What could be more egocentric than wanting from the sensation of another person the full throttle of desire, passion, and every shade of transcendent experience? And what could be more ridiculous, more naïve, more dreamy-eyed, and more shamelessly hopeful? And what more human? Around this and its associated myths Pauline at the Beach revolves like a frozen planet, setting its face to this and that side of the question without becoming too committed to any one point. The steely core of this human madness of a planet is the titular character, Pauline, who takes part in the fateful—and fatal—adult game of love as an initiate of this dangerous word and…
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The most astonishing thing about the man and the legend J. Robert Oppenheimer—a man whose intellectual brilliance was so prodigious that even in the top-secret and desolate expanses of Los Alamos, brimming with the most brilliant minds of the era, he was considered by all to be an intellectual superior—is not that he was so variously brilliant in so many fields and with tastes ranging from medieval French literature to theoretical physics and Eastern mysticism, but that he was so naïve. He fell prey to a fanciful idealism–this is the easiest takeaway, but maybe not the right one. His was a mind, brilliant and profound, that nonetheless retained the old…
