Monday, June 29, 2020

Fascinating …

… The Big Bang | by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The queerest and maddest part of the evening came at the end. People were then trying ineffectively to dance in the constricted space available. I was suddenly seized upon by an absurd and very drunken little woman, who ordered me to dance with her. As she is a pathetic-looking creature with a disfiguring scar on her face, I could not decently reject her. So I danced around with her for about twenty minutes, she evidently not minding how badly I danced. At the end of this she was getting so wild and jumping about so that it made me very uncomfortable, and I finally succeeded in returning her to her husband. The husband, who is a solemn and frightened-looking little man, was standing around by himself miserably while all this went on. He did not seem to talk to anybody all the evening. It makes me feel sick just to think of the horror of the lives these two people may be living. Evidently the reason the wife seized upon me for a partner is that I am the only one of the young men at the party whom she had met before. The name of the husband (I wonder if you guessed it) is Kurt Gödel.
The horror of this scene was real, but Adele Gödel was rarely drunk, and she was a good wife for Kurt when she was sober.

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