From The Infinities

. . ."relives the time of his father's death . . . as if a close-packed flotilla were putting out to sea." He recalls that his father died at Christmas and he helped his mother bake a cake, "measuring out the ingredients on the black iron weighing-scales with the brass weights that were cool and heavy as he imagined doubloons would be," and how, when his mother's tears fell into the mixing bowl, "making three tiny grey craters in the white mixture," the embarrassed boy took over the mixing as his mother sat down and wept, her tears quickly dissolving into the other ingredients as he asked himself: "but what did it mean, completely mixed? . . . how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved?--how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder?"
. In this tragic scene, which goes on for several pages, we see a character in formation, coalescing itself around grief, a boy sensing and testing his powers of imaginative abstraction as he discovers a permanent refuge from unfiltered feeling. "Yes," says Hermes, and not without a certain bitter irony, "we gods were there with him even then."
. Inspiration--whether in mathemathhics, love, science or art--often comes with a cost to those closest to us."
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--Quotations from "The Infinities," a novel by John Banville (Alfred A. Knopf) 273 pages; $25.95, as reviewed by Jacob Molyneux in the Books section, SF Chronicle Sunday March 14.