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I Spend A Lot Of Time Just Listening To The Ospreys. I Watch Them Go Through Their Life Cycle. They Spend The Winter In South America. The Mother And Father Osprey Stay Together. It's A Monogamous Relationship. And Every Summer They Raise A New Brood Of Children. They Came Back To The Nest In The Middle Of April. They Take Separate Vacations In The Winter - The Mother And Father.

-Alan Lightman

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I Spend A Lot

Alan Lightman

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I Spend A Lot Of Time Just Listening To The Ospreys. I Watch Them Go Through Their Life Cycle. They Spend The Winter In South America. The Mother And Father Osprey Stay Together. It's A Monogamous Relationship. And Every Summer They Raise A New Brood Of Children. They Came Back To The Nest In The Middle Of April. They Take Separate Vacations In The Winter - The Mother And Father.

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In A World Of Fixed Future, Life Is An Infinite Corridor Of Rooms, One Room Lit At Each Moment, The Next Room Dark But Prepared. We Walk From Room To Room, Look Into The Room That Is Lit, The Present Moment, Then Walk On. We Do Not Know The Rooms Ahead, But We Know We Cannot Change Them. We Are Spectators Of Our Lives.

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Although Technology Is Proceeding At A Dizzying Pace, I Believe That The Human Mind Will Always Have Control Of Itself. And Since The Human Mind Has A Degree Of Infinity And Imagination Unlikely To Be Matched By A Machine For A Very, Very Long Time, I Don't Think That We Will Become The Machines Of The Machines.

While People Brood, Time Skips Ahead Without Looking Back.

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I Think What Gets You Through A Small Writing Project, Is Just One Burst Of Inspiration. A Book, Especially A Longer Book, It's A Different Kind Of Force That Pushes You Through It. It's A Vision Of The Whole Thing.

Another Strand Of My Writing Is The Importance Of The Idea. If You Think About Fiction Writing As A Spectrum, Where At One End Of The Spectrum In The Infrared, Are The Story Tellers, And The People For Whom Creation Of Wonderful Characters And Telling A Good Story Is The Most Important Thing.

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But What Is The Past? Could It Be, The Firmness Of The Past Is Just Illusion? Could The Past Be A Kaleidoscope, A Pattern Of Images That Shift With Each Disturbance Of A Sudden Breeze, A Laugh, A Thought? And If The Shift Is Everywhere, How Would We Know?

I Should Have Written Books Instead Of Reading Them.

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Whether God Exists

The Time-deaf Are Unable To Speak What They Know. For Speech Needs A Sequence Of Words, Spoken In Time.

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One Metaphor For How We Are Living Is That You See So May People With Cell Phones. In Restaurants, Walking, They Have Cell Phones Clamped To Their To Heads. When They Are On Their Cell Phones They Are Not Where Their Bodies Are...they Are Somewhere Else In Hyperspace. They Are Not Grounded. We Have Become Disembodied. By Being Always Somewhere Else We Are Nowhere.

In Fiction Writing Ideas Have To Be Handled Extremely Carefully. You Can't Let Your Characters Just Be Mouthpieces For Your Ideas. They Have To Live And Breathe On Their Own.

I Go To Live In Maine For The Summer. Without Computer, And Without The Telephone Service We Are Mercifully Without The Faxes And E-mails. So It's Really About Two And A Half Months That I'll Feel Like I Can Recover Some Silence In My Life...which Is So Hard To Find.

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New Experiences

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Asking Questions

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Guiding Principles

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Despite Our Strongly Felt Kinship And Oneness With Nature, All The Evidence Suggests That Nature Doesn't Care One Whit About Us. Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Floods, Earthquakes And Volcanic Eruptions Happen Without The Slightest Consideration For Human Inhabitants.

A Writer Is Someone Who Has A One-man Tent In The Desert And Occasionally He Sees The Footprint Of An Other Writer - In The Form Of A Review Or Something.

As I Understand It, A Universe Is A ... Well, A Totality. A Universe Is Everything That Is, As Far As The Inside Of The Thing.

