Origin (Robert Langdon, #5)

by Dan Brown

For Langdon, the only familiar sensation was the sterile tang on the back of his tongue; museum air was the same worldwide—filtered meticulously of all particulates and oxidants and then moistened with ionized water to 45 percent humidity.

I hope Ludwig van Beethoven gets his cut, Langdon thought, fairly certain that the original inventor of bone conduction technology was the eighteenth-century composer who, upon going deaf, discovered he could affix a metal rod to his piano and bite down on it while he played, enabling him to hear perfectly through vibrations in his jawbone.

Elisabeth Bridge, which linked the ancient cities of Buda and Pest, which were formally united in 1873.

Although Langdon had devoted the better part of his career to studying art, it troubled him that he had never quite learned how to appreciate the art world’s more avant-garde offerings. The appeal of modern art remained a mystery to him.

“The challenge with synthetic intelligence,” the voice continued, its light British air now seeming stranger than ever, “is not the rapid access to data, which is really quite simple, but rather the ability to discern how the data are interconnected and entangled—something at which I believe you excel, no? The interrelationship of ideas?

He had to give Edmond credit—not so much for creating this amazing illusion, but for persuading hundreds of adults to kick off their fancy shoes, lie down on the lawn, and gaze up at the heavens. We used to do this as kids, but somewhere along the way, we stopped. Langdon reclined and placed his head on the pillow, letting his body melt into the soft grass.

Ruthless, violent, and uncompromising, Francisco Franco had risen to power with the military support of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. He killed thousands of his opponents before seizing total control of the country in 1939 and proclaiming himself El Caudillo—the Spanish equivalent of the Führer. During the Civil War and well into the first years of dictatorship, those who dared oppose him disappeared into concentration camps, where an estimated three hundred thousand were executed.

Spain’s pacto de olvido—a nationwide political agreement to “forget” everything that had happened under Franco’s vicious rule—meant that schoolchildren in Spain had been taught very little about the dictator. A poll in Spain had revealed that teenagers were far more likely to recognize the actor James Franco than they were dictator Francisco Franco.

“As a high school student, I learned these details—and as you can imagine, my mother’s unwavering zealotry has a lot to do with my abhorrence of religion. I call it—‘Newton’s Third Law of Child Rearing: For every lunacy, there is an equal and opposite lunacy.’ ”

“Precisely,” his father said. “And history has proven repeatedly that lunatics will rise to power again and again on tidal waves of aggressive nationalism and intolerance, even in places where it seems utterly incomprehensible.”

As a professor, whose primary love was teaching, Robert Langdon had to smile. Dialogue is always more important than consensus.