Alpha and omega

We are often happy, but it is rare for us to be serene. That serenity is a product of both happiness and a deep sense of security; the latter is notoriously hard to achieve in this troubled day and age.

Which is perhaps why my own period of true serenity dates from the time just before I went up to Cambridge. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, the world seemed to consist of little except possibilities. The future was an infinitely distant horizon, without even a hint of the coming storm clouds.  With the worst of adolescence's dark mysteries behind me, and the challenges of university still ahead, those two years at the head of the school represent a kind of endless in-between time.

Certainly my memories of them are of one long summer, with blue skies and the sun roaring through the classroom windows without a break. Outside,  young loins girded themselves as leather struck willow on luxuriant bottle-green grass.

And yet it is not for these commonplace boyhood visions that I value those years.  In truth, such elements formed only the most dimly perceived of backdrops to the real excitement, and even the real world, which was to be found in the classroom.  For at this time I and my fellow classmates attained a kind of intellectual acme, a virtuoso mastery of a subject, which was never to be matched.

And what a subject - mathematics, the root of all science, the root, that is, of all knowing.  At its best, mathematics equips you to see the universe as a huge equation.  It reveals the inherent order of things. Of course this is only an approximation, or rather, the real equation of the universe is too complicated to solve.  It is this terrible fact, learned later on, which embitters and defeats many a mathematician.  But at the age of seventeen or so, there are no such doubts.  You have reached an enchanted plateau of knowledge where for the first time you can analyse and comprehend an entire world, albeit idealised.

And analyse it we did.  I remember well the frisson of excitement as I read each problem.  The desired result was always painfully elegant, consisting perhaps of just five or six symbols related in a strangely new yet harmonious fashion.  The thrill was not just in taking the seven or eight fundamental formulae and winning through to this unlikely yet beautiful result; it was in the sense of being initiated through that result into another mystery of the world, of another corner of the curtain of creation being lifted.  Each problem solved was a conquest of life.

In those brief years, I felt as if I were totally in command of the external world.  True, my version of that world consisted of frictionless rods, smooth slopes, and perfectly inelastic spheres.  No matter, I had dominion over it through my obedient alphas and omegas.  Allied, then, to the happiness I derived from solving problem after problem, of producing like a sculptor or musician the final, balanced, perfect form, there was a deeper, pervasive sense of calm that flowed from that never-to-be-repeated sense of control. Whence my cherished, but lost, sixth-form serenity.

(6.8.87)

See also Moody Sonnets - AI’s Secret

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