Para. 1

Early in 1981 I received an invitation to give a lecture at a writers’ conference that was being held someplace on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, just across from New Jersey. I don’t remember the exact location, but a study of the map convinces me that it was probably New Hope. My first inclination was to say no. There were several reasons. I was living in New York City and teaching full time. My weekends were precious and the idea of getting up before dawn on a Saturday, rending a car, and driving across the entire state of New Jersey to deliver a lecture was repellent. As I recall, the honorarium offered would have barely covered the expense. Furthermore, a subject had be suggested for my lecture that, in truth, no longer interested me. Since I both wrote and did physics, I had often been asked to discuss the connection, if any, between these two activities. When this first came up, I felt obligated to say something, but after twenty years, about the only thing that I felt like saying was the both physics and writing, especially if one wanted to do them well, were extremely difficult.

Q: When the author was invited to lecture at a writers’ conference early in 1981, what was his first inclination? Why?

A: His first inclination was to turn down the invitation. The reasons were several-fold. (1) He was living and teaching in New York city and getting up early on weekend and driving all the way across New Jersey to give a lecture did not appeal to him.

(2) The honorarium could only cover the expenses.

(3) The suggested topic is not interesting enough.

Para 2

The conference seemed to be centered on poetry, and one of the things that came to mind was an anecdote that Robert Oppenheimer used to tell about himself. Since Oppenheimer will play a significant role in what follows, I will elaborate. After Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, he was awarded a fellowship to study in Europe. Following a very unhappy time in England, where he seems to have had a sort of nervous breakdown, he went to Germany to get his Ph.D. He studied with the distinguished German theoretical physicist Max Born in Gottingen and took his degree there in 1927 at the age of twenty-three. Born’ s recollections of Oppenheimer, which were published posthumously in 1975, were not sympathetic. Oppenheimer, he wrote, “was a man of great talent and I was conscious of the superiority in a way which was embarrassing and led to trouble. In my ordinary seminar on quantum mechanics, he used to interrupt the speaker, whoever it was, not excluding myself, and to step to the blackboard, taking the chalk and declaring: ‘This can be done much better in the following manner.’” In fact, it got so bad that Oppenheimer’s fellow students in the seminar petitioned Born to put a stop to it.

Q: What is the role of the first sentence in Paragraph 2?

A:It is a transitional sentence. The first part of the sentence links the paragraph with the previous one. The second part brings in a chief character of the essay, Robert Oppenheimer.

Para 3

Quantum a mechanics had been invented in the year before by Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul A. M. Dirac. The next year, Dirac came as a visitor to Gottingen and, as it happened, roomed in the large house of a physician named Cario where Oppenheimer also had a room. Dirac was twenty-five. The two young men became friends—insofar as one could have a friendship with Dirac. As young as the took it for granted. However, he was, and remained, an enigma. He rarely spoke, but when he did, it was always with extraordinary precision and often with devastating effect. This must have had a profound effect on Oppenheimer. While Oppenheimer was interrupting Born’ s seminars, announcing that He could do calculation better in the quantum theory, Dirac, only two years older, had invented the subject. In any case, in the course of thing the two of them often went for walks. In the version of the theory that I heard Oppenheimer tell, they were walking one evening on the walls that surrounded Gottingen and got to discussing Oppenheimer’s poetry. I would imagine that he “discussion” was more like an Oppenheimer monologue, which was abruptly interrupted by Dirac, who asked, “How can you do both poetry and physics? In physics was try to give people an understanding of something that nobody knew before, whereas in poetry...” Oppenheimer allowed one to fill in the rest of the sentence. As interesting as it might have been to hear the responses, this did not seem to be the sort of anecdote that would go over especially well at a conference devoted to poetry.

Q: what is the contrast implied in the following statement?

“While Oppenheimer was interrupting Born’s seminars, announcing that He could do calculations better in the quantum theory. Dirac, only two years older, had invented the subject.”

