beliebig in eine andere Form bringen können, wie Kuchenteig.

Von jeder dieser Kabinen aus konnte die Natürliche Selektion gesteuert und kontrolliert werden, daher bildete, zumindest aus der Perspektive der Informatik, jede Kabine die Gesamtheit der Natürliche Selektion ab. Die Natürliche Selektion war selbst wie eine Holografie. Das Schiff war ein Samen aus Metall, der alle Informationen der Menschheit transportierte. Er keimte irgendwo im Universum und konnte sich zu einer ganzen Zivilisation auswachsen. Das Teil enthielt das Ganze, also konnte die ganze menschliche Zivilisation holografisch sein.

Und jetzt stellen wir einmal zwei Axiome für die kosmische Gesellschaft auf. Erstens: Überleben ist das erste Gebot jeder Zivilisation. Zweitens: Zivilisationen wachsen und dehnen sich ununterbrochen aus, aber die im Kosmos verfügbare Materie bleibt konstant.«

»So düster wie das Universum nun einmal ist.« Luo Lis Hand fuhr durch die Dunkelheit, als streichelte sie über Samt. »Das Universum ist ein dunkler Wald. Jede Zivilisation ist ein bewaffneter Jäger, der wie ein Geist zwischen den Bäumen umherstreift, vorsichtig störende Zweige aus dem Weg schiebt und versucht, geräuschlos aufzutreten und so leise wie möglich zu atmen. Der Jäger muss vorsichtig sein, denn überall im Wald lauern andere Jäger wie er. Stößt er auf anderes Leben, egal ob es sich dabei um einen anderen Jäger, einen Engel oder einen Teufel, ein neugeborenes Baby oder einen alten Tattergreis, eine Fee oder einen Waldgeist handelt, bleibt ihm nichts anderes übrig, als es auszuschalten. In diesem Wald sind die Hölle die anderen Lebewesen. Es herrscht das ungeschriebene Gesetz, dass jedes Leben, das sich einem anderen offenbart, umgehend eliminiert werden muss. Das ist das Bild der kosmischen Zivilisationen. Das erklärt das Fermi-Paradox.«