A Good Book Changes For You Every Few Years Because You Are In A Different Place In Your Own Life. That's A Sign Of A Good Novel. Not Only Will Two Different Readers Get Something Different But So Will A Single Reader At Different Points In His Life.

Franz Kafka Is An Idea Person. His Books Begin And End In Ideas. Ideas Have Always Been Important To Me In My Writing. To The Point That I Have To Be Careful That They Don't Take Over.

As Human Beings, Don't We Need Questions Without Answers As Well As Questions With Answers, Questions That We Might Someday Answer And Questions That We Can Never Answer?

Children Grow Rapidly, Forget The Centuries-long Embrace From Their Parents, Which To Them Lasted But Seconds. Children Become Adults, Live Far From Their Parents, Live Their Own Houses, Learn Ways Of Their Own, Suffer Pain, Grow Old. Children Curse Their Parents For Their Wrinkled Skin And Hoarse Voices. Those Now Old Children Also Want To Stop Time, But At Another Time. They Want To Freeze Their Own Children At The Center Of Time.

I Think All Tragedies Are Best Told With Some Humor. You Have To Relieve The Darkness To Let The Reader Get Through It. Also, That Life Has Happiness And Sadness Mixed Together. If You Told A Story That Was All Darkness, It Wouldn't Be Real.

I've Taken A Philosophical Position On E-mail. Although I Think It's A Wonderful Communication Technology, And It Has A Lot Of Good Uses, It Is Abused Quite A Lot.

The Tragedy Of This World Is That No One Is Happy, Whether Stuck In Atime Of Pain Or Of Joy. The Tragedy Of This World Is That Everyone Is Alone. For A Life In The Past Cannot Be Shared With The Present. Each Person Who Gets Stuck In Time Gets Stuck Alone.

Novels Aren't Pedagogical Instruments, Or Instructions In Law Or Physics Or Any Other Discipline. A Novel Has To Be An Emotional Experience, A Trip Of The Imagination, And Because Science Has Raised So Many Issues That Concern And Affect Humans, It's A Good Starting Place For Me.

We're Plugged In 24 Hours A Day Now. We're All Part Of One Big Machine, Whether We Are Conscious Of That Or Not. And If We Can't Unplug From That Machine, Eventually We're Going To Become Mindless.

Oh, Love Is Very Much A Physical Thing.... I Realize That It's Very Complicated, And I'm Sure It Can't Be Traced To Individual Neurons And Hormones, But I Think It's Very Much A Physiological Sensation That Takes Place In The Brain.

Unconditional Love. That’s What He Wants To Give Her And What He Wants From Her. People Should Give Without Wanting Anything In Return. All Other Giving Is Selfish. But He Is Being Selfish A Little, Isn’t He, By Wanting Her To Love Him In Return? He Hopes That She Loves Him In Return. Is It Possible For A Person To Love Without Wanting Love Back? Is Anything So Pure? Or Is Love, By Its Nature, A Reciprocity, Like Oceans And Clouds, An Evaporating Of Seawater And A Replenishing Of Rain?

Some Make Light Of Decisions, Arguing That All Possible Decisions Will Occur. In Such A World, How Could One Be Responsible For His Actions? Others Hold That Each Decision Must Be Considered And Committed To, That Without Commitment There Is Chaos. Such People Are Content To Live In Contradictory Worlds, So Long As They Know The Reason For Each.

The Urge To Discover, To Invent, To Know The Unknown, Seems So Deeply Human That We Cannot Imagine Our History Without It.

Except For A God Who Sits Down After The Universe Begins, All Other Gods Conflict With The Assumptions Of Science.

Scientists Will Forever Have To Live With The Fact That Their Product Is, In The End, Impersonal.

Suppose Time Is A Circle, Bending Back On Itself. The World Repeats Itself, Precisely, Endlessly.

Human Beings Consider Themselves Satisfied Only Compared To Some Other Condition. A Man Who Has Owned Nothing But A Bicycle All Of His Life Feels Suddenly Wealthy The Moment He Buys An Automobile...but This Happy Sensation Wears Off. After A While The Car Becomes Just Another Thing That He Owns. Moreover, When His Neighbor Next Door Buys Two Cars, In An Instant Our Man Feels Wretchedly Poor And Deprived.