A: The contrast implied is calculation applying the theory as against invention of the theory

Para 4

Pitted against these excellent reasons for my not going to the conference were two others that finally carried the day. In the first place, I was in the beginning stages of a love affair with a young woman who wanted very much to write. She wanted to write so much that she had resigned a lucrative job with an advertising agency and was giving herself a year in which, living on here savings, she was going to do nothing but write. It was a gusty thing to do, but like many people who try it, she was finding it pretty rough going. In face, she was rather discouraged. So, to cheer her up, I suggest attending this conference, where she might have a chance to talk with other people who were in the same boat. This aside, I had read in the tentative program of the conference that one of the other tutors was to be Stephen Spender. This, for reasons I will now explain, was decisive. I should begin by saying right off that I am not a great admirer if Spender’s poetry. He is, for me, one of those writing about their writing is more interesting than their writing itself. But I had read with great interest Spender’s autobiography—World Within World—especially for what it revealed about the poet who did mean the most to me—namely, W.H. Auden, Auden’s Dirac-like lucidity, the sheer wonder of the language, and the sense of fun about serious things—“At least my modern pieces shall be cheery/Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory”— were to me irresistible. I became fascinated by Spender’s obsession with Auden. Auden must have been to Spender what Dirac was for Oppenheimer, a constant remainder of the difference between being “great” and being “merely” very good. I was also struck by the fact that, like Oppenheimer, Spender seemed “unfocused”. Partly Jewish, partly homosexual, partly a British establishment figure, one wondered when he got time to write poetry. By being profoundly eccentric, both Auden and Dirac, probably not by accident, insulated themselves. They focused like laser beams. What I did not know in 1981—I learned it only after Spender’s journals were published in 1986—was that Spender had paid a brief visit to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in November of 1956, the year before I got there and two years before Dirac came on one of his perennial visits.

Q: What is the function of this paragraph?

A:It brings the readers back to the decision of going to the conference and introduces Spender and Auden, thus presenting to the readers the two pairs of contrast: Dirac and Oppenheimer and Auden and Spender.

Para 5

Spender’s journal entry on his visit is fascinating both for what it says and for what it does not say. He begins by nothing that“Oppenheimer lives in a beautiful house, the interior of which is painted almost entirely white.”This was the director’s mansion. Spender did not notice that, because of Oppenheimer’s western connections, there was also the odd horse on the grounds. He continues: “He has beautiful paintings. As soon as we came in, he said: ‘Now is the time to look at the van Gogh.’ We went into the sitting room and saw a very fine van Gogh of a sun above a field almost entirely enclosed in shadows.” At the end of my first interview with Oppenheimer, immediately after I had driven cross-country from Los Alamos in a convertible with a large hole in the roof and had been summoned to the interview while still covered in grime, he said to me that he and his wife had some pictures I might like to look at sometime. I wondered what he was talking about. Some months later I was invited a party at the Oppenheimers’ and realized that he was talking about a van Gogh. Some years later, I learned that this was part of a small collection he had inherited from his father to which he had never added.

Q: Why did Oppenheimer want to show people the painting of van Gogh?

A: Do not forget that Oppenheimer wrote poetry. The display of his collection of paintings also revealed the artistic side of his character. He may not be able to appreciate art but he wanted to show he had artistic taste. This is also an example to show his unfocused interests.

Para 6

In his journal entry, Spender describes Oppenheimer’s physical appearance:“Robert Oppenheimer is one of the extraordinary-looking men I have ever seen. He has a head like that of a very small intelligent boy, with a long back to it, reminding one of those skulls which were specially elongated by the Egyptian. His skull gives an almost egg-shell impression of fragility, and is supported by a very thin neck. His expression is radiant and at the same time ascetic.”Much of this description seems right to me except that it leaves out the fact that Oppenheimer did have the sunwrinkled look of someone who had spent a great deal of time outdoors, which he had. Spender also does not seem to have remarked on Oppenheimer’s eyes, which had a kind of wary luminescence. Siamese cats make a similar impression. But more important, Oppenheimer appears in Spender’s journal as a disembodied figure with no contextual relevance to Spender’s own life.

Q: What does “His expression is radiant and at the same time ascetic.” mean?

A: He looks intense as well as self-denying.