TITLE: A Reunion with Reunion
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 20, 2007  7:38 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
My 25th high school reunion is next month.  (I can just
hear the pencils at work as students, current and former,
figure out just how old I am.)  So I took this opportunity
to re-read
<A HREF="http://www.mit.edu/~humanistic/faculty/lightman.html">
    Alan Lightman</A>'s
novel
<A HREF="http://www.mit.edu/~humanistic/faculty/lightman.html#Reunion">
   Reunion</A>,
which is about a college professor's 30th college reunion.
I first read this book when it came out several years ago,
but the theme was more timely this time around.

I first learned about Lightman, a physicist-turned-novelist
whose fact and fiction both rest on a physics foundation,
from an endnote in David Bodanis's
<A HREF="http://www.davidbodanis.com/pages/emc2_pg.html">
   E=mc<SUP>2</SUP></A>,
which referred me to
<A HREF="http://www.mit.edu/~humanistic/faculty/lightman.html#Einstein's">
   Einstein's Dreams</A>,
This was an unusual book, only a couple of dozen short
chapters, that consisted of a few fictional vignettes of
Einstein's thinking and discussion with Hans Bethe as he
reconceptualized time for his theory of relativity,
interspersed among twenty or so fictional dreams that
Einstein might have had about worlds in which time behaves
differently than it does in our world.  For example, in one
world, time passes faster when one is at higher altitudes;
in another, one occasionally gets stuck to a single place
in time; in yet another, time moves backward.

I found this book delightful, both creative and wonderfully
written.  The conversations between Einstein and Bethe
sounded authentic to this non-physicist, and the dream
chapters were both "whimsical" and "provocative" (words I
borrow from a literary review of the book) -- what would
it be like if different neighborhoods lived in different
decades or even centuries?  Lightman writes as a poet,
spare with words and description, precise in detail.  Yet
the book had a serious undercurrent, as it exposed some
of the questions that physicists have raised about the
nature of time, and how time interacts with human experience.

Later I found <I>Reunion</I>.  It's more of a traditional
human story, and I expect that some of my friends would
derogate it as "chick lit".  But I disagree.  First, it's
a man's story: a 52-year-old man keenly aware that time
has passed beyond his dreams; a 22-year-old man alive with
promise unaware that he is reaching branches in time that
can never be passed again.  And while its structure is that
of a traditional novel, the underlying current is one of
time's ambiguity: looking back, looking forward, standing
still.  Lightman even resorts in the shortest of passages
to a common device which in other authors' hands is
clich&eacute;, but which in his seems almost matter of
fact.  It's not science fiction because it sticks close
to the way a real person might feel in this world, where
time seems to move monotonically forward but in which our
lives are a complex mishmash of present and past, future
and never-was.

I enjoyed <I>Reunion</I> again and, though it's a bit of
downer, it hasn't diminished my anticipation of stepping
back in time to see people who were once my friends, and
who because of how time works in my mind will always be my
friends, to reminisce about back-when and since-then, and
what-now.  Time's linearity will show through, of course,
in the graying of hair and the onset of wrinkles...
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