ES text 5

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him and who is led to work on environmental issues, more particularly on renewable energies. He is travelling back home to deliver a speech.

A common place sight that would have astounded Newton or Dickens. He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime—it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging, widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks towards the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood, and the out-sized hospital where his mother died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary, and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine. Then his gaze was rotated southwards through a silvery haze over the Weald of Sussex towards the soft line of the south downs, whose gentle folds once cradled his raucous first marriage, a synaesthesia of misguided love, infant excrement and wailing of their lodgers' twins, and the heady quantum calculations that led, fifteen years and two divorces later, to his prize. His prize , that had half blessed, half ruined his life. Beyond those hills was the English Channel, trimmed with frills of pinkish cloud that obscured the coast of France.

Now a fresh tilt of the aircraft's wings turned him into the sunlight and a view of west London and, just below the trembling engine slung beneath the wing, his improbable destination, the microscopic airport, and around it, the arterial feeds, and traffic pulsing down them like corpuscles, M4, M25, M40, the charmless designations of a hard-headed age. Benignly, the glare from the west softened a little the industrial squalor. He saw the Thames Valley, a pallid winter green, looping between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern Hills. Beyond, lost to view, was Oxford and the laboratory-toiling of his undergraduate years, and the finely calculated courting of his first wife, Maisie. And now, here it came again , for the sixth time, the colossal disc of London itself, turning like an intricately slotted space station in majestic self-sufficiency. As unplanned as a giant termite nest, as a rain forest, and a thing of beauty, to great human intensity at the centre, along the rediscovered river between Westminster and Tower bridge, dense with confident, playful architecture, new toys. Briefly he thought he saw the plane's shadow flitting like a free spirit across St James's and over the rooftops, but it was impossible at such a height. He knew about light. Among those millions of roofs, four had sheltered his second, third, fourth and fifth marriages. These alliances had defined his life, and they were all, no point denying it, calamities.

These days, whenever he came over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. The giant concrete wounds dressed with steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon—the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat , a modern kind of heat that ha become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession. The hot breath of civilisation.

Ian McEwan, Solar (p. 148-150), Vintage, 2010.