理查德·费曼写给亡妻阿琳的信：诺奖物理学家的深情告白

物理学的冷峻锋刃，与人类心灵那脆弱的形而上学相遇之处。

很少有人能像物理学家 Richard Feynman（1918年5月11日–1988年2月15日）那样，如此有力而持久地用科学点亮大众的想象——这位“伟大的阐释者”拥有非凡的天赋，能将科学的精髓与生活中最富人性、最温暖人心的维度连接起来。

Feynman 去世数月后，当 James Gleick 正在撰写后来成为 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman（public library）的书稿时——这部杰出的传记深入探寻了Feynman 天才的源泉——他发现了一些奇异而壮美的东西。

“我的心跳都停了，”Gleick 对我说，“无论是之前还是之后，作为传记作者，我从未有过那样的体验。”

在 Feynman 的遗孀 Gweneth 寄给他的一大堆未读文件中，Gleick 找到了一封信，它动摇了他对 Feynman 性格最核心的理解。在计算先驱 Alan Turing 于失去至亲之后挣扎于身心的二元密码的一代人之后，Feynman——一位或许格外浪漫、却在敬畏那趋向衰败的不可抗拒的物理定律时又坚定理性、不带感伤的科学家——给一个在物理上无足轻重的存在写了一封非凡的信，而对这位未来的诺贝尔奖得主而言，它正是某种不可抑制的形而上实在的所在。

高中时，少年 Richard 每年夏天都在家乡 Far Rockaway 的海滩度过。在那里，他迷上了一个引人注目的女孩 Arline——一个他知道自己会娶的女孩。Arline 既是对他本性的补充，也是与之的对位：她以对哲学和艺术的热忱，回应了 Richard 对科学的倾向。（他为了接近她而选修的那门艺术课，为他鲜为人知、持续一生的绘画热情奠定了基础。）到高三那年，Richard 求了婚。Arline 答应了。怀着初恋的目光，他们凝望着一个充满无限幸福可能的共同未来。

但当一种神秘的疾病开始以莫名的症状侵袭 Arline 时，他们突然被拉回了现实——她脖子上会出现又消失的肿块，无来由的高烧一阵阵袭来。最终，她因被认为是伤寒而住院。

Gleick 写道：

Feynman 开始隐约感受到，医学上的不确定性会给一个科学工作者带来一种特殊的无力感。他曾相信，科学的思维方式能在困境中带来一定程度的平静与掌控——但此刻却不然。

就在 Feynman 开始向医生们抛出一连串问题、引导他们更贴近科学方法之际，Arline 却像当初神秘莫测地病倒一样，同样神秘而不可预测地开始康复。然而，这只是暂时的缓解。症状卷土重来，依旧没有一个确切的解释，却已明确指向终局——一个医生们对 Arline 隐瞒的预后。Richard 拒绝参与这场欺骗——他和 Arline 曾彼此承诺，要以不懈的真诚面对生活——但他不得不根据现实调整自己的坚持。

Gleick 写道：

他的父母、Arline 的父母以及医生们都劝他，不要残忍到去告诉一个年轻女子她即将死去。他的妹妹 Joan 哭着说他固执而无情。他崩溃了，向传统低头。在 Farmingdale 医院她的病房里，她的父母陪在身边，他确认她得的是腺热。与此同时，他开始随身带着一封信——他称之为“告别情书”——打算等她发现真相时交给她。他确信她永远不会原谅这个不可饶恕的谎言。

他没等多久。Arline 从医院回家后不久，她悄悄走到楼梯顶端，无意中听到母亲在楼下的厨房里和一位邻居一起哭泣。当她质问 Richard 时——那封信还安稳地放在他口袋里——他把真相告诉了她，把信交给她，并向她求婚。

然而，婚姻被证明是一个巨大的现实难题——Princeton 大学（Feynman 此时正在那里攻读博士学位）威胁说，如果他结婚，就要取消资助他研究生学业的奖学金，因为校方认为婚姻的情感与现实责任会对学术纪律构成严重威胁。

就在 Feynman 开始考虑离开 Princeton 之际，一个诊断引爆了局面——Arline 感染了一种罕见形式的结核病，很可能是由未经巴氏消毒的牛奶传染的。

