The Elementary Particles

by Michel Houellebecq

The sound of their voices snapped like twigs in the air. Shortly afterward, the party broke up.

The weather had been magnificent all day, and it was still warm now. In the early weeks of summer everything seemed fixed, motionless, radiant, though already the days were getting shorter.

Niels Bohr’s claim to be the true founder of quantum mechanics rests less on his own discoveries than on the extraordinary atmosphere of creativity, intellectual effervescence, openness and friendship he fostered around him.

The Institute of Physics, which Bohr founded in Copenhagen in 1919, welcomed the cream of young European physicists. Heisenberg, Pauli and Born served their apprenticeships there.

Their conversations ranged easily from philosophy to physics, history to art, from religion to everyday life. Nothing comparable had happened since the days of the Greek philosophers. It was in this extraordinary environment, between 1925 and 1927, that the basic premises of the Copenhagen Interpretation—which called into question established concepts of space, time and causality—were developed.

The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.

Postwar France was a difficult and troubled society: industrial production was at an all-time low and rationing would continue until 1948. Even so, a privileged few on the margins of society already showed symptoms of the mass consumption of sexual pleasure—a trend originating in the United States—that would sweep through the populace in the decades that followed.

Sometimes he cycles cross-country, pedaling as hard as he can, filling his lungs with a taste of the infinite. He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief. The countryside streams past.

Bruno’s earliest memory was one of humiliation. He was four years old and attending the Parc Laperlier nursery school in Algiers. It was an autumn afternoon and the teacher had shown the boys how to make necklaces out of leaves. The girls, most of them in white dresses, sat on a small bank watching, their faces already betraying a hint of dumb female resignation. The ground was strewn with golden leaves, mostly chestnut and plane. One after another, his friends finished their necklaces and went to place them around the necks of their little girlfriends, but he could not seem to finish his. The leaves broke and crumbled in his hands. How could he tell them that he, too, needed love? How could he let them know without a necklace? He started to cry with rage, yet the teacher did not come to help. Class had finished, and the children stood up and began to file out of the park. The nursery school closed shortly afterward.

Brilliant character introduction

At night she would replay her life over and over, trying to discover how it had ended like this. She rarely managed to find sleep before dawn.