down her golden tresses, a few locks of her hair fell onto the earth and turned into the
lilies of the field ...
Sophie liked her beautiful story. If she had not known any other explanation for
the changing seasons, she felt sure she would have come to believe her own story in
the end.
She understood that people had always felt a need to explain the processes of
nature. Perhaps they could not live without such explanations. And that they made up
all those myths in the time before there was anything called science.
The Natural Philosophers
… nothing can come from nothing …
When her mother got home from work that afternoon Sophie was sitting in the
glider, pondering the possible connection between the philosophy course and Hilde
Moller Knag, who would not be getting a birthday card from her father.
Her mother called from the other end of the garden, “Sophie! There’s a letter for
you!”
She caught her breath. She had already emptied the mailbox, so the letter had to
be from the philosopher. What on earth would she say to her mother?
“There’s no stamp on it. It’s probably a love letter!”
Sophie took the letter.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
She had to find an excuse.
“Have you ever heard of anyone opening a love letter with her mother looking
over her shoulder?”
Let her mother think it was a love letter. Although it was embarrassing enough,
it would be even worse if her mother found out that she was doing a correspondence
course with a complete stranger, a philosopher who was playing hide-and-seek with
her.
It was one of the little white envelopes. When Sophie got upstairs to her room,
she found three new questions:
Is there a basic substance that everything else is made of?
Can water turn into wine?
How can earth and water produce a live frog!
Sophie found the questions pretty stupid, but nevertheless they kept buzzing
around in her head all evening. She was still thinking about them at school the next
day, examining them one by one.
Could there be a “basic substance” that everything was made of? If there was
some such substance, how could it suddenly turn into a flower or an elephant?
The same objection applied to the question of whether water could turn into
wine. Sophie knew the parable of how Jesus turned water into wine, but she had never
taken it literally. And if Jesus really had turned water into wine, it was because it was
a miracle, something that could not be done normally. Sophie knew there was a lot of
water, not only in wine but in all other growing things. But even if a cucumber was 95
percent water, there must be something else in it as well, because a cucumber was a
cucumber, not water.
And then there was the question about the frog. Her philosophy teacher had this
really weird thing about frogs.