And beyond that, of course, an examination of mankind’s greatest secret, the meaning of consciousness.
It had begun in the 1970s, when a small group of trailblazers had launched themselves on what they had believed to be the ultimate scientific journey: an ongoing exploration of the human mind, conducted under strict laboratory conditions, and hopefully leading towards not only a fuller knowledge of the mind’s powers but also, maybe one day, to at least some level of understanding of the final mystery. What is consciousness? And what, if we surrender to it, is consciousness capable of?
It had always been something of a dream. But Sandy Jones, the girl from the wrong side of town, also knew that dreams could come true. And, rather to her surprise, she had become enthralled by RECAP, and those who had made it their life’s work.
Part Two
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
Three
Jones had not even heard of RECAP when she arrived at Princeton in 1994. But her, at first reluctant, association with the charismatic underworld of the project and its people began by accident just a few weeks later.
Princeton itself had been a culture shock. And Jones was still getting used to the air of unreality about the place, from its perfectly manicured lawns and immaculately sited sculptures to its curiously out of place architecture.
Mock Tudor mansions dominated the campus, most serving as dining halls for students. To Jones, accustomed as she had quickly become to the famous dreamy spires of Oxford, arguably the grandest old university in existence, it all looked totally false. The buildings didn’t really belong. Jones thought they were like a cross between the more pretentious examples of English suburbia and the set of Stepford Wives. Everything about the place created an atmosphere of some kind of alternative world. Students and staff wafted about in a bubble of their own superiority, a state not uncommon in great universities internationally. But at Princeton this seemed to be taken to extremes, without a hint, of course, of what Jones considered to be the saving grace of good old British cynicism and self-deprecation. Princeton and its people, she learned, took themselves and their reproduction architecture very seriously indeed.
When Jones had excitedly told her favourite Oxford lecturer that she had landed a place to study for her doctorate in America, at the famous Ivy League university, the man, a somewhat grizzly and very English don of the old school, replied sagely, ‘America? Princeton isn’t in America.’ Jones soon learned exactly what the lecturer had meant. Moreover, she quickly concluded that not only was Princeton most certainly not in America, it probably wasn’t even on planet Earth. But that didn’t concern Sandy Jones at all.
Whatever she felt about the curious unreality of Princeton, Jones knew she had been given a wonderful opportunity to complete her studies there. Princeton was at the cutting edge of her area of science. And it was where probably the greatest physicist of all, Albert Einstein, had sought his ultimate refuge from Nazi Germany and completed so many of his great works.
However, to begin with, she thought she was never going to fit into the place. She was a blue stocking with few social graces. The air of casual sophistication she acquired later in life was still a long way off. She hadn’t known how to dress then, and in any case had yet to acquire any interest in clothes. And she hadn’t a clue about make-up. She reckoned, in those days, that she was skinny rather than slim. Her breasts had barely developed since adolescence, which embarrassed her — particularly after the doctor who carried out her Princeton medical told her she was the nearest thing he’d ever seen to a hermaphrodite. However she had good skin, intelligent hazel eyes, and unusually glossy black hair, shaped into a sharp bob. She did know she was not entirely unattractive, and there had been one boyfriend — or very nearly — at Oxford, who had relieved her of the burden of her virginity. But after three rather fraught months he ended it, telling her that he couldn’t cope with being treated as a biological experiment. And Sandy Jones was honest enough to accept that he’d probably assessed her attitude to sex rather accurately.
She became something of a loner at Oxford, and felt destined to become even more of one at Princeton. She was, in fact, painfully lonely — and therefore receptive to, and even grateful for, the attentions of fellow student Ed MacEntee.
Ed was a brilliant mathematician, a child prodigy, but, not unlike Sandy, something of a lost soul away from his own rarefied world. He was, however, clearly smitten with Sandy Jones from the moment they met.
They became friends, at first no more than that, very quickly studying together in the evenings at the Firestone Library, and often sharing a table at the dining club at mealtimes. They walked around campus together. They pooled their resources to occasionally visit the town’s hippest bar — not that Jones considered anything Princeton, town or university, could offer to be remotely hip really. They went swimming together in the campus pools, and at weekends they would sometimes go to the movies, or a nearby bowling alley.
Ed was tall, thin, and more than presentable, even though he was already losing his wispy blonde hair. He was also the kindest and gentlest of men. Best of all, because of him, she was no longer lonely.
When the friendship ultimately moved on, and they became lovers, Sandy Jones was glad, if only because this surely made her like everybody else. The earth most certainly did not move for her. Ed, in the second year of his BSc was a year or so younger than Jones, and possibly even less experienced. But the sex was pleasant enough, and she at least tried not to give the impression that she was treating it as a scientific experiment.
Perhaps surprisingly for a mathematician, Ed, it turned out, was heavily into RECAP. He frequently talked to her about the project, but most of the time she didn’t even listen properly. After all, he was inclined to tell the same thing over and over again.
One warm summer’s evening when they were sitting in the shade of Nixon’s Nose — the irreverent name given by the students to Princeton’s massive Henry Moore sculpture which from a certain angle is considered to resemble the profile of the disgraced former president — Ed was particularly persistent.
‘I mean, people think it’s weird, but it’s not,’ he told her. ‘Connie says it’s all about studying powers of the human mind which have always been there. We’ve lost the use of them, that’s all, just like you’d lose the use of your legs or arms if you didn’t exercise them. That’s partly why Paul came up with the name, RECAP, because at least part of the purpose of the project is to look way back in time over the way the mind has developed and changed, in order to move forwards...’
Jones nodded sagely. Connie this... Paul that. She really wasn’t that interested.
‘The thing is nobody can explain why it happens, but laboratory condition experiments across the world are proving that it does happen.’
‘Uh huh,’ Jones responded. Why what happens? She couldn’t even be bothered to ask. In any case he had probably told her already. Repeatedly. She just hadn’t taken any of it in properly. She had her own work to think about.
‘You know, you should come along and meet Connie and Paul, see what they’re doing first hand,’ Ed continued.