I Love The Fact Publishers Are Still Publishing Unprofitable Material. It's A Challenge To The Powers That Be. It's Saying There Is A Real Literature In This Country And We Will Keep Publishing It.

If I Were Not A Writer, I Would Spend More Time Doing The Things That I Am Already Doing, Which Include Doing Research In Physics, Teaching, And Running A Nonprofit Organization With A Mission To Empower Women In Cambodia.

Where Are The One Billion People Who Lived And Breathed In The Year 1800, Only Two Short Centuries Ago?

I Have A Family And You Know Very Well The Time That That Takes. That's Good Time. I Have A Couple Hobbies. I'm A Runner And Play Tennis. In The Summer My Family And I Uproot Ourselves And Go Live In Maine For The Summer. We Have A House On A Very Tiny Island In Maine. Which Is Really My Spiritual Center. We've Been Going There For Ten Years, And It Has No Ferry Service, No Bridges, No Telephone Service. It's Really Isolated.

Writers Are A Loosely Knit Community - Community Is An Overstated Word. Writers Don't See Each Other Very Much.

We've Lost Our Way, We Have Lost Our Centeredness. We Don't Have The Time, Literally, To Think During The Day. To Listen To Ourselves Think. To Think About Where We Are Going, Who We Are, What's Important. I Would Bet Most People Don't Have Thirty Minutes In A Day Where They Can Just Sit Down And Think. Or Maybe They Don't Have To Be Sitting, They Can Be Walking.

It's Not Necessarily A Large Number Of People That Affect The Culture. You Don't Count The Number Of Influential Voices, You Weigh Them. A Hundred People Can Affect The Culture.

A Life Is A Moment In Season. A Life Is One Snowfall. A Life Is One Autumn Day. A Life Is The Delicate, Rapid Edge Of A Closing Door's Shadow. A Life Is A Brief Movement Of Arms And Of Legs.

One Day I'm Going To Write A Book About Osprey. It Has Really Gotten Deep Into My Bloodstream. So When You Ask What Else I Do, I Feel Like This Is Part Of What I Do....is To Watch These Birds.

Such Is The Cost Of Immortality. No Person Is Whole. No Person Is Free. Over Time, Some Have Determined That The Only Way To Live Is To Die. In Death, A Man Or A Woman Is Free Of The Weight Of The Past [and The Future].

Continents Of Memory Had Been Lost.

If You Over-plot Your Book You Strangle Your Characters. Your Characters Have To Have Enough Freedom And Life To Be Able To Surprise You.

Time Is A Rigid, Bonelike Structure, Extending Infinitely Ahead And Behind, Fossilizing The Future As Well As The Past.

Each Time Is True, But The Truths Are Not The Same.

Who Would Fare Better In This World Of Fitful Time? Those Who Have Seen The Future And Live Only One Life? Or Those Who Have Not Seen The Future And Wait To Live Life? Or Those Who Deny The Future And Live Two Lives?

I Have For A Long Time Loved Fabulist, Imaginative Fiction, Such As The Writing Of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, And Salman Rushdie. I Also Like The Magic Realist Writers, Such As Borges And Marquez, And Feel That Interesting Truths Can Be Learned About Our World By Exploring Highly Distorted Worlds.

The Book Is Finished By The Reader. A Good Novel Should Invite The Reader In And Let The Reader Participate In The Creative Experience And Bring Their Own Life Experiences To It, Interpret With Their Own Individual Life Experiences. Every Reader Gets Something Different From A Book And Every Reader, In A Sense, Completes It In A Different Way.

I Have No Opposition At All To Technology. I Think Technology Is A Wonderful Thing That Has To Be Used Thoughtfully, And We Can't Just Assume That Every Bit Of New Technology Improvesthe Quality Of Life; It's Really In How The Technology Is Used. What I Am Very Disturbed About Is This Trend Of Everything Happening Faster And Faster And Faster And There Being More And More General Noise In The World, And Less And Less Time For Quiet Reflection On Who We Are, And Where We're Going.

