Page 124 - A Little Life: A Novel

Laurence smiled back at him and nodded. “Very good,” he said.
“Well, I have a question,” said Harold, who’d been quiet, listening to
them. “How and why on earth did you end up in law school?”

Everyone laughed, and he did, too. He had been asked that question often
(by Dr. Li, despairingly; by his master’s adviser, Dr. Kashen, perplexedly),
and he always changed the answer to suit the audience, for the real answer
—that he wanted to have the means to protect himself; that he wanted to
make sure no one could ever reach him again—seemed too selfish and
shallow and tiny a reason to say aloud (and would invite a slew of
subsequent questions anyway). Besides, he knew enough now to know that

the law was a flimsy form of protection: if he really wanted to be safe, he
should have become a marksman squinting through an eyepiece, or a
chemist in a lab with his pipettes and poisons.
That night, though, he said, “But law isn’t so unlike pure math, really—I
mean, it too in theory can offer an answer to every question, can’t it? Laws
of anything are meant to be pressed against, and stretched, and if they can’t

provide solutions to every matter they claim to cover, then they aren’t really
laws at all, are they?” He stopped to consider what he’d just said. “I
suppose the difference is that in law, there are many paths to many answers,
and in math, there are many paths to a single answer. And also, I guess, that
law isn’t actually about the truth: it’s about governance. But math doesn’t
have to be convenient, or practical, or managerial—it only has to be true.
“But I suppose the other way in which they’re alike is that in

mathematics, as well as in law, what matters more—or, more accurately,
what’s more memorable—is not that the case, or proof, is won or solved,
but the beauty, the economy, with which it’s done.”
“What do you mean?” asked Harold.
“Well,” he said, “in law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a
beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness

of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk
about a beautiful proof, what we’re recognizing is the simplicity of the
proof, its … elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability.”
“What about something like Fermat’s last theorem?” asked Julia.
“That’s a perfect example of a non-beautiful proof. Because while it was
important that it was solved, it was, for a lot of people—like my adviser—a
disappointment. The proof went on for hundreds of pages, and drew from

so many disparate fields of mathematics, and was so—tortured, jigsawed,