AlanLightmanisworriedaboutthis.
He is worried, that is, about time and space and speed. He’s worried that the world is accelerating so rapidly that our souls may suffer whiplash.
With the flicker of a few sentences in “The Diagnosis” (Pantheon), his latest novel, Lightman makes that fear utterly, eerily plausible. The novel was named a finalist last week for the National Book Award.
It begins with Bill Chalmers, “earnest and dressed in a blue cotton suit,” and his morning commute on the Boston subway. Suddenly, Chalmers realizes he doesn’t know who he is or where he’s going. He’s surrounded by busy, oblivious people dangling from the invisible puppet strings of their cell phones and digital pagers–yet he is alone.
Lightman’s densely paragraphed depiction of the man’s plight moves with the brute headlong force of the subway itself: “What was happening? What was happening to his mind?”
Lightman, 52, thinks he knows all too well what’s happening — to all of us, not simply to a hapless Boston businessman. “The pace of life has speeded up tremendously. We’re drowning in speed and information,” the author said on a recent visit to Chicago.
From almost anybody else, the opinion that technology is running roughshod over our species would sound like a typical Luddite rant, the sour-grapes mutterings of somebody left behind by the information revolution–somebody who, perhaps, sunk his fortune into Royal typewriter stock.
But Lightman is no Luddite. He is an astrophysicist specializing in gravitation theory and stellar dynamics who teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the author of the best-selling novel “Einstein’s Dreams” (1992), a series of meditations on the nature of time.
So it’s not technology that makes Lightman apprehensive. It’s what we do with it.
“Technology benefits us enormously. I’m certainly not opposed to it. But it can be used or abused. It doesn’t have a mind of its own. We have to think about what’s important to us,” he said. “What disturbs me is how this tool–technology–has altered our consciousness, our relationships, our work. It’s been going in a one-way direction.
“I don’t think we have time to hear ourselves think anymore. I think we’ve lost our way.”
Lightman was sitting in a downtown courtyard on one of those splendid fall days when the sun is like a warm hand on your shoulder. The wind picked up bits of his wavy brown hair and then set them back down again. He spoke carefully in a soft, almost melodic voice that was honeyed by the inflections of his native Memphis.
“There is some irony in the fact that I’m a faculty member at the `Temple of Technology’–MIT,” Lightman said with a brief smile. He has also taught and done research at Harvard and Cornell Universities.
But those experiences only exacerbated his sense that something was going very wrong with the world, Lightman said. Five years ago, he sat down to write a collection of essays about technology’s stranglehold on our spirits. The essay form, though, wasn’t working. So he turned it into a novel about a businessman who misplaces his identity one morning on a subway train. After a series of excruciating medical tests, things only get worse for Chalmers; to the uncomprehending horror of his wife and teenage son, numbness spreads over his body, changing his life forever.
“We’re passive consumers,” Lightman said. “That’s one of the most horrific aspects of the modern world. I decided to give this character a glimpse of awareness of our condition.”
Chalmers’ descent in “The Diagnosis” is nimbly juxtaposed with what Lightman calls an “embedded novella” about the death of Socrates. The philosopher, who was put to death in the ancient world for spreading his knowledge, is an intriguing counterpart to the businessman in the modern world who is dying from too much knowledge — knowledge delivered too fast, too often, in the beeping, humming, buzzing guise of gadgets.
Once he is deposited into the hands of modern doctors, Chalmers deteriorates even more rapidly. For all of their wisdom and skill, for all of the complex and expensive diagnostic machinery at their fingertips, the specialists have no idea what’s ailing Chalmers. While the doctors schedule more tests, he suffers. While they exchange inquisitive e-mails with colleagues, he wastes away.
If “The Diagnosis” upsets readers with its endlessly grim take on contemporary life, so much the better, Lightman said.
“I want to disturb people. I want to provoke them.” An important item on a novelist’s “To Do” list, he added, is to shock readers out of their complacency. “One of the loftiest aims of a novel is to examine society. We’re drowning in our own prosperity. We have all of this material prosperity — and spiritual bankruptcy.”
Writing “The Diagnosis” posed a special challenge for him, Lightman said. “One of the hazards and penalties of writing a very successful book is that everything else is compared to it.”
No matter what he came up with to follow “Einstein’s Dreams,” Lightman knew he’d receive a few reviews that began, “Well, it’s no `Einstein’s Dreams,'” in the same disappointed tone with which Lloyd Bentsen dismissed Dan Quayle during their 1988 vice presidential debate: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Admittedly, “Einstein’s Dreams” (Pantheon) is a tough act to follow. Recently reissued in a boxed edition, the novel is a quiet, thoughtful gem.
“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself,” one of its brief chapters begins. “The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.” Another starts this way: “In his world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze.” And another: “Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect is in the future, but cause and effect are intertwined.”
A playful sense of wonder about the world seems to animate “Einstein’s Dreams,” a kind of intellectual rope-skipping. What happened between then and now to chase the playfulness out of Lightman’s soul?
He took a hard look around, said the author. And he began to notice, as Chalmers does in “The Diagnosis,” that the world was awash in noise and tumult, but precious little wisdom. “Above his head, the digital sign flickered and hummed and something clattered repeatedly against the high concrete ceiling,” the narrator notes. “Several radios blared, jumbling their throbbing bass notes in competing rhythms . . . A woman in a smart linen suit was delivering instructions into a cellular telephone.”
Noise, heat, endlessly pulsing streams of random information — but no time for a simple, silent walk. We’ve managed to drown out our own cries for help, Lightman’s work warns.
So the author retreated to the study — actually, a room off the garage — of his home near Boston, where he lives with his wife, who is a painter, and their two daughters. And he imagined the tragic predicament of one person who may become, in the minds of readers willing to make the leap, all people.
Making the National Book Award finals was gratifying, Lightman said. “It was completely unexpected, but practically speaking, it means that my book will have more impact, which is something that’s important to me. I believe people write books to have impact. Rightly or wrongly, when a book is nominated for a major award, more people take it seriously.” Winners will be announced Nov. 15.
Even in the midst of his apprehension about the world, Lightman considers himself an optimist.
“I think changes are going to have to come from the bottom up,” he said. “I’d like each person to weigh their own life. That’s how it has to happen. Think about the cost of living with each of the things you have in your life.”
