Murray Gell-Mann

He was my idol when I was seventeen

And keen on physics. I had breakfast with him

At a math contest in 1963, in a hotel on Mission Bay

In San Diego. I was too star-struck to remember

What we talked about, but I remember his seersucker jacket

And how young he seemed. I wanted to be like him,

Think like him, know what he knew, discover

What he hadn’t discovered yet, and now look at me:

Reading his obituary in the Times today

I wondered where that life that used to seem so

Clear to me had gone, sitting here in our dining room

In Milwaukee (which to me in 1963 was just a baseball team

Somewhere in the middle of the country), a minor poet

Light years away from physics, inhabiting his poem.

He saw the patterns in the chaos of cascading particles

Floating in from nowhere like the quarks in Finnegans Wake

To fill the openings in some Lie group that he dubbed the Eightfold Way,

That had no reason to exist beyond those slots—yet there they were,

As if those patterns were what made them real. What does make anything real?

I used to think I knew and now I don’t. It isn’t us, though we’re the ones

Who can’t stop talking about it since we don’t know what it is. I used to think

That physics knew, yet now it makes no sense, not for the usual reasons—

It’s strange, shut up and calculate—but since it can’t be true

Unless there’s nothing there. I could go on, but let me leave it there at

Breakfast with Murray Gell-Mann on Mission Bay in 1963.

Nothing ever came of it, though I remember writing to the president

Of MIT to ask if I should go there first and then Caltech,

Or vice versa. He wrote back to say that either way was fine.

Some things are hidden from us, not because we don’t know what they are,

But because they’re inconceivable until they happen, like the future.

The morning light in our dining room has the inevitability

Of the ordinary, and yet fifty-seven years ago it was as unreal

As I was then, as unimaginable as that life I had is now.

Sometimes I think the past is all there is. Sometimes I think

It’s the other way around, that only now is real. The future though

Remains an abstraction, even when we know what’s going to happen, like death,

Especially death. There was supposed to be a different person in this chair.

Where did he go? That universal destination, nowhere? It isn’t a real question,

Though it sounds like one. It’s merely a feeling of perplexity

And calm at the memory I had this morning of someone

I had been and someone I was going to become as I was reading

Murray Gell-Mann’s obituary here in our dining room in Milwaukee.