起初，Feynman 松了一口气，因为霍奇金病和淋巴瘤等无法治愈的癌症这些可怕的备选诊断已被排除。但他低估了——或者也许是误解了——结核病的严重性——正是这种疾病夺走了 Alan Turing 一生的挚爱，在其两个世纪的鼎盛时期，它在全球夺去的生命比任何其他疾病以及所有战争的总和还要多。在 1941 年 Arline 被确诊时，免疫学尚在襁褓之中，针对细菌感染的抗生素治疗几乎不存在，青霉素首次成功用于医疗也还有一年之遥。结核病就是一纸死刑判决，即便那是一种伴随缓解间歇的缓慢死亡——Richard 和 Arline 以一种矛盾的心态面对这一事实，既有勇敢的清醒，也抱着一线渺茫的希望。

与此同时，Richard 的父母对他可能的婚姻满怀戒惧。他的母亲认为他娶 Arline 是出于怜悯而非爱，告诫他说这会危及他的健康乃至生命，并冷冷地担忧结核病的污名会如何影响她才华横溢的小儿子的名声。“我很惊讶地得知这样的婚姻竟然不违法，”她无情地嘲讽道，“它本该违法。”

但 Richard 被爱所鼓舞——这份爱如此博大而明亮，以至于有一天他在安排 Arline 转往疗养院时，发现自己竟高声唱起歌来。他决心把婚礼办成，于是写信给他的挚爱：

我想这也许就像从圆木上滚落下来一样——我的心再次被填满，我哽咽得说不出话——爱是如此美好而有力——它值得被守护——我知道没有什么能把我们分开——我们经受住了时间的考验，我们的爱如今仍如诞生之日那般辉煌——最亲爱的，财富从未让人伟大，但爱每天都能做到——我们不是渺小的人——我们是巨人……我知道我们两人都有未来在前方——充满幸福——现在以及永远。

1942 年 6 月 29 日，他们向彼此许下了永恒的诺言。

Gleick writes:

He borrowed a station wagon from a Princeton friend, outfitted it with mattresses for the journey, and picked up Arline in Cedarhurst. She walked down her father’s hand-poured concrete driveway wearing a white dress. They crossed New York Harbor on the Staten Island ferry — their honeymoon ship. They married in a city office on Staten Island, in the presence of neither family nor friends, their only witnesses two strangers called in from the next room. Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline’s new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

与此同时，二战正走向破坏的顶峰，珍珠港事件把美国拖入了死亡的腹地。作为当时全国最有前途的物理学家之一，费曼被招募参与后来成为 曼哈顿计划 的工作，并很快加入了洛斯阿拉莫斯的秘密实验室。

Arline entered the nearby Albuquerque sanatorium, from where she wrote him letters in code — for the sheer fun of it, because she knew how he cherished puzzles, but the correspondence alarmed the military censors at the laboratory’s Intelligence Office. Tasked with abating any breaches to the secrecy of the operation, they cautioned Feynman that coded messages were against the rules and demanded that his wife include a key in each letter to help them decipher it. This only amplified Arline’s sense of fun — she began cutting holes into her letters, covering passages with ink, and even mail-ordered a jigsaw puzzle kit with which to cut up the pages and completely confound the agents.

But the levity masked the underlying darkness which Richard and Arline tried so desperately to evade — Arline was dying. As her body failed, he steadied himself to her spirit:

You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a reservoir for your strength — without you I would be empty and weak… I find it much harder these days to write these things to you.

In every single letter, he told her that he loved her. “I have a serious affliction: loving you forever,” he wrote.

In early 1945, two and a half years into their marriage, Richard and Arline made love for the first time. He had been too afraid of harming her frail health somehow, she too afraid of infecting him with the deadly bacterium consuming her. But Arline insisted that this pent up desire could no longer be contained and assured Richard that this would only bring them closer — to each other, and to the life they had so lovingly dreamt up for themselves:

I’ll always be your sweetheart & first love — besides a devoted wife — we’ll be proud parents too… I am proud of you always Richard –[you are] a good husband, and lover, & well, coach, I’ll show you what I mean Sunday.

But heightened as their hopes were by this new dimension of shared experience, Arline’s health continued to plummet. Her weight dropped to eighty-four pounds. Exasperated by the helplessness of medicine, which Feynman had come to see not as a manifestation but as a mutilation of the scientific method, he invested all hope in an experimental drug made of mold growths. “Keep hanging on,” he exhorted Arline. “Nothing is certain. We lead a charmed life.” She began spitting blood.

At twenty-seven, on the precipice of a brilliant scientific career, he was terminally in love.

