In a lifetime of indifference to math, the equations and formula that nonetheless stuck with a planet’s gravitational strength on my mind’s tabula rasa are 1+1=2; e=mc2; and H2O — albeit I can’t say I have understood the latter two as clearly as maybe you have.
Forget the fantastic, literally earth-shaking, second. Take just the third, the chemical formula for water.
Water molecule is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Can you visualize what that means the way you can imagine holding an apple in your left hand and a chocolate bar in your right? No way, since the thing is microscopic in dimension.
Two atoms of hydrogen combining with one atom of oxygen equals one molecule of water. Means, a glass of water makes you a billionaire.
Nay, much, much more — a drop of water means you are a septillionaire — but in terms of molecules, not dollars or even pesos or even centavos! (If it were, Klicko Orange, you’d be so rich you can make any girl’s wish come true — along with yours, of course.)
Actually, a glass of water can be beyond buying in the same way that one of Shakespeare’s kings — fighting on foot because he lost his steed and therefore, dead any minute — shouted: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
The first time I experienced great thirst was in grade school, after joining a town parade and walking a kilometer or two, under the sun.
To this day, I remember my amazement at the size of my thirst as, upon getting home, I quaffed glass after glass of water.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French pilot who wrote The Little Prince, wrote a shorter piece that made a deeper impression on me, Prisoner of the Sand, really non-fiction, in fact, the autobiographical basis of The Little Prince.
Prisoner is only a chapter in the book, Wind, Sand and Stars but quite autonomous in that it tells of how the author and his companion survived an aeroplane crash in the Sahara.
Three days without water in the desert, walking on blindly, hoping somehow to be rescued. Only my limitation as a reader stops me from calling this piece the greatest account of thirst ever written.
In a writers workshop a world ago, I heard Nick Joaquin cite a virtue that Hemingway possesses as a writer: when Hemingway describes, say a soft drink (example mine), the ice-cold taste of the beverage will register in your parched mind’s mouth, or is it mouth’s mind, just reading it.
At a certain point in my reading of Exupery’s story, it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say I was ready to see a desert mirage.
The whole passage when rescue comes is a veritable hymn to water. I won’t show it here without the harrowing tale of thirst that precedes it as the power of the narrative would be missing altogether. At any rate: ‘Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.’
Poetry talking. Science, inclined to be amused by the word mysterious, says simply: H2O.
Yet, the first man of science, Thales of Miletus, looking for the primal origin of matter and thereby, breaking epochally with mythos, said in still gnomic fashion: ‘Everything is water, water is all.’
And some 20 centuries later, Leonardo: “Water is the driving force of all nature.”
If this is beginning to smell like antiquity itself, how about Loren Eiseley writing: “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
That’s a 20th century naturalist, a great one, talking.
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Author’s email: cezaruis@gmail.com
