Yesterday, I went to watch a play called “Proof“, which was awarded 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. It was originally produced in Manhattan Theatre Club and then went to Broadway, and the adopted film was released in 2005, directed by John Madden and starred by Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal and Hope Davis.
A story about genius, someone admiring genius, someone struggling hard to be as close to a genius as possible, it intrigues me far beyond all of these. The heroine Catherine is 25 years old at Act One, ironically, the same age I’m now. She hasn’t really “worked” since her dad getting bad, and actually she quit from undergraduate, not to mention graduate school. However, born to be a daughter of a genius mathematician, she does have talent on mathematics, which seems to already be part of her nature, although most of the time, she denies this fact. The story isn’t that out of imagination, but as “ordinal” as I could anticipate, however, it makes me think a lot when Catherine first said to her father’s ex PhD student Hal, ‘you just don’t wanna believe someone could do all these work who wasn’t a graduate student, and who even didn’t finish her undergraduate, while you have been struggled years to get your PhD degree.’ Something like that, maybe not exact. I could now understand why some people always leave theatres full of tears. I felt my throat congested by something, some mixed emotions I could not tell or which I just don’t want to face.
I was deeply fascinated with geniuses and their stories since I was a three or four-year-old girl. Instead of playing toys or dolls, I played medical instruments as well as laboratory wares. My tales were never ever about Cinderella, Princess, and their happy ending with Prince, but about Madam Curie’s Ra, X-ray and the ring of Ringen’s wife, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and so on. Such a passion drove me to collect every edition of biography of Marie Curie I happened to see, to feel or believe that crazy scientists always had a natural affinity for me, and to try to be another Frankenstein myself. Years and years passed, and now I’m in graduate school, doing research, however I start to forget my original motivation, that kind of crazy passion which makes me afraid, impulsed, but more, excited and exalted. They’re away from me or more exactly, not as strong as they used to be. I’m afraid of being a person like Hal, a person as common as the commons. I know there’s a long long way ahead, but I don’t know where it will take me to.
