The Aesthetes Return

The poem was bad. Thomas Webster knew it the moment he wrote it, and he knew it even more firmly the moment Aline read it and did not say anything at all.

They were sitting in the cafe on the Rue de Seine, the one with the green awning and the waiters who wore white jackets and referred to everyone as monsieur even when they were clearly not, and Thomas had just read the poem aloud in a voice that was meant to be confident and came out as something closer to pleading.

The poem was about the heat death of the universe. It was about a cosmos in which all the stars had gone out, one by one, over a span of time so vast that the word span itself became meaningless—because a span implies two points, and in a universe with no stars and no light and no time, there were no two points, there was only the silence between them.

And Aline had sat there, her coffee growing cold between her hands, and she had listened, and she had not said anything, and Thomas had understood that the silence was worse than any criticism.

"You wrote this?" she said finally.

"I wrote it."

"For me?"

"Yes."

Aline set her cup down. "You should not have."

Thomas looked out the window at the street. A woman was walking a dog. A man was smoking a cigarette on the corner. The world went on, indifferent to poems and to stars and to the slow dying of everything.

"Why not?"

"Because you wrote it for me, and it is about the end of everything, and that is not the sort of thing you give to someone you love."

Thomas looked at her. Aline Moreau was twenty-nine, French, a physicist at the Sorbonne who specialized in thermodynamic modeling—a field that, in the late 1920s, consisted largely of staring at equations on a blackboard until they stopped looking like equations and started looking like faces.

She was beautiful in a way that Thomas had always found intimidating—not the kind of beauty that made you feel brave, but the kind that made you feel small. Which was appropriate, because Aline's work was about making people feel small: showing them that the universe was not just vast, but vast in a way that had a direction, and that direction was toward cold, and cold was toward nothing.

"I did not write it for you," Thomas said, which was a lie, and they both knew it.

Aline picked up her coffee, took a sip, and set it down again. "Thomas, I have something to tell you."

He waited.

She looked at him with the particular expression that she wore when she was about to say something that would change the relationship between them from whatever it was to something else—something that had no name and could not be named because there was no language in which to contain it.

"I have been working on a project," she said. "A classified project. For the American government. It is—well, it is the most important scientific work I have ever done. And I cannot tell you about it, because I have sworn not to. But I can tell you this: what I have found is not good."

"What have you found?"

She was silent for a long time. The waiter came and refilled their coffee without asking. Aline stared at the cup as if it contained the answer to a question she had been asking since she was a child.

"The universe is dying," she said. "Not in a billion years. Not in a trillion. Not even in a trillion trillion. The rate of entropy increase is faster than anyone has calculated. The mathematical proof is—well, the mathematical proof is beyond me. But the conclusion is not. The universe will reach heat death in a fraction of the time that anyone has predicted. And when it does, it will not be a slow fading. It will be—well, I do not know how to describe it. It will be a sudden and total cessation of all processes. All motion. All thought. All light."

Thomas sat very still.

"And if this information were made public," Aline continued, "if people knew that the universe was not just going to end, but was going to end soon—and that the end was not distant and abstract but real and approaching—the effect would be catastrophic. Not in the way that a war or a plague would be catastrophic. In a deeper way. People would stop creating. They would stop hoping. They would stop loving. Because what is the point of creating if the thing you create will not last a trillionth of a second? What is the point of hoping if hope itself is just a biochemical reaction in a dying brain?"

She stopped. She looked at Thomas, and he saw fear in her eyes—not fear for herself, but fear for everyone. Fear for the world.

"I cannot tell you the numbers," she said. "I cannot tell you the calculations. I can only tell you this: we have a responsibility. We have a duty to keep this secret, even from each other."

Thomas stood up. He walked to the window and looked out at the street and the woman and the dog and the man and the cigarette.

"You want me to forget," he said.

"I want you to love," she said.

Thomas turned back to her. "That is the same thing."

It was not. They both knew it was not. But they were sitting in a cafe on the Rue de Seine in the late autumn of 1928, and the coffee was cold, and the poem was on the table between them, and nothing else in the world mattered.

Thomas went home that evening and wrote a letter to Aline. He did not send it. He wrote it anyway.

In the letter, he described a world in which every star had gone out and the only light was the light of memory—the faint, fading afterglow of a billion civilizations that had existed and loved and created and destroyed, and then were gone. He described a universe that was not evil but simply indifferent, like a child who does not know that it is crushing a flower beneath its feet. He described a love that was not eternal but simply immediate—a love that existed in this moment, in this cafe, in this lifetime, and that would be gone when the last star went out, but that did not make it less real.

He wrote the letter in French, because French was the language of love and Aline was French and French had words that English did not have for the things that he wanted to say.

The next morning, he went to the cafe with the green awning and he read the letter to Aline. She did not cry. She did not smile. She sat there and listened, and when he was finished, she reached across the table and took his hand and held it until the waiter came to clear the table and they stood up and walked out into the street and the rain began to fall and the city of Paris became something that Thomas would carry with him for the rest of his life—not as a memory, but as a wound.

Years later, after the war, after Aline had gone back to America and Thomas had stopped writing poetry and taken a job teaching literature at a small college in Vermont, he would sometimes sit at his desk in the evenings and look at the stars through the window and think about the letter. He would think about the words he had written and the words he had not written and the words that Aline had heard and the words that she had not heard.

And he would think about the poem—the bad poem, the poem that he had written for her and that she had not criticized but had not praised either, because the only appropriate response to a poem about the end of everything was silence.

He would sit in the dark and look at the stars and he would understand, with a clarity that was both terrible and beautiful, that the silence was not empty.

It was full of everything that had been said and everything that had not been said, and the things that had not been said were louder, in the end, than the things that had been said, because they were the things that would never be said, and that was a kind of forever, and forever was the one thing that the universe could not take away.

Thomas Webster died in 1963, at the age of seventy-two, in his study in Vermont, with a book of poetry open on his desk and a photograph of a woman with dark hair and a cafe on the Rue de Seine on the wall beside him.

The last thing he wrote was not a poem. It was a single line, written in a handwriting that was too shaky to be called calligraphy:

The stars are quiet now, but they were never silent.

OTMES-v2-

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