In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf--so it seemed to those who from out in the wood lecture halls watched his eyelids slowly granulate, spots and wrinkles grow across his image, disintegrating it toward old age--a hostility, a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all, the bond must be improved on--some students even read "transcended." That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond--where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!
"Whatever lip-service we may pay to Reason," he told Pökler's class back at the T.H., "to moderation and compromise, nevertheless here remains the lion. A lion in each one of you. He is either tamed--by too much mathematics, by details of design, by corporate procedures--or he stays wild, an eternal predator.
"The lion does not know subtleties and half-solutions. He does not accept sharing as a basis for anything! He takes, he holds! He is not a Bolshevik or a Jew. You will never hear relativity from the lion. He wants the absolute. Life and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy of the leap, the roar, the blood."
If this be National Socialist chemistry, blame that something-in-the-air, the Zeitgeist. Sure, blame it. Prof.-Dr. Jamf was not immune.
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