I knew what languages were spoken in the world I wanted to inhabit, and if I was not yet fluent in them, if I needed years still to untangle the grammar and syntax of thermodynamics, the poiesis of astrophysics and particles and the movement of light, I understood nevertheless the alphabets in which they were inscribed. I had thought that I knew exactly what I did not yet know: unlearned equations like missing volumes on a shelf, to be slotted in neatly as I acquired them. I had been unable to bear anything like disorder, and no wonder—the word cosmology itself comes from the ancient Greek kosmeo, which means “to order,” “to organize”—the universe is worthy of study because it operates in patterns, and our understanding of them is, fundamentally, a kind of organization, a fact which suited my tidy nature well. And then I had come here, and all I had brought with me seemed now nothing like what I needed, what was necessary to make the world clear. I had arrived with a star chart of a cosmos I expected and landed instead in a universe whose physics were nothing like the physics of the world I knew; I had tumbled into a landscape without polestar or cardinal direction, where the tools with which I’d flawlessly navigated my previous life—my memory, my history, my experience of love—were as useless as a compass held over a magnet until its needle spun in circles.
