How old were you when you left?

Eleven.

Eleven.

Yes.

What was it like?

Los Alamos.

Yes.

During the war I think it was pretty primitive. Supposedly there were eight thousand fire extinguishers and five bathtubs. And endless mud. What I remember mostly is people at our house talking until three oclock in the morning.

You were awake until three oclock in the morning.

Yes. The house smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. You could hear the clink of glasses. I would lie there listening until the last guest left.

You couldnt have understood what they were talking about.

What I understood was that I had to learn what it was that they were talking about.

Do you remember your earliest thoughts?

All I had were thoughts.

I’m not sure I understand.

I understood I was in a place where I was going to be for a long time and that I had to figure it out. That everything depended on my finding out where I was. It wasnt that I thought there could be some other place to be. The world as an absolute was clear to me. But I had to know what it was.

Was this out of fear?

Yes.

Quick answer.

Children are fearful creatures.

How old were you when you discovered mathematics?

Probably older than memory. I was musical first. I had perfect pitch. Have. Later I suppose I came to see the world as pretty much proof against any comprehensive description of it. But music seemed to always stand as an exception to everything. It seemed sacrosanct. Autonomous. Completely self-referential and coherent in every part. If you wanted to describe it as transcendent we could talk about transcendence but we probably wouldnt get very far. I was deeply synesthetic and I thought that if music had an inherent reality—color and taste—that only a few people could identify, then perhaps it had other attributes yet to be discerned. The fact that these things were subjective in no way marked them as imaginary. I’m not doing this very well, am I?

I’m still listening.

If you stretched a piece of music—so to speak—as the tone drew away the color would fade. I’ve no idea where to put that.

So where does music come from?

No one knows. A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letters of the alphabet if you like but it doesnt change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions. Is music as we know it complete? In what sense? Are there classes such as major and minor we’ve yet to discover? It seems unlikely, doesnt it? Still, lots of things are unlikely until they appear. And what do these categories signify? Where did they come from? What does it mean that they are two shades of blue? In my eyes. If music was here before we were, for whom was it here? Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.