A quantum, relatively speaking
Posted on January 26th, 2008 in Daily Life |
The new James Bond movie, “Quantum Solace” is based LOOSELY on a short story by Ian Flemming. An excerpt from WikiPedia below, explains the details of a story told to Bond during this rather uneventful tale.
Bond makes a remark after dinner when the other guests have left in order to stimulate conversation, about always having thought it would be nice to marry an air hostess. This solicits a careful reply from the elderly Governor of The Bahamas who tells 007 a sad tale about a relationship between a former civil servant he calls Philip Masters, stationed in Bermuda, and air hostess Rhoda Llewellyn. After meeting aboard a flight to London the two eventually married but after a time Rhoda became unhappy with her life as a housewife. She then began a long open affair with the eldest son of a rich Bermudan family. As a result Masters’ work deteriorated and he suffered a nervous breakdown. After recovering he was given a break from Bermuda by the governor and sent on an assignment to Washington to negotiate fishing rights with the US. At the same time the governor’s wife had a talk with Rhoda just as her affair ended. Masters returned a few months later and decided to end his marriage, although he and Rhoda continued to appear as a happy couple in public. Masters returned alone to the UK, leaving a penniless Rhoda stranded in Bermuda, an act which he’d been incapable of carrying out merely months earlier
This then leads the Governor to speak of the notion of the “Quantum of Solace”.
…the smallest unit of human compassion that two people can have.
In the case of Masters and Rhoda, Masters no longer had even this quantum left for Rhoda and thus he could leave her in such a state.
What I like is the idea of this quantum because it’s an idea that I have tried, in vain, to articulate—this notion of there being a basic amount of compassion that people have for each other. What I find is that my quantum of solace is not always the same as everyone else’s. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s one of those things that’s hard to verbalize because it’s so easy to feel like your idea of this quantum is so basic that there are no words.
What do you do? Oh the big questions…. I don’t know. Ideally, you want to find someone working with the same units. Not euros and dollars, pounds and kilograms, just solace and solace, no fractional equivalents. Who wants to do math? Conversions? If you don’t start from the same basic place, you’re always going to be working on a different scale. You’ll be out of balance. One looking for more, one looking for less. Pushing, pulling because you both think you’re asking for the same thing, the same basic quantum of solace, but it’s not, and I don’t know how it ever would be.