"the Diagnosis" Had Ten Drafts Of Very Significant Changing, Where I Went Through The Whole Book, Wholesale And Changed Everything. Then The Last Year Or So It Was Making Small Changes. I Would Do Something And Let It Sit For Three Months... Just Brood About And Decide I Needed To Slightly Change Something Here Or There. Or One Character Wasn't Quite Right. But I Think Everybody Goes Through This.

The Target Of Power Is More Interesting Than Its Quantity.

The Relationship Between Science And The Humanities Is Two-way. Science Changes Our View Of The World And Our Place In It. In The Other Direction, The Humanities Provide The Store Of Ideas And Images And Language Available To Us In Understanding The World. The Exploding Star Of A.d. 1054, The Crab Nebula, Was Sighted And Documented By The Chinese, But Nowhere Mentioned In The West, Where The Aristotelian Notion Of The Immortality Of Stars Still Held Sway. We Often Do Not See What We Do Not Expect To See.

You've Made Something Grand, But It Will Be Grander If It Has Feeling And Beauty And Harmony.

A World In Which Time Is Absolute Is A World Of Consolation. For While The Movements Of People Are Unpredictable, The Movement Of Time Is Predictable. While People Can Be Doubted, Time Cannot Be Doubted. While People Brood, Time Skips Ahead Without Looking Back.

A Person Who Cannot Imagine The Future Is A Person Who Cannot Contemplate The Results Of His Actions. Some Are Thus Paralyzed Into Inaction.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Just Listening To The Ospreys. I Watch Them Go Through Their Life Cycle. They Spend The Winter In South America. The Mother And Father Osprey Stay Together. It's A Monogamous Relationship. And Every Summer They Raise A New Brood Of Children. They Came Back To The Nest In The Middle Of April. They Take Separate Vacations In The Winter - The Mother And Father.

I Am Spellbound By The Plays Of Shakespeare. And I Am Spellbound By The Second Law Of Thermodynamics. The Great Ideas In Science, Like The Cro-magnon Paintings And The Plays Of Shakespeare, Are Part Of Our Cultural Heritage.

Imagine A World In Which There Is No Time. Only Images.

Thoughts Are No More Than Electrical Surges In The Brain. Sexual Arousal Is No More Than A Flow Of Chemicals To Certain Nerve Endings. Sadness Is No More Than A Bit Of Acid Transfixed In The Cerebellum. In Short, The Body Is A Machine, Subject To The Same Laws Of Electricity And Mechanics As An Electron Or Clock.

My Writings Are An Exploration, And I Think A Lot Of Writers Would Tell You This, But In Writing, You're Not Simply Putting Down Things That Are Already Known To You. You're Actually Discovering In The Writing Process, You're Actually Creating Knowledge.

When The First Mechanical Clocks Were Invented, Marking Off Time In Crisp, Regular Intervals, It Must Have Surprised People To Discover That Time Flowed Outside Their Own Mental And Physiological Processes. Body Time Flows At Its Own Variable Rate, Oblivious To The Most Precise Hydrogen Master Clocks In The Laboratory. In Fact, The Human Body Contains Its Own Exquisite Time-pieces, All With Their Separate Rhythms. There Are The Alpha Waves In The Brain; Another Clock Is The Heart. And All The While Tick The Mysterious, Ruthless Clocks That Regulate Aging.

I Think That The Scienti?c Way Of Looking At The World, And The Humanistic Way Of Looking At The World Are Complementary. There Are Important Differences Which Should Be Preserved, And In Trying To Do Away With Those Differences We Would Lose Something The Same Way As If We Tried To Make All Religions One Religion Or All Races One Race. There Is A Cultural Diversity That's Very Valuable, And It's Valuable To Have Different Ways Of Looking At The World.

