solitude and primeness

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

“Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves….among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other…but between them…is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching…If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender…you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly.”

Read it today because I felt like reading someone’s deliberate illustration of exactly what I feel. I’m not here to review it, but I thought it was lovely (though obviously translated). I am making a repository for some of the things I liked. I realize quoting things out of context is unwise, but *I* will remember the context and hopefully will feel the same connection to some of these quotes later.

Quotes:
“She knew that all the violence is contained in the precision of a detail.”

“How she longed for the uninhibitedness of kids her age, their vacuous sense of immortality. She yearned for all the lightness of her 15 years…”

“They weren’t smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other’s, through their arms and fingers.”

“The he realized it was the most natural thing in the world, which was precisely why he was incapable of it.”

“Every one of them had a love that had rotted alone in their heart, as his love for Mattia had done.”

“He had learned to respect the chasm that Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump that chasm and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void.”

“That evening she had crossed the invisible boundary beyond which things start working by themselves.”

“…what she could find here was more like love than anything else she would ever have.”

“She smiled as she opened the back of the camera, took out the film, and unrolled it completely under the white light of the sun.”

“She had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them.”

“Time was being consumed in a great hurry. It wasn’t just the time of that particular evening, it was the time of the possibilities of her many 35 years.”

“Mattia thought that if the ratio between the intervals of their breath was an irrational number, there was no way of combining them to find a regularity.”

“The love of those we don’t love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates.”

“A pleasant apprehension gripped her bones and made her smile, as if at that very moment time had begun again.”

“It happened every day, people…clutched at coincidences…and made a life from them.”

I liked several metaphors: the letter of acceptance sitting on the bed next to Mattia where Alice chose not to sit. The description of the motion of the planets and stars that creates a sunrise or sunset. “…nothing but a trajectory, which could not be anything other than what it was.” The surface tension of the water breaking above the rim of the glass when Alice and Mattias meet. Silly things like that were obvious, I guess, but lovely.

I love a reviewer on amazon stating there’s nothing you can do about being a prime number. Sometimes you get to be a twin, but don’t count on it. Word.