Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Page B

rushed in. With her wide, broad-shouldered stance, every bone and curve articulated in the leotard, hair blowing and head lifted high in indignation, she seemed at last the Martha Graham tragic heroine she longed to dance. Woman confronting the betrayal of the intellect. Her eyes were shadowed; I couldn’t see their colors.
    “That was wonderful.” I applauded. “Brava!”
    “I’m not fooling around, Lydia. We wasted so much time. Look, the so-called enlightened ones are no better.” She riffled through her notes. “Hume. Such an original mind, she told us. But the same old thing—seven different categories of relationships. Would you like to hear them?”
    “No!” Esther said. “And could you please stop running around the room? You’re making me dizzy.”
    “Oh, all right.” She dropped to the floor and breathed deeply. “Also those fallacies. They made up as many fallacies as truths.” She was calmer; we were still transfixed. “Fallacy of ambiguity, fallacy of equivocation,” she droned. “Fallacy of composition, fallacy of division—I can’t even remember all the fallacies.”
    “Oh, come on,” I said. “The fallacies are fun.”
    “Aha, speaking of fun—have you run across the Hedonistic Calculus, by any chance? Jeremy Bentham? I know it wasn’t in the course but I happened upon it. The Hedonistic Calculus helps you choose between competing but mutually exclusive pleasures.” She grabbed a book and leafed through. “I bet you didn’t know there were seven ways to measure your pleasure.”
    “Gaby, really. Talk about jejune.”
    “I didn’t make this up, Lydia. This is the product of a great mind. Number one. Intensity of the pleasure. Number two. Duration of the pleasure. Three. Certainty or uncertainty—that means how far the experience is guaranteed to deliver the pleasure.” Her lips moved tentatively in a gamine kind of smile. The Greek Fury was giving way to a Gallic wit. “Four. Propinquity or remoteness—how close the pleasure is, in space as well as time. Five. This is a good one. Fecundity. How likely is it that the pleasure will lead to subsequent pleasures of the same sort?” She had us laughing, in relief as much as amusement. The impending test was forgotten. “Six. Purity—the absence of any little bits of pain mixed in. And seven. Extent. How far can the pleasure be shared with others?”
    “Well,” said Esther. “We could go out and share a pizza, at least.”
    The next morning Professor Boles, looking melancholy in her old gray tweeds, asked us to trace the successive phases of pre-Socratic thought. I think she loved the Greeks and hated to see the semester over. Dutifully, sophomorically, I repeated vision after vision until I reached the mystical poet and the prosaic man of science, who reassured us that there is indeed movement (and with it possibility, and hope), and underneath, the eternal and the immutable. Something abides, I wrote to her in my blue book, like a personal letter, my heart in my pen. Those elemental roots—earth, water, air, fire. (“Good but too literal,” she commented in red pencil. B plus.)
    I was disappointed that there was no question remotely connected with how Thales measured the height of the pyramid. Even though Nina was right—Thales could have measured a man’s shadow at any time of day and applied the shadow-man ratio to the pyramid—I found the appeal of the story lay in the waiting. I imagined him patient and serene, maybe eating cookies and talking to his friends, waiting for that ripe moment when an insubstantial shadow on the sand inches up to a human magnitude that can break down a pyramid’s recalcitrance. But it was a no-nonsense exam.
    “That was not really related to the course, Lydia,” said Gabrielle. “Only of biographical interest. Are you taking the next semester?”
    “Sure.” I remembered her outburst of the night before. I would take it warily, not expecting truth but simply watching the mind flex