Tag: Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman’s Screening Room

In the acknowledgments at the end of Alan Lightman’s revealing new memoir, Screening Room (Pantheon Books), there are matters to keep in mind before you even begin the book. Some of his characters are based on real people. The names are unchanged; their stories are “for the most part true.” Other characters are “loosely based” on family members, and their names have indeed been changed. Some of the characters are “amalgamations” of real people; some are “fictitious.” But there’s nothing “for the most part true” about gilgul neshamot. As Lightman explains in the body of the book, it’s a concept drawn from the mystical element of Judaism known as Kabbalah, and the phrase means “cycle of souls.”

Phasma, however, is pure invention. It was a term Lightman and his distant (and fictionalized) Uncle Nate coined, and it means “ghost” — the ghost of the family patriarch, Lightman’s formidable grandfather, Maurice Abraham Lightman, but he was known to relatives, friends, and colleagues throughout the movie business as M.A. It was M.A. who gave his name to the M.A. Lightman Company, shortened to Malco, which would grow to become a major chain of theaters still operating in Memphis and across the Mid-South.

Alan Lightman

The phasma doesn’t operate just geographically, however. Nor does it “necessarily obey the usual relations between time and space.” It’s a force that can travel forward in time to haunt subsequent generations. It can even travel back in time “to fasten its grip” on family members who lived before the patriarch was born. “No one can control a phasma,” Lightman writes in Screening Room. “Being aware that a phasma is at work offers no help, and being unaware also offers no help.” Though Uncle Nate can somewhat help when he observes: “It’s a weird, weird thing …. But then everything is weird. We’ve got a problem, my friend.”

“Weird” is not exactly the word to describe religious observance in the Lightman household. A prominent East Memphis Jewish family of the Reform variety, the Lightmans were proud of their heritage, but that pride ran along the lines expressed by a family friend, who once said: “I want a mezuzah [for the doorway], but one that is not too Jewish.” Not exactly orthodox either but plenty prevalent when Lightman was growing up: the alcohol-fueled evenings his parents and their friends enjoyed as members of Memphis’ Ridgeway Country Club in the 1950s and ’60s. But Screening Room doesn’t limit itself to those decades. It travels back and forth in time and touches on all of Memphis history, and by the 1930s, that history was often linked to the Lightmans. Uncle Nate was, however, more than right about the other thing: “We’ve got a problem, my friend.” That’s one way to describe Lightman’s conflicted feelings for his high-strung mother and his emotionally detached father. Add in, too, the ambivalent attitude toward his hometown and the South in general when the author was a young man.

What is Alan Lightman — physicist, MIT faculty member, novelist, essayist, and avowed atheist — doing writing of a time-traveling ghost-patriarch in the pages of Screening Room? It’s the same Alan Lightman, artist-scientist, who can imagine a cycle of souls as one way of interpreting a troubled family universe.

On Thursday, February 19th, 6 to 8 p.m., Lightman, who has lived for decades outside Boston, returns to his hometown to read from and sign copies of Screening Room at story booth (438 N. Cleveland). The evening, presented by Burke’s Book Store in conjunction with Crosstown Arts, will also include a Q&A with the author. That landmark building on Cleveland, a few doors down from story booth? It used to be the Crosstown movie theater. Alan Lightman once worked inside it. The Malco company once owned and operated it. And you might say the phasma who built it still haunts it.

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Lightman’s Excellent Cambodian Adventure

CREDIT: nubar.com

Memphis-born writer and MIT physicist Alan Lightman was the subject of a long profile in the The Boston Globe last week. The story recounts Lightman’s efforts to build a women’s college dorm in Cambodia.

Lightman began doing charity work in Cambodia after becoming friends with a minister who had asked to use Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams in a sermon. While on one such trip, Lightman learned that many women don’t pursue a college education because they don’t have a safe place to stay.

“The women started coming up to us, holding their babies, and said, ‘Please help us build a school,’ ” he told the Globe. “I was just amazed that in this remote village with no electricity, no plumbing, no toilets, they were talking about education. . . . I was overwhelmed by their courage and their ability to think in the long term.”

With donations from friends and family, Lightman built Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women in Phnom Penh. The building is named for Harpswell, Maine, where Lightman spends summers.

To read the story, go here.

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An Undertaking

David Kurzweil isn’t the “suggestible” sort — the sort to believe in the supernatural, the paranormal, and the otherwise inexplicable. A hypnotist who couldn’t hypnotize him once said as much. Kurzweil says so himself: “Logic is what holds it all together.” And by “all,” Kurzweil means the world as we know it, the world “as it is,” the observable, testable, verifiable world of cause and effect.

Which doesn’t mean Kurzweil isn’t searching — searching for “something unseen behind common experience, some totality” to be glimpsed between the “cracks,” as in that crack between the worlds of the living and the dead.

But what is Kurzweil to do when, alone inside the funeral home where he works, he sees, one day at dusk, a vapor exiting (or is it entering?) the body of a dead woman? More than a vapor, Kurzweil claims, but how to describe it? It seemed to him alive. It had “intelligence.” It looked at him. Seconds later, it was gone.

Not for long. The memory of it haunts him, and when news of a “ghost” reaches outside the funeral home, a newspaper reporter hounds him about it, a psychic researcher tests him on it, and scientists at the local university ask him to deny it. But no denying the life-changing effects of Kurzweil’s vision on the man himself and those closest to him: his co-workers, his girlfriend, his ex-wife, and his widowed mother. Where are the words to describe the effects? In Alan Lightman’s new novel, Ghost (Pantheon).

Lightman, a native Memphian, is a theoretical physicist by training, but he’s also a science writer, essayist, and best-selling author of the novel Einstein’s Dreams and National Book Award finalist in fiction for The Diagnosis. He is also the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment at MIT in science and the humanities, which puts him in the perfect position to pose David Kurzweil’s questions and our own — questions about the limits of science and religion, about the powers of reason and faith, and about the present, which is fleeting, and the past, which is faulty with memories. Questions too about the passing of time itself: Is it the ticking of a clock, or sunlight crossing a room, or the ripples from a stone tossed in a stream?

What are we to make, though, of David Kurzweil, a 42-year-old man who served nine unambitious years working at a bank (he’s a wiz at numbers), only to be downsized right out the door? Mortuaries “repulse” him, and yet he applies for a job in one. He lives alone and comfortably enough in an unremarkable apartment. His reading, however, is anything but commonplace: Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations), Antoine Lavoisier (Elements of Chemistry), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), and Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man).

He’s also divorced, but his ex-wife of 12 years still has hold of him emotionally, to the distress of his girlfriend, who is otherwise the essence of understanding. His widowed mother is something of a cold fish, and yet he admires her, while it’s his father who lays claim to one of Kurzweil’s fondest childhood memories, and yet he’s a father dead now for decades. Add to these plot points Kurzweil’s metaphysical speculations and his run-in with an apparition, little wonder that when Ghost opens, the man is one step from a nervous breakdown. But it puts him in good company with his funeral-home boss, who suffers from a panic attack after venturing into the unpredictable, sometimes violent outside world.

That’s a lot of plot points to fold into this narrative, which is, on the one hand, a family drama and, on the other hand, an extended meditation on what Kurzweil calls “the world underneath” — the extrasensory spirit world. You can take that to include a world of ghosts, a world for some of us true enough. Or is it the equally mysterious world of the imagination, unmeasurable by the standards of science but true just the same?