cosmology

there's a monitor attached to his chair and on the monitor are menus of words. he chooses words, constructs sentences, by twitching a muscle in his face, near his right eye. during his lectures last night, between each sentence or two, there would be a silence of 30 or 40 seconds' duration, in which he put together the next sentence or two for his voice synthesizer. these punctuations of silence were sometimes helpful, as i could use the time to attempt to glean the meaning of his abstractions. sometimes, though, i just watched him up there on the stage. there were stretches of his lectures in which i was right there with him, understanding him as he described his theories of the universes. there were larger stretches in which i was far, far behind.