In A World Without Future, Each Parting Of Friends Is A Death. In A World Without Future, Each Loneliness Is Final. In A World Without Future, Each Laugh Is The Last Laugh. In A World Without Future, Beyond The Present Lies Nothingness, And People Cling To The Present As If Hanging From A Cliff.

I Have Too Many Friends Who Tell Me That They Spend The First Hour Of Every Morning Going Through Their E-mail Messages. I'd Like To Use My Time More Carefully.

I Think E-mail Is Representative Of Our Fast Food Mentality In The United States, Where Everything Has Gotten Faster And Faster, And We're Required To Respond To Inputs More Quickly With Less Time For Thought And Reflection. I Believe That We Need To Slow Down.

I Re-read A Lot Of Books That I Like A Lot. There Are Some Books That I Try To Reread Every Couple Of Years. A Good Book Changes For You Every Few Years Because You Are In A Different Place In Your Own Life.

I Still Will Sit Down At The Piano And Play When I Am Wrestling With Something Emotionally Or Just Want To Move Into The Musical World.

A World With One Month Is A World Of Equality.

Every Reader Gets Something Different From A Book And Every Reader, In A Sense, Completes It In A Different Way.

We Live In A Highly Polarized Society. We Need To Try To Understand Each Other In Respectful Ways. To That End, I Believe That We Should Make Room For Both Spiritual Atheists And Thinking Believers.

I Think People All Over The Institution Recognize That Different Ways Of Understanding Are Valuable. Artists May Think In A Different Way Than Biologists Or Chemists, But You Can Learn Something From That. It Is True That The Arts At Mit Don't Have The Same Amount Of Funding Or Same Status As The Sciences Or Engineering.

I Wouldn't Overall Say That "the Diagnosis" Is A Funny Book. I Would Say That It Has Comic Moments. It's A Modern Tragedy.

I Would Think That You Are More Fluent With The Rational. It Has Its Appeal. But The Irrational Permits A Greater Exercise Of ... Shall We Say, Power.

The World Is Moving Faster And Faster, But Where Are We Going?i Think One Of The Reasons Why Things Are Getting Blurry Is Because There Is Not Much Meaning.

I Have Always Loved Magic Realism As A Form Of Writing. I Have Also Been Fascinated For A Long Time With The Intersection Of Science And Religion.

Every Essay - The Subject Matter Of Every Essay - Is Ultimately About The Essayist; Him Or Herself. That Ultimately, Every Essayist Is Writing About His Or Her View Of The World.

One Cannot Walk Down An Avenue, Converse With A Friend, Enter A Building, Browse Beneath The Sandstone Arches Of An Old Arcade Without Meeting An Instrument Of Time. Time Is Visible In All Places. Clock Towers, Wristwatches, Church Bells Divide Years Into Months, Months Into Days, Days Into Hours, Hours Into Seconds, Each Increment Of Time Marching After The Other In Perfect Succession. And Beyond Any Particular Clock, A Vast Scaffold Of Time, Stretching Across The Universe, Lays Down The Law Of Time Equally For All.

In This World, Artists Are Joyous. Unpredictability Is The Life Of Their Paintings, Their Music, Their Novels. They Delight In Events Not Forecasted, Happenings Without Explanation, Retrospective.

It Is A World Of Impulse. It Is A World Of Sincerity. It Is A World In Which Every Word Spoken Speaks Just To That Moment, Every Glance Given Has Only One Meaning, Each Touch Has No Past Or No Future, Each Kiss Is A Kiss Of Immediacy.

That Has Been The Great Achievement Of Our Age: To So Thoroughly Flood The Planet With Megabits That Every Image And Fact Has Become A Digitized Disembodied Nothingness. With Magnificent Determination, Our Species Has Advanced From Stone Age To Industrial Revolution To Digital Emptiness. We've Become Weightless, In The Bad Sense Of The Word.

It's Exciting Having A Student Who Is Not Used To Expressing Their Emotional Side And Bringing That Out In Them And See That Developing And Helping To Nurture That. That's An Exciting Thing. In A Class Of Fifteen There Are Usually Two Very Good Writers, Equal To Good Student Writers Anywhere In The Country. Those Two Make The Class Wonderful.

