My Life as a Quant (15 page)

During the week I spoke little to anyone in the department. From Monday through Wednesday or Thursday, I was able to do some physics. Then, as Friday approached, I grew dread-filled, apprehensive about another weekend with my own company; my capacity to work tailed off as I began to scan the local papers and make obsessive plans for what I would do in each segment of the day: pancakes at the communal center table at The Good Earth, then a run, a little work, a walk on the mall, a foreign movie in the evening.

My solitary personal life amplified the lonely activities of a theoretical physicist and an academic. You were always banging your head against a wall, trying to quell the need for company in order to keep studying or calculating. I hated the solitude and envied people whose daily work involved dealing with other people. Years later, I found daily life as a quant to be richer and less isolated than life as an accademic. On any given day you might speak to other quants, read theory, interact with traders, write software, speak with clients, give talks and explain difficult concepts to smart but relatively innumerate traders. Until I experienced it, I wouldn't have believed that an investment bank could be more collegial than a college.

Shortly after I arrived in Boulder I went to the Buddhist center. Once I had become fond of Steiner's
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
, I kept the book around as a talisman, reading bits of it but only occasionally doing some of the spiritual exercises it recommended. I had never managed to be really rigorous about it, and grew to understand that you needed a community and a school to keep you conscientious. Now I decided to attend a few introductory lectures on Tibetan Buddhism given at the Dharmadhattu.

The classes were given by followers of the Rinpoche who were not hip at all, but rather businesslike and regular-looking; part of their spiel was that their practice was consistent with living
in
the world rather than retreating from it. As far as I understood it, the meditation required sitting cross-legged and then simply watching your thoughts as they bubbled up, as though you were dispassionately watching someone else in a movie. You paid unsentimental attention to your own fantasies, obsessions, worries, desires, passions, and disappointments with the detachment of hearing someone else's problems. I liked it, but it was very difficult to do: In no time at all you could suddenly find yourself worrying and strategizing rather than watching. If you caught yourself getting involved, you weren't supposed to grieve or fight it, but simply recognize that distraction itself as just another distraction to be observed. I started attending the Dharmadhattu to meditate on some Sunday mornings, sitting for as long as I could. Their regular session was three hours; someone walked silently around the flamboyantly decorated Tibetan-style room, wordlessly correcting an occasional case of bad posture; once an hour a gong rang, and everyone followed the leader in walking silently around the room for a few minutes, easing cramped muscles. I never looked at my watch; time was on someone else's hands.

The teachers warned you that sometimes, while meditating, you might see strange visions or experience eerily supernatural sensations. Should that happen, you were not to pay undue attention or to regard the vision as a sign of spiritual progress. Instead, you were supposed to acknowledge these as natural occurrences, similar to the other thoughts or feelings bubbling out of your mind. Sometimes, indeed, the walls of the room seemed to shimmer and glow for me, and I couldn't resist feeling naively pleased and vain, despite my teachers' warnings.

At one of the introductory lectures I heard a man in the front of the room ask a question that reminded me of my Steiner dabblings. His name was Roy Hershey and he, like me, was relatively new to Boulder. My instincts were correct; he had trained as a landscape gardener in Europe with the Anthroposophists who, like Steiner himself, thought of plants as the living hair on a living earth. I liked Roy and we had occasional dinners together. Thin and lively and, unlike my physicist colleagues, not career-oriented, he ate more slowly than anyone I have ever seen. He took his time, unperturbed by hurried waiters and unapologetic about it; Roy could easily spend an hour over a plate of pasta. Sometimes he harangued me about the spiritual benefits of buying and preparing one's own meals rather than eating out, but most evenings I still succumbed to the temptation to eat in a restaurant while reading a book rather than go home alone. One evening I invited Roy over and cooked pork chops with orange sauce out of Pierre Franey's Sixty-Minute Gourmet; then we sat on my carpet and meditated for half an hour. Roy claimed to meditate every day in his room in the house he shared with a crowd of people. I envied his free time; he had no job for most of the time I knew him.

