"Bruce Holland Rogers - The Krishman Cube" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

pretty much how I'm regarded in the department."
I nodded absently. The room was incredible. Bookshelves lined two walls, and volumes of all sizes
were crammed into them every which way or else stacked on the floor near that monolithic desk. Near
the door were a small, two-drawer desk and an unstable-looking chair, toward which Krishman waved.
My new office. She apologized for this poor substitute for an office of my own. We chatted about my
research, about the two years' work I had lost in the fire. I explained my project, a critique I was writing
on previous critiques of criticism of Melville. When I felt she was sufficiently impressed, I told her that
she, too, would have some project of great import to work on someday, as soon as she advanced to my
level of erudition.
And then I attempted to start off my morning by grading a few composition papers at the diminutive
desk.
I say, attempted. Krishman immediately went back to doing what she must have been doing before I
came in. She moved back and forth from her desk to the bookshelves, pulling volumes out at random, it
seemed, and then thumping them down before her. In the midst of that frenetic activity, I was unable to
concentrate. So I turned around and watched her.
Krishman devoured the pages she held open on the desktop, tracing the margins of each page with a
fingertip and thwapping the page whenever she seemed to find something of value. Then, from time to
time, she scribbled notes onto a pad of yellow paper before reaching for another book. This furious pace
was nerve-racking, like watching a mouse that was hyped on amphetamines scrabble madly about its
cage. I gazed at the bookshelves and, for the first time, noted the titles of the books. Only a few were
what I would expect of a physics student: monographs and texts like Quantum Mechanics or Radio
Spectrometry: A Handbook for Analysis. Among the others were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, Visionary Aspects of the Peyote Cult, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, and biographies of
Karl Popper, Karl Marx, and William Carlos Williams.
Ostentatiously, I cleared my throat.
She kept on working.
I tried again.
She looked up from her reading. "Oh," she said. "I hope I'm not distracting you."
"As a matter of fact..."
"You see now," she said, "why I have an office of my own. I drove the students who used to share this
area with me up the wall. I'm sorry. I just don't know of any other way to work."
A pair of large volumes in front of her caught my eye. One was the Bible and the other, as near as I
could guess, was the Vedas in the original Sanskrit. So, naturally, I couldn't resist asking her what she
was working on.
She swept a few strings of brown hair out of her eyes and said, "Do you really want to know?"
"I've never seen such a diverse range of references used for a single project," I told her.
"That's because most projects are limited in their scope. I'm trying to assess the fabric of the universe,
and so my sources have to reflect the nature, well, of everything, of the whole universe."
I turned my chair around and moved it before her desk. "Fabric of the universe?" I said, just a bit
skeptical.
"Since you teach literature," she said, "I'll start with this." She fetched a book from a stack near the
window. It was Robert Bly's Sleepers Joining Hands. "Have you read it?"
I shook my head. I knew something about Bly, though. He was an aging hippie poet who lived in some
snowy woods somewhere. Wisconsin or Minnesota, I thought.
"Well, then," Krishman told me, "you ought to read it now. The essay in the middle of all these fine
poems deals with an important archetype, that of the Great Mother. You see, there's a great deal of
evidence that the earth was once dominated by matriarchies."
I must have looked incredulous, because she grabbed two other books, Primacy of the Mother and
The First Sex, and handed them to me.
"Maybe that's the wrong place to start. What do you know about quantum mechanics?"