How the Light Gets In

Kids are the best scientists:
Curious, playful, observing without agenda.

Science & the Cult of Personality

The festival was Alejandro’s fault.

He’d been talking about it for months — this philosophy thing in Wales, or maybe it was England, she kept forgetting the difference — and somehow he’d convinced her parents that a family trip to the UK should include two days at a philosophy and music festival in a town she couldn’t pronounce. Hay-on-Wye. It sounded like something Sheepey would say after too many pints.

“It’s one of the most important intellectual events in Europe,” Alejandro had said, and her dad had nodded like he knew what that meant, and her mom had said “that sounds wonderful!” because her mom said that about everything, and Persefoni had said nothing because nobody asked her, and now here they were.

The festival itself was actually kind of cool — she’d give it that. It was spread across a little town full of bookshops, with tents and stages set up in fields and courtyards, and there were food stalls and people playing music and everyone looked like they’d rather be interesting than attractive, which was a choice Persefoni respected even if she didn’t understand it. There were worse places to be on a summer afternoon.

They’d arrived around eleven. Her dad had found the pub within twenty minutes.

It wasn’t really a pub — more of an open-air tent with a makeshift bar and picnic tables and a guy pouring pints who looked like he’d been doing it since before Persefoni was born. But her dad walked into that tent the way other people walked into their own living rooms. Within five minutes he was leaning on the bar, telling the bartender something that made the man throw his head back laughing, and her mom was sitting at a picnic table with a glass of wine she hadn’t asked for, smiling the smile she smiled when he was performing for new people, which was the same smile she always smiled, because he was always performing for new people.

“You kids go have fun,” her dad said, waving them off without looking. He was already into a story about the time he’d fixed a fabrication tool at Intel with a paperclip and a piece of chewing gum, and the bartender was leaning in like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard, and maybe it was, because her dad could make anything the most interesting thing you’d ever heard. That was his gift.

So that’s what they did. Alejandro went to the talks — every talk, back to back, a kid in a candy store that dispensed ideas instead of sugar. And Kathleen and Persefoni did what Kathleen and Persefoni always did: they made their own fun. They wandered the bookshops and invented backstories for strangers and ate pastries and told Sheepey stories at full volume — his aristocratic opinions on Welsh weather, his feud with a goat in Surrey — until an older woman in a scarf asked them to please keep it down, at which point they kept it down for roughly forty-five seconds. They checked on her parents a couple of times — her dad always in the same spot at the bar, always with a fresh pint, always with someone new leaning in to listen; her mom always at the picnic table, always smiling, always waiting. The festival went on around them and above them and through them, and by mid-afternoon Persefoni had decided that philosophy festivals were actually fine as long as you didn’t go to any of the philosophy.

The McGilchrist talk was at four. The main event — the one Alejandro had been waiting for all day. He found the girls near a food stall and told them they had to come, they had to, this was the whole reason they were here, please. Kathleen said of course. Persefoni said fine.

The talk was in a big white tent that smelled like grass and rain, the light inside pale and bluish, filtered through canvas. Every chair was taken and people were standing three deep at the back, which told Persefoni something about this man that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Most of the audience looked like the kind of adults who read books on vacation instead of going to the beach, which she found deeply suspicious. Alejandro pulled them to the front — past all the chairs, to the strip of grass between the first row and the stage — and sat on the ground like it was the best seat in the house. Kathleen sat beside him. Persefoni looked at two hundred adults in chairs behind her and lowered herself onto the grass, which was cold and slightly damp through her jeans.

The man on stage was adorable.

That was her first thought and she never revised it. He was old — really old, maybe seventy? — with white hair and a proper British bearing, the kind of man who probably said “quite” and “indeed” without irony. He stood very straight and spoke very carefully and he had the kind of face that made you want to bring him a cup of tea and a biscuit. He looked like someone’s grandfather. He looked like Sheepey if Sheepey were a human and had tenure.

