Verbal lectures on the experience of music.

My only spiritual brother is Newton. I was moved when, at the university, they introduced us to the passage in Principia Mathematica, Book One, where he tips a bucket full of water and uses the tilted surface of the water to argue that there is Absolute Space inside and surrounding the rotating earth and the turning sun and the tumbling stars, which makes it impossible to find any constant starting point or initial system or fixed point in life. Absolute Space-that which stands still, that which we can cling to.

I could have kissed Newton. Later I despaired over Ernst Mach's criticism of the bucket experiment, the criticism which formed the basis for Einstein's work. I was younger then and more easily moved. Today I know that all we did was prove that Newton's arguments were inadequate. Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition. No one has budged my or Newton's certainty about Absolute Space. No one is going to find his way home to Qaanaaq with his nose stuck in Einstein's writings.

"So what do you think happened?"

There is nothing as disarming as a sympathetic response.

"I don't know," I say. That's very close to being the truth.

"What do you want us to do?"

My objections suddenly seem so transparent here in the daylight, where the snow has melted, and across Knippels Bridge life is going on, and a courteous person is speaking to me. I have no reply.

"I'll review the case again," he says, "from beginning to end, and look at it in light of what you have told me." We climb down, and it's also a descent into the depression waiting for me down there.

"I'm parked at the corner," he says. And then he makes his big mistake.

"I would suggest that while we review the case, you withdraw your complaint. So that we can work undisturbed. And for the same reason, if the newspapers should contact you, I think you ought to refuse to comment on the case. And don't mention what you've told me, either. Refer them to the police; tell them we're still working on the case."

I can feel myself blushing. But it's not from embarrassment. It's from anger.

I'm not perfect. I think more highly of snow and ice than love. It's easier for me to be interested in mathematics than to have affection for my fellow human beings. But I am anchored to something in life that is constant. You can call it a sense of orientation; you can call it woman's intuition; you can call it whatever you like. I'm standing on a foundation and have no farther to fall. It could be that I haven't managed to organize my life very well. But I always have a grip-with at least one finger at a time-on Absolute Space.

That's why there's a limit to how far the world can twist out of joint, and to how badly things can go before I find out. I now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that something is wrong.

I don't have a driver's license. If I'm dressed up, there are too many parameters to keep in check if I have to steer a bicycle, survey the traffic, maintain my dignity, and hold on to a little hunter's hat I bought at Vagn's on Oster Street. So I usually either walk or take a bus.

Today I decide to walk. It's Tuesday, December 21, and it's cold and clear. First I stroll to the library of the Geological Institute on Oster Vold Street.

One sentence that I'm quite fond of is Dedekind's postulate about linear compression. It says-more or less-that anywhere in a series of numbers, within any infinitesimally small interval, you can find infinity. When I look for the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark in the library's computer, I find enough material for a year's worth of reading.

I select White Gold. It turns out to be a book with sparkles. The workers at the cryolite quarry have a sparkle in their eyes, the industrial tycoons that earn the dough have a sparkle in their eyes, the Greenlandic cleanup staff have a sparkle in their eyes, and the blue fjords of Greenland are full of reflections and flashes of sunshine.

Then I stroll past Osterport station and down along Strand Boulevard. To number 72B, where the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark-next to its competitor, the Øresund Cryolite Corporation-had 500 employees and two laboratory buildings and a raw cryolite hall and a sorting hall and a canteen and workshops. Now all that's left is railroad tracks, the demolished plant, some sheds and shacks, and a single red brick building. From my reading I know that the two big cryolite deposits at Saqqaq in Greenland were finally depleted in the sixties and that during the seventies the company switched over to other activities.

Now there is only a barricaded area, a driveway, and a group of workmen wearing white coveralls enjoying a quiet Christmas beer, getting ready for the approaching holiday.

A bold and enterprising girl would go right up to them and salute like a Girl Scout and talk their lingo and pump them for information about who Mrs. Lübing was and what happened to her.

I don't have that kind of directness. I don't like talking to strangers. I don't like Danish workmen in groups. Actually, I don't like any men at all in groups.

While I've been thinking, I've walked all the way around the block, and the workmen have caught sight of me and wave me closer, and they turn out to be courteous gentlemen who have been employed there for thirty years, and who have the melancholy task of closing down the place, and who know that Mrs. Lübing is still alive and that she lives in the Frederiksberg district and is listed in the phone book, and why do I want to know?

"She did me a favor once," I tell them. "Now I want to ask her about something."

They nod and say that Mrs. Lübing did a lot of favors for people, and they have daughters of their own my age, and they tell me to stop by again.

On my way back toward the city along Strand Boulevard I think that inside even the most paranoid suspicion there is a sense of humanity and the desire for contact waiting to emerge.

No one who has lived side by side with animals that have plenty of room can ever visit the zoo. But one time I take Isaiah along to the Natural History Museum to show him the room with the seals.

He thinks they look sickly. But he's fascinated with the model of the aurochs. On the way home we walk through Fælled Park.

"How old did it say it was?" he asks.

"Forty thousand years old."

"Then it's going to die soon."

"You're probably right."

"When you die, Smilla, can I have your hide?"

"All right," I say.

We walk across the Triangle. It's a warm autumn day, the air is misty.

"Smilla, can we go to Greenland?"

I see no reason to spare children from unavoidable truths. They have to grow up to bear the same burdens as the rest of us.

"No," I say.

"All right."

I've never promised him anything. I can't promise him anything. Nobody can promise anyone anything.

"But we can read about Greenland."

He says "we" about our reading aloud, aware that he contributes just as much by his presence as I do.

"In what book?"

"In Euclid's Elements."

It's dark by the time I get home. The mechanic is pushing his bicycle down into the basement.

He is very wide, like a bear, and if he straightened up his head he would be quite imposing. But he keeps his head down, maybe to apologize for his height, maybe to avoid the doorframes of this world.

I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I've always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.

Isaiah and the mechanic had been friends from the time before Isaiah learned to speak Danish. They probably didn't need many words. One craftsman recognizing another. Two males who were alone in the world, each in his own way.