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In This Acausal World, Scientists Are Helpless. Their Predictions Become Postdictions- Their Equations Become Justifications, Their Logic, Illogic. Scientists Turn Reckless And Mutter Like Gamblers Who Cannot Stop Betting. Scientists Are Buffoons, Not Because They Are Rational But Because The Cosmos Is Irrational. Or Perhaps It Is Not Because The Cosmos Is Irrational But Because They Are Rational. Who Can Say Which, In An Acausal World?

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For My Students Who Are Trying To Learn The Craft Of Writing In A Writing Class - Contemporary Literature Is What's Most Useful.

I'm Still Happy With The Way Einstein's Dreams Came Out. That Book Came Out Of A Single Inspiration. I Really Felt Like I Was Not Creating The Words, That I Was Hearing The Words. That Someone Else Was Speaking The Words To Me And I Was Just Writing Them Down. It Was A Very Strange Experience. That Can Happen With A Short Book. I Don't Think It Could Happen With A Long Book.

A World In Which Time Is Absolute Is A World Of Consolation. For While The Movements Of People Are Unpredictable, The Movement Of Time Is Predictable. While People Can Be Doubted, Time Cannot Be Doubted. While People Brood, Time Skips Ahead Without Looking Back. In The Coffee Houses, In The Government Buildings, In Boats Of Lake Geneva, People Look At Their Watches And Take Refuge In Time. Each Person Knows That Somewhere Is Recorded The Moment She Was Born, The Moment She Took Her First Step, The Moment Of Her First Passion, The Moment She Said Goodbye To Her Parents.

The Tragedy Of This World Is That Everyone Is Alone. For A Life In The Past Cannot Be Shared With The Present.

In Our Constant Search For Meaning In This Baffling And Temporary Existence, Trapped As We Are Within Our Three Pounds Of Neurons, It Is Sometimes Hard To Tell What Is Real. We Often Invent What Isn't There. Or Ignore What Is. We Try To Impose Order, Both In Our Minds And In Our Conceptions Of External Reality. We Try To Connect. We Try To Find Truth. We Dream And We Hope. And Underneath All Of These Strivings, We Are Haunted By The Suspicion That What We See And Understand Of The World Is Only A Tiny Piece Of The Whole.

Everyone Shares The Same Fate.

The Book Of Telling Tells Of A Woman's Journey To Uncover The Secret Life Of Her Father And To Find Herself In The Process, An Unusual Counterpoint Between Personal History And The History Of A Young Nation. Haunting, Powerful, And Beautifully Written.

The Tragedy Of This World Is That No One Is Happy, Whether Stuck In A Time Of Pain Or Joy.

In This World, Time Has Three Dimensions, Like Space. Just As An Object May Move In Three Perpendicular Directions, Corresponding To Horizontal, Vertical, And Longitudinal, So An Object May Participate In Three Perpendicular Futures. Each Future Moves In A Different Direction Of Time. Each Future Is Real. At Every Point Of Decision, The World Splits Into Three Worlds, Each With The Same People, But Different Fates For Those People. In Time, There Are An Infinity Of Worlds.

I Value My Correspondence With Writers...i Was In New York And Had Lunch With Oliver Sachs And Compared Notes With Him - He Is Someone I Really Like. I Love Staying In Written Correspondence With Some Writers. That's Enough For Me.

We Often Do Not See What We Do Not Expect To See.

I Oppose Any Belief That Contradicts Experimental Evidence As Determined By The Methods Of Science. All Beliefs Not In Such Contradiction May Be Considered As Faith. Whether Faith In A Particular Belief Is Beneficial Or Not Is Another Matter.

What Sense Is There In Continuing When One Has Seen The Future?

Order Is The Law Of Nature, The Universal Trend, The Cosmic Direction. If Time Is An Arrow, That Arrow Points Toward Order. The Future Is Pattern, Organization, Union, Intensification; The Past, Randomness, Confusion, Disintegration, Dissipation.

It's The Platonic Philosophy In The Republic That Philosophers Should Lead The Country.

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