His name was Iain McGilchrist and he was, according to Alejandro, one of the most important thinkers alive.

The problem was that he talked the way important thinkers talked.

Persefoni tried. She really did. She sat there for the first ten minutes and listened to this lovely old man explain something about hemispheres and attention and the way the brain divided the world into parts, and she understood each individual word but the sentences they formed seemed to dissolve in the air before they reached her, like smoke rings — pretty, structured, gone. He was saying something about the left hemisphere being a tool that had mistaken itself for the master, and about how the right hemisphere saw the whole while the left saw the parts, and about how Western civilization had become increasingly dominated by a mode of attention that grasped and controlled rather than one that was open and receptive, and Persefoni thought: I would literally rather be looking at sheep.

She leaned over to Kathleen. “He looks like he irons his pajamas,” she whispered.

Nothing.

“I bet he has a cat named something like Reginald.”

Kathleen didn’t respond. She was watching Alejandro, who was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his mouth slightly open, the way he looked when something was happening inside his brain that he couldn’t wait to let out. His eyes were locked on the stage. He was gone — transported — and Kathleen was watching him the way you watch someone who’s gone somewhere you can’t follow.

“Kathleen.”

“Shh.”

“He just said ‘the phenomenological world.’ Who says that?”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re not listening. You’re watching Alejandro listen.”

“Persefoni. Stop.”

It landed like a small slap. Not the words — the tone. The dismissal. Kathleen had never shushed her like that before. They’d spent seven years whispering through assemblies and church services and every boring thing the adult world had ever forced them to sit through, and this was what they did — they made it funny, they made it theirs, they survived it together. That was the deal. That had always been the deal.

But Kathleen was looking at Alejandro the way Alejandro was looking at the stage, and Persefoni was looking at Kathleen, and for a moment that she would remember much longer than she expected to, nobody was looking at her.

She sat there for another few minutes, arms crossed, watching the adorable old man move his hands in careful precise gestures as he talked about something called “the Master and his Emissary,” which sounded like a fairy tale, which would have been fine with Persefoni because she liked fairy tales, but he wasn’t telling it like one. He was telling it like a textbook. She could feel the shape of something interesting in there — a quiet king and a loud servant, the servant forgetting his place, taking over the kingdom — but every time she got close to the picture, the man said something like “left-hemisphere-dominant analytical processing” and the picture dissolved.

She stood up off the grass — the only person in the tent moving, the only person at ground level, visible to everyone — and walked out into the afternoon, where the wind off the hills moved through the festival grounds without stopping for anything, bending the pennants on the tent poles and letting them go.

She went to the pub to find her mom.

The castle was right there — she could see it from the festival grounds, old and stone and covered in ivy, and she wanted to go explore it. She was done with philosophy. She wanted to climb something.

She could hear her dad before she could see him. His laugh — the real one, the big one, the one that made other people laugh just from hearing it — was coming from inside the tent, and she followed it the way she’d followed it her whole life, like a sound that meant home.

She stopped at the entrance.

The tent was open on two sides, and the late afternoon light was coming through the canvas warm and reddish-gold, turning everything soft. String lights were looped between the poles, not yet lit but promising something for later. It smelled like hops and cut grass and something cooking somewhere, and there was laughter — real laughter, the kind that made you want to know what was funny. And at the center of it, as always, was her dad.

He was at the bar with three or four people around him — a different little audience than the one from lunch — and he was in the middle of something. She could tell from his hands, the way they moved when he was building a story, conducting his own orchestra. She caught the tail end of it — something about a pressure gauge and a zip tie and his boss’s face when the tool came back online — and the whole group erupted, and her dad’s laugh was the biggest, and she felt it in her chest the way she always did, and for a second she almost walked in and sat down. The tent was nice. Her dad was happy. Everyone around him was happy. It would have been easy to believe that this was enough.

