![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moogingI just don't even know where this came from. Please excuse me RUINING something good and special from the tellybox.
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
Title: What We Will Not Do
Fandom: Einstein and Eddington
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: These people were real, and, er, are not mine, and I am not claiming either to have owned them, or that this happened, or to have any involvement with the BBC programme at all (woe).
Summary: This is what has happened this morning
Eddington has never really thought about it before, that one day he might wake up and William might be dead, but this is what has happened this morning.
He didn’t know at first. In retrospect, a dull part of him is angry for not realising as soon as he woke. One would imagine that loving someone deep and frantic in the depths of one’s body would allow you to be aware of their every move, when apart as well as when together, that loving someone so completely and so privately would entitle you to comprehend their every breath; or, at least, to know that they were still taking breaths.
This is apparently not the case.
Eddington awoke that morning and got dressed. He did not think, ‘I shall not see William again’. He ate his breakfast and he did not think, ‘I shall not talk to William again’. He wiped his mouth and kissed his sister and rode his bike into the centre of town, and he did not think ‘I have lost William today’.
When he learns that all of these statements are true, he presses his lips together in the strongest impression of British reserve that he can muster and rides his bike back home, where he sits on a wooden, Quaker bench, runs his fingers over the cold, metal watch and tries to think wooden, Quaker thoughts.
God has his reasons, he thinks.
It is difficult: behind this expected rationality, despite this patriotic repression, he cannot stop his thumb from shaking as it smoothes across the glass front of the timepiece in his hand. The room is too small when he glances up; too big when he looks down. His feet, he notices, are both pointing away from his body at precisely the same angle.
He wonders whether anyone will shine William’s shoes before they bury him, because, personally, Eddington would like to be buried with clean shoes. Then he wonders whether there will be a burial – what they do with the bodies of soldiers he does not know – and he wonders if there will even be a funeral, and, if there is, if he will be informed.
He puts the watch in his pocket and walks outside.
It is just beneath his religion, the grief. He can feel it now. It throbs, determinedly, like he should acknowledge it in spite of his misgivings, like knowing that Newton’s Mercury was fractionally out of place and not wanting to admit it. He reaches out a hand to touch the bark of the fat, round tree, and then he walks a little way around the trunk, and then he sits down on a high, sturdy root breaking out into the sunlight from the dark earth below, and he forgets to be a scientist, forgets to have faith, because William is dead and neither logic nor his Lord are doing anything to change that.
Later, lying in bed with the curtains open at the twilit window and his eyes hurting in a way that they have never done before, Eddington supposes he should have pretended that he and William had won the tennis match.
He rolls over.
He will not pretend that Einstein is wrong.
*
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
Title: What We Will Not Do
Fandom: Einstein and Eddington
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: These people were real, and, er, are not mine, and I am not claiming either to have owned them, or that this happened, or to have any involvement with the BBC programme at all (woe).
Summary: This is what has happened this morning
Eddington has never really thought about it before, that one day he might wake up and William might be dead, but this is what has happened this morning.
He didn’t know at first. In retrospect, a dull part of him is angry for not realising as soon as he woke. One would imagine that loving someone deep and frantic in the depths of one’s body would allow you to be aware of their every move, when apart as well as when together, that loving someone so completely and so privately would entitle you to comprehend their every breath; or, at least, to know that they were still taking breaths.
This is apparently not the case.
Eddington awoke that morning and got dressed. He did not think, ‘I shall not see William again’. He ate his breakfast and he did not think, ‘I shall not talk to William again’. He wiped his mouth and kissed his sister and rode his bike into the centre of town, and he did not think ‘I have lost William today’.
When he learns that all of these statements are true, he presses his lips together in the strongest impression of British reserve that he can muster and rides his bike back home, where he sits on a wooden, Quaker bench, runs his fingers over the cold, metal watch and tries to think wooden, Quaker thoughts.
God has his reasons, he thinks.
It is difficult: behind this expected rationality, despite this patriotic repression, he cannot stop his thumb from shaking as it smoothes across the glass front of the timepiece in his hand. The room is too small when he glances up; too big when he looks down. His feet, he notices, are both pointing away from his body at precisely the same angle.
He wonders whether anyone will shine William’s shoes before they bury him, because, personally, Eddington would like to be buried with clean shoes. Then he wonders whether there will be a burial – what they do with the bodies of soldiers he does not know – and he wonders if there will even be a funeral, and, if there is, if he will be informed.
He puts the watch in his pocket and walks outside.
It is just beneath his religion, the grief. He can feel it now. It throbs, determinedly, like he should acknowledge it in spite of his misgivings, like knowing that Newton’s Mercury was fractionally out of place and not wanting to admit it. He reaches out a hand to touch the bark of the fat, round tree, and then he walks a little way around the trunk, and then he sits down on a high, sturdy root breaking out into the sunlight from the dark earth below, and he forgets to be a scientist, forgets to have faith, because William is dead and neither logic nor his Lord are doing anything to change that.
Later, lying in bed with the curtains open at the twilit window and his eyes hurting in a way that they have never done before, Eddington supposes he should have pretended that he and William had won the tennis match.
He rolls over.
He will not pretend that Einstein is wrong.
*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 11:25 pm (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed.