Lights out

The days are getting very, very short again. I'm amazed, as ever, at the way this city comes into itself in the early night.

Candles burn small and silent behind the windows of close brick buildings, buildings that lean against each other in the dark, lean over narrow streets and wide canals, lean into the glow of electric light to shrug off the late year's rain.

The raindrops bring the black canals to life and together with the cold and dark shroud bikers on back streets in mystery as they hurry past, the purposeful bikers, their lamps glowing weakly above their tires, disappearing down an empty lane.

And at my stamkroeg, my regular bar, as the days grow cold and short I can sit by the openhaard, the fireplace, and watch the shadows dance along the walls and windows, windows that look out on a huddled brick street where most of the other people in the bar grew up.

Still for the most part I do not like all this darkness. It comes down like a lid, closes us in, and no lit bridge, with arched stone or wood slats, can carry you across it. The people here endure the long night well, and with reason. But it remains a challenge.

A fantastic conversation

Amazing what you can hear from a table over on a terrace on a fine fall day.

They had been speaking like this for a while.

"In the evening," she said, "we're all reduced to shadows. Shadows by moonlight, and all quick like silver, like that. But in the morning," and here she set down her dark beer, probably sweet, "we're brought back by the sun, by the sunlight."

"What," he asked, his fork held up between his face and his plate, "are you suggesting?"

"That," she stammered a little, "that at night I know a different truth. A different truth," she repeated herself. "What does that mean?"

When he didn't speak she went on. "It's like a dream. I can't escape its logic while I'm within it. But in the morning it makes no sense. The daytime is so much more sure, so certain. Surer. Surer? But still, whatever, it's not like that means anything at night." She inhaled audibly, perhaps for dramatic effect. "Isn't that scary?"

"What about the dawn?" he asked, not answering. "I always feel different at dawn." Then he added, "not that I'm awake then all that often, I mean at least not sober."

She was drinking her beer again. "Oh I don't know. The dawn's nice I guess."

Of course I had to madlib the words I didn't catch.

Take the baton

Consider this another effort to elicit comment from my reticent readers. I'm looking for nominations for today's spirits kindred, for better or worse, to Évariste Galois. If you don't know his story, or don't mind a refresher, read on.

Galois was a sort of republican dauphin (if it's acceptable to say such a thing). Born in 1811 in a village south of Paris to the son of a politically involved republican, and schooled as a young child in Latin and classic texts by his mother, he became interested in mathematics as a teenager. He twice failed the test to enter the École Polytechnique, the latter occasion occurring two days after his father committed suicide following a politically charged run-in with the local priest.

Évariste also failed repeatedly to see his discoveries in the theory of polynomial equations published, the reasons for which are unclear, but he did publish three papers in 1830, laying the foundation for what came to be known as Galois Theory. The full articulation of Galois Theory, linking field theory and group theory in abstract algebra, was published posthumously – not entirely surprising, as he wrote much of its explication only two days before his untimely death.

Politically active, Galois was expelled from the school he did get into, the École Normale, for republican political agitation. He used his extra time to join the Republican Artillery Unit of the National Guard. The unit was dissolved to prevent it from destabilizing the government, with nineteen officers from the unit arrested on conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy. During the party following their acquittal, Galois toasted the king holding a dagger over his cup, and was promptly arrested – though ultimately acquitted – for threatening the king's life. He was later arrested and convicted, however, for showing up to a Bastille Day celebration armed to the teeth and wearing his old uniform.

While in jail, Galois saw another paper on the theory of equations rejected. Then his jail term ended early when he was transferred to a clinic with other prisoners as a precaution taken against a raging cholera epidemic. At the clinic, he fell madly in love with Stéphanie, daughter of Jean-Louis Poterin-Dumotel, one of the doctors. She, too, rejected him.

Within weeks Galois was fighting a duel he knew he would lose. Legend has it the duel was a royalist conspiracy to get him out of the way, but that legend's been long disregarded, and is possibly a fabrication that began with Galois himself. He stayed awake the entire night before the duel, writing his republican friends. Between scribbling "Je n'ai pas le temps" (I don't have time) over and over, and conveying other thoughts in other letters, he made clear his extraordinary mathematics in a letter to his friend Chevalier.

He was shot in the abdomen and dead the following day. His last words to his brother were: "Ne pleure pas, Alfred – j'ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans." (Don't cry, Alfred – I need all my courage to die at twenty.)