“The man who does not understand the nature of the universe cannot know his place in it.” — Marcus Aurelius
Kogan knew it couldn’t possibly be the woman he had bedded in Venice nearly forty years ago, yet there she was, on the train from Glasgow to Mallaig, headed into the Scottish Highlands: the same olive-skinned complexion, the same dark, Semitic features — that same lush exuberance of curly, coal-black hair. Aside from the temporal impossibility of it all, this was Sheila Rosenwein, incarnate.
The conference in Edinburgh had gone well, and now he and Marcie were taking a well-earned week in the craggy, green countryside, stretching from the Grampian Mountains to Inverness and the far north. Kogan was a cosmologist, not a geologist, but he knew of the great upheavals, the cycles of ice and fire that had shaped Scotland, from the volcanic eruptions four hundred million years ago to the last ice age, only ten millennia ago. Great glacial ice floes had gouged out these Highland valleys, then dumped their rocky debris in fields of parallel drumlins. The whole country, it seemed to Kogan, was a collection of fragments — tossed, heaved and heaped, over untold eons.
A pimply faced young man pushed a pastry cart through the narrow aisle, replying “No bother, no bother!” to the proffered thanks of hungry customers. Kogan was annoyed that there was no dining car on the train, and reluctantly purchased two blueberry scones. Marcie, busy snapping pictures through the sun-dappled windows, kept vying for her husband’s attention.
“Joel,...
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