Boulder had many spiritual groups “doing the work” together. Roy attended one that met once a week, run by Francesca, a quietly tough woman in her early thirties. She charged about ten or fifteen dollars per person for the weekly group meeting in her house that Roy invited me to attend, and I went along, despite my skepticism.

Before allowing me to join, Francesca required that I first have a private consultation with her. On the appointed afternoon I left my office and went to her house. I answered her questions and remember telling her about my difficulties with living so far from my wife and child; I also told her about my resentments. Then I started attending her meetings.

The group consisted of a range of people, from college kids to dropouts to one middle-aged married man, each obviously there because of some personal difficulties. Francesca had little money. She was nice-looking, but had an unsettlingly bright yellow skin that, she said, was the consequence of a diet rich in homemade carrot juice. At her meetings, she spoke about attitudes to life, read to us from self-help books, elicited discussion, and ended the evening by playing relaxation tapes. It was corny, but not complete nonsense. In the matter of being happy, I could see, both sophisticated and unsophisticated people need the same simple help. It was humbling to be given what looked like trashy paperback self-help books (
The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power
was the title of one, I recall), and see through the clichéd style to the biblically simple truths of some of the statements inside. Francesca worked hard at people. There was something confrontational and unfair about the way she operated, bringing up private facts she knew about you in front of everyone at the meeting, forcing you to publicly confront unpleasant problems and your own contribution to them. I wondered whether she enjoyed provoking these embarrassments, or whether she did it because she thought it was good for you. It reminded me of a verse in Blake's
Auguries of Innocence
: “A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” Occasionally, an evening would end with someone feeling really bad about something she had said, and she would offer to stay up all night with the person involved and talk it through.

We knew little about Francesca's personal life. Sometime in the spring of 1980 she left Boulder, to follow some man or perhaps to get married, according to Roy, and then the meetings ceased. I had an uncomfortable lunch with her at a vegetarian restaurant shortly before she left. As usual, she was positive but hurtful. “What's it like being a physicist?” she asked. I started to bemoan the difficulty of being ambitious, the smart people in the field, the struggle, the political battles, the need to move, the weariness. “No, not your complaints, tell me about the good things, the positive parts!” she insisted. It was sensible. I never saw her again.

The academic year that started in September 1979 sped by rapidly. In late October Eva's mother took a week off work to help us and brought Joshua to visit me. He was two years and two months old, and I was immensely grateful to her for visiting with him. Always foolishly scared of disappointing Josh, I was quick to explain to him that this was only a temporary visit, and that he would have to leave in a week. As usual he seemed to understand everything. We spent a week visiting playgrounds and the almost fabulous Grand Rabbit toy store, where, on his last day in Boulder, I bought a Lone Ranger figure; I gave it to him as a gift and distraction just before he and his grandmother left me and boarded the plane. Then I was alone again. Eva's mother called me from New York when they arrived, knowing that I would be upset at their departure.

At Thanksgiving I went back to New York for the long weekend. As soon as I arrived I anxiously explained to Josh that in three days I would soon depart again. Our babysitter Helga, who looked after Joshua all day long, told me that sometimes, as she wheeled him through the streets in his stroller, he would point to some stranger who must have resembled me and ask her “Is that my Daddy?” I had no knowledge of his inner mental states, but I hurt to think that they might encompass a world in which I could live in his neighborhood and yet not visit him.

At Christmas I returned to New York for a tense winter semester break. In January I flew back to Boulder. Having to take care of Joshua on her own, Eva developed back trouble and had to spend a week in the hospital, prone. On weekends in Boulder I read Spinoza, taking some comfort from his rigorous and unsentimental look at the logic of life's unhappinesses. In May 1980 I returned to New York for the summer. As I began planning for the course I would teach in the fall, I also began to consider that I might not return there.

