The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

And if I’d just seen Sorabji on another night—if I’d just spent one more day on the periodic table—I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Miller, and I wouldn’t have heard any phone calls, and I wouldn’t have known there was anything to see or hear. I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself. I had another look at the Kutta-Joukowski theorem. It wasn’t so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It’s just that if you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can’t go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.