Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Second, small initial changes ripple into large differences. The constricted initial alphabet of four letters produces a journey many million species long. The only astonishment great enough to replace that ectomized maker: all this proliferation results from one universal and apostolic genetic code. The fantastic diversity of outward form doesn't begin to anticipate the leaping, snaking, wild logic that develops in response to the far more complex internal, intracellular environment. Once DNA began to speak, not only the carrying medium but the message itself was susceptible to evolution. Even to approximate that polyphonic, perpetual baying, I'll have to go back down, square off against the living, purposive program incorporated in the enzyme.

Tonight in History—12/9/38: A coelacanth caught off Africa, a third of a billion years after it was supposed to have vanished from the earth. Not the first extinct animal to return from living fossil-hood, nor the last. Far stranger things are afoot. Quaggas rebuilt from the residual ghost in their zebra cousins. Frogs cloned. Talk of reviving mastodons from single frozen cells. I sit at my desk, overwhelmed but still among those throwing their insufficient efforts against the unlistable world.

I know nothing about the place. But the nothing I've ascertained has already changed everything. I learn that I live in an evening when all ethics has been shocked by the sudden realization of accident. I must ask not how many kinds of life there can be, nor even how there can be so many kinds of life. I must learn how, out of all the capricious kinds of cosmos there might have been, ours could have lucked, against all odds, into that one arrangement capable of supporting life, let alone life that grew to pose the hypothetical in the first place. How quantum physics allowed room for a rearrangement capable of learning the outside chance hidden in quantum physics. How this tone-deaf conservatory could produce the Goldbergs.

I review the record of care we've given a spark we once thought was lit for our express warming. I feel sick beyond debilitation to think what will come, how much more desperate the ethic of tending is, now that we know that the whole exploding catalog rests on inanimate, chance self-ignition. The three-billion-year project of the purposeful molecule has just now succeeded in confirming its own worst fear: this outside event need not have happened, and perhaps never should have. We've all but destroyed what once seemed carefully designed for our dominion. Left with a diminished, far more miraculous place — banyans, bivalves, blue whales, all from base pairs — what hope is there that heart can evolve, beat to it, keep it beating?

12/6/85

Our Dearest O'Deigh, Out of some terrifying collective unconscious, the phrase "Greetings from the Old Country" nags at me, although this place is one continuous novelty from Cisalpina to the Afsluitdijk. Do you remember that game show where contestants were sent into a supermarket for three minutes (our nation's chief contribution to world culture — shopping as a competitive sport)? Europe is exactly that; I've got this checklist of three-star Schatz chambres and a rail pass, and I can't come home until the art treasures have all been looted. Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum. Speyer Cathedral. Brueghels in Brussels. Haven't enjoyed myself so much since butterfly-collecting days.

I can haul body around faster than mind can follow — the goal all civilization has striven for since the Golden Age. I haven't words enough yet to tell you what I've seen. My teacher says (at least I think she says; all transactions are in Dutch, with scattered cloudy regionalisms) that words make up for lack of grammar better than grammar makes up for lack of words. The language methods here do no conjugations, declensions, paradigms. Only reading, speaking, and restoring sense to texts by supplying missing words. ("Vocabulary," beautifully enough, is woordenschat: word treasure. OE's word-hoard?) Only a little touring and I've discovered how beautiful Dutch is. On those city maps set up at strategic places for out-of-towners, the highlighted red arrow reads: U bevindt zich hier. You find yourself here.

Here's where I find myself. I now know that a bighearted person, in het Nederlands, is small-hearted, that the Holy Ghost and your basic pigeon roosting in the carillon bear the same name,that pijp uitkloppen, to clean out one's pipe, is to form a geslachtsgemeenschap, a "sex community" (the official term is even funnier than the euphemism. But then, "intercourse" is pretty funny at etymological level). Lenen is both to borrow and to lend, making it hard to translate Polonius. I've had my first Dutch dream: I stopped a wimpled woman in a begijnhof in some forgotten Belgian town and asked, "Is dit de weg naar de zestiende eeuw?" Roughly: Show me the way to the Renaissance.

I've brought my en face French partway back from the dead, although you'd be surprised at how little Racine contributes to an exchange in your basic Wallonia pâtisserie. In the tongue of the dreaded Hun, I begin to take a special delight in imbedding clauses and dropping fat, daylight verbal runs at sentence end. I can now read museum tags anywhere in Northern Europe, although a disturbing number are already in imperial Engels. Toward our Frenchified Anglo-Saxon, the whole continent seems to have developed a strange love-hate. Everyone wants to speak the language of power, but secretly, not far below the surface, runs the widespread conviction that ieder Engels is verschrikkelijk.

Thus a little protective coloration helps. Not that I can always pass. I asked directions from a díke-obsoleted fisherman up in Enkhuizen, and following his directions to the letter, found myself halfway out in the Zuider Zee. I had to know where I'd gone wrong, so I retraced my steps, found the fellow, and told him exactly what had happened. 'You followed the directions fine," he told me. "We always send you Germans into the water."

My tutor assures me that research shows that a core vocabulary of a thousand words will get one through 75 percent of ordinary conversation. Unfortunately tempera, patina, pigment, brushstroke, etc. tend not to be among the core one thousand. I have thus become adept at compound neologism. I learn nouns daily, but the arbitrarily of gender makes any decent American yearn for the syllogistic cleanliness of COBOL.

Everything I do all day depends on conversion. Exchange rates, distances. The visual road sign codes — supposedly in Universal Icon Language — are more inscrutable than I imagined. I swear to God there's one indicating that something up ahead is about to put your vehicle into a condition of religious bliss. I take no joy in driving a car, even one dangerously close to the kind Shriner clowns pile out of, in any country where mirrors on building walls assist you to take otherwise blind 90-degree turns at 90 km/h. But I am, at least, marginally better off than the Midwesterner on the Autobahn who kept wondering why he couldn't find this place Ausfahrt on the map.

All my primary sources are written in literary figures nobody has used for centuries. A greater competence than I'll ever possess would still not admit me into the real private clubs. Believe me, every backwater here has its secret speech. The more common the item, the more likely that the villager two kilometers down gives it a different name. That good Dr. Browne was right: jabbering is a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.

The hardest code to break out here — not recorded in any grammar — is greeting kisses. Every dorp has its own dialect. Do I kiss this woman one, two, three, or four times? Do I start on the left cheek or the right? Do I kiss this guy? They don't put this stuff in the Michelin. The exchange frequently leads to jarred eyeglasses and bruised noses. There's a similar dance to find a common denominator language for conversation. Observe clothes, ported books, license plate. Try a few mumbled words. I overheard two men in the Liège (Luik, Luttich) railway station conclude, after halting negotiation, that their strongest common language was Latin. A Belgian friend's advice: if you need to address someone in Brussels and can't tell whether to use French or Vlaams, speak English and walk away healthy.