I spent the summer working in an office kindly provided by the Rockefeller University, in whose postdoc apartment Eva, Josh, and I still lived. I considered applying for physics assistant professorships in the New York area, but there were too few of them and I was exhausted at the thought of more comprehensive job searches. As midsummer approached, I realized that I had no intention of going back to Boulder to live another year like the one I had just endured.

Karma is the mechanical expiation of sin, according to Tolstoy, and at that time I thought I understood its meaning. The universe wanted you to renounce vanity, ambition, and pride, and embrace God. To do it voluntarily would be best. But if you didn't, then karma, the everyday workings of the universe, would slowly and mechanically grind away at your vanities, flaying off your skin of pride and self-importance, like potatoes in an automated peeler, until you submitted.

What was I to do instead? The oil crisis and commodity inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s had pushed interest rates up and had driven down the value of the Treasury and corporate bonds that had long been a staple of investment portfolios. The world of fixed-income investors longed for the old days of price-stable products. Investment banks responded with the financial-products boom of the late 1980s—Treasury bond futures, bond options, CMOs, swaps, and swaptions, whose increasing mathematical complexities ultimately led to good employment opportunities for physicists in finance. If I had left Boulder and physics in 1984, Wall Street would have beckoned clearly.

But in 1980, the early days of the energy crisis, the sirens that sang to weary physicists as they sailed from postdoc position to postdoc position were the energy and communications companies: Exxon Labs in Newark, Schlumberger in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) in Golden, Colorado, and Bell Laboratories at locations throughout New Jersey. They were the Wall Streets of the 1980 physics community.

The smallest deformation of my life in pure physics would have been a job in applied physics, at SERI or Exxon or Schlumberger, working on the physics of oil extraction or solar energy heating. But I was disappointed and ashamed to leave physics, and arrogantly snobbish about its subfields. “If I can't do pure physics,” I thought to myself, “I'll be damned if I do applied!” If they expelled me from the monastery, I didn't intend to worship God in the world. I would rather quit religion forever.

Looking back, I was quite clearly wrong (although in the end fate took care of me anyway). Everything is interesting when you examine it closely enough to be able to reconcile its quality and its quantity; every field is fascinating when you have sufficient familiarity with its nuances and begin to try to bridge the gap between its form and its implementation. Applied physics can provide an assortment of tasks, a mix of long-range and short-term problems, a chance to instruct and entertain—in short, a refreshing alternation between the obsessive world of solitary research and the lively world of dealing with people.

“
You can do what you want, but you cannot want what you want
,” wrote Schopenhauer in his
Essays and Aphorisms
, which I had started reading. This was true, I thought. I could no longer want to do physics, much as I would have liked to. In the struggle with myself, I got to savor Schopenhauer's hard, cynical view of the universe and its driving forces, all phrased and condensed so beautifully that it read like poetry. I never forgot it. His crystal analysis and elegant style far transcended Steiner's clumsy pronouncements of the truth given without explanation, but they gave a much colder comfort.

In entering physics almost twenty years earlier and now in leaving it, I was not alone; I was in part a follower of fashion and a slave of circumstance. Despite my sensation of free will, I had been part of the largest-ever graduating physics class at Cape Town in 1965 and the largest-ever entering physics class at Columbia in 1966. Similarly now, I was part of the tidal efflux. Several people I had known as students or postdocs in physics had already left the field and were now working at Bell Labs. Furthermore, a molecular biologist acquaintance of Eva's, Lucy Shapiro, had a husband, Harley McAdams, who worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Lucy suggested to Eva that I interview with him. Reluctantly, I went out to spend a day there in the summer. I gave a half-hour talk on an introduction to gauge theories and the research I had done, trying hard to be qualitative and entertaining, and soon I had an offer from them. According to my future friend Mark Koenigsberg, an applied mathematician from MIT who was already working there but had been away the day I interviewed, they liked me a lot. Mark had a penchant for scientific metaphors and used to tease and flatter me for years afterwards that since my interview they rated everyone else they questioned in milliDermans.