Her mom was at the picnic table. Exactly where she’d been five hours ago, and for every check-in between. Her dad had a fresh pint — she’d lost count of how many that was. Her mom’s wine was half-finished and warm-looking, the red gone dark at the edges where it clung to the glass.

Her mom said something. Persefoni couldn’t hear all of it — just her voice, softer than the laughter around the bar, the way it always was. But she caught the shape: “…maybe you and I could go see the castle…” and “…it’s right over there, George, it looks so pretty…” and something about how it would be nice for the two of them.

She wanted to go explore. She wanted to do something with her husband besides sit at this pub where he’d been holding court since eleven in the morning. Persefoni could hear it in her mother’s voice — not a complaint, never a complaint, just a small hope. A suggestion wrapped in enough softness that it could be ignored without anyone feeling bad about ignoring it.

Her dad turned from the bar. His face did the thing it always did — the warmth, the focus, the full beam of his attention landing on her mom like a spotlight. He wasn’t angry. Her dad was never angry. He was something worse than angry. He was charming.

“Baby, we flew all the way across the ocean for this trip. The kids are having the time of their lives — did you see Alejandro’s face in there? And this place!” He spread his arms like he was presenting the tent to her, this makeshift pub with its folding tables and its plastic cups, as if it were the Ritz. “When are we ever going to be back here? Let’s just enjoy this. Let’s enjoy being here.”

He hadn’t seen the kids all day. He had no idea what Alejandro’s face looked like in there. He’d been at this bar since they arrived, performing for whoever would listen, and he believed it — you could see that he believed it — and somehow that made it true. He said it like he was giving her a gift. Like staying at this bar while she sat alone at a picnic table was something he was doing for her. And Persefoni watched her mother’s face do the thing it always did — a small softening, a small surrender, the moment where whatever she actually wanted got folded up and put away somewhere she wouldn’t look at it again.

“You’re right,” her mom said. “You’re right, it is nice here.”

It wasn’t what she’d asked for. It wasn’t even close. But it was what her dad wanted, and what her dad wanted had a way of becoming what everyone wanted, and that was just how it worked.

She walked into the tent. “Mom.”

Her mom turned.

“Hey, baby! Are you having fun?”

“I’m bored. The talk is boring. Can we go look at the castle? It’s right there.”

The castle — the exact thing her mom had just asked her dad about. The thing she’d wanted. And for a half second Persefoni saw something crack in her mother’s face — a tiredness, something real behind the expression — before the smile came back and covered it. Her daughter was standing in front of her asking to do the very thing she’d suggested thirty seconds ago, and Persefoni watched her mother’s eyes and waited for the recognition, the moment where her mom would say yes, I want that too, let’s go together.

“Oh, honey, we’re having such a nice time. Your dad’s making friends and Alejandro is loving the talks — let’s just enjoy being here a little while longer, okay? We came all this way.”

She said it warmly. She said it with love. She said it in almost the exact same words her dad had said to her forty-five seconds earlier, and she didn’t seem to know she was doing it, and that was the thing — that was the thing that sat in Persefoni’s chest like a stone she couldn’t cough up — her mother didn’t seem to know. She wasn’t being mean. She wasn’t lying. It was like she’d already forgotten she’d wanted to leave. Her dad’s version of reality had replaced hers so smoothly that there was nothing left of the original, like a song stuck in your head that you didn’t remember hearing, and now she was humming it to her like it was her own. The castle was right there. They both wanted to go. And neither of them would.

You’re just tender-headed.

The memory came without warning. Small hands. Her mom’s fingers in her hair, pulling, braiding. The sharp sting of the comb catching a tangle and the word she’d said — “ow” — and her mother’s voice, gentle and certain: “Oh, that doesn’t hurt. You’re just tender-headed.”

It had hurt. She remembered it hurting. She remembered the specific quality of the pain — not bad, not terrible, but real, hers, happening to her — and she