On June 16, 1945, while working at the computing room at Los Alamos, Feynman received a call from the sanatorium that Arline was dying. He borrowed a colleague’s car and sped to the hospital, where he found her immobile, her eyes barely tracing his movement. Early in his scientific career, he had been animated by the nature of time. Now, hours stretched and contracted as he sat at her deathbed, until one last small breath tolled the end at 9:21PM.

The wake of loss has a way of tranquilizing grief with the pressing demands of practical arrangements — a tranquilizer we take willingly, almost gratefully. The following morning, Feynman arranged for his beloved’s cremation, methodically collected her personal belongings, and on the final page of the small spiral notebook in which she recorded her symptoms he wrote with scientific remove: “June 16 — Death.”

And so we arrive at Gleick’s improbable discovery in that box of letters — improbable because of the extreme rationality with which Feynman hedged against even the slightest intimation of metaphysical conjectures untestable by science and unprovable by reason. During his courtship of Arline, he had been vexed by her enthusiasm for Descartes, whose “proof” of God’s perfection he found intellectually lazy and unbefitting of Descartes’s reputation as a champion of reason. He had impishly countered Arline’s insistence that there are two sides to everything by cutting a piece of paper and half-twisting it into a Möbius strip, the ends pasted together to render a surface with just one side.

Everything that appeared mystical, Feynman believed, was simply an insufficiently explained mystery with a physical answer not yet found. Even Arline’s dying hour had offered testing ground for conviction. Puzzlingly, the clock in the room had stopped at exactly 9:21PM — the time of death. Aware of how this bizarre occurrence could foment the mystical imagination in unscientific minds, Feynman reasoned for an explanation. Remembering that he had repaired the clock multiple times over the course of Arline’s stay at the sanatorium, he realized that the instrument’s unwieldy mechanism must have choked when the nurse picked it up in the low evening light to see and record the time.

How astonishing and how touchingly human, then, that Feynman penned the letter Gleick found in the box forty-two years later — a letter he wrote to Arline in October of 1946, 488 days after her death:

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

但是现在我知道，我亲爱的妻子，做我一直拖延未做的事是对的，而我过去已经做了太多。我想告诉你我爱你。我想爱你。我会永远爱你。

我在脑海里很难理解在你死后爱你意味着什么——但我仍然想安慰你、照顾你——我也希望你爱我、关心我。我想有和你一起讨论的问题——我想和你一起做些小项目。直到刚才我才想到我们还能那样做。我们该做些什么呢。我们开始一起学做衣服——或者学中文——或者买一台电影放映机。我现在就不能做点什么吗？不能。没有你我孤身一人，而你是我们所有疯狂冒险的“点子女王”和总策划人。

你生病的时候很担心，因为你无法给我你想要给的、并且认为我需要的东西。你本不必担心。就像我当时告诉你的，其实并没有真正的需要，因为我在那么多方面那么深地爱着你。而现在这更加千真万确——你现在什么也给不了我，可我依然如此爱你，以至于你挡住了我爱任何其他人的路——但我希望你站在那里。你，死去的你，比任何活着的人都好得多。

我知道你会向我保证我很傻，说你希望我获得完整的幸福，不想挡我的路。我敢打赌你一定很惊讶，两年过去了，我甚至没有女朋友（除了你，亲爱的）。但你也没办法，亲爱的，我也没办法——我不明白，因为我见过很多女孩，而且都是很好的女孩，我也不想一直孤单下去——但在两三次见面之后，她们全都化为了灰烬。只有你还留在我身边。你是真实的。

我亲爱的妻子，我确实崇拜你。

我爱我的妻子。我的妻子死了。

富。

然后，用我们唯一拥有的除颤器来应对心痛——幽默——费曼补充道：

附言：请原谅我没有把这封信寄出去——但我不知道你的新地址。

将这一段格外精彩的内容与整部了不起的《费曼：理查德·费曼的生平与科学》结合起来阅读，再配上蕾切尔·卡森在病榻上对爱人的动人告别以及塞内加论面对失去的坚韧，然后重温费曼论科学与宗教以及生命的意义。

捐赠 = 爱

十七年来，我每个月都要花数百小时、数千美元来撰写The Marginalian（最初十五年用的是已经不再合适的名字Brain Pickings）。它一直保持免费、无广告，并且依靠读者的资助得以存续。我没有员工，没有实习生，没有助手——这完全是一个女人独自倾注心血的热爱之作，同时也是我的生活和生计。如果这份劳作以任何方式让你自己的生活更值得过，请考虑以捐赠的方式伸出援手。你的支持至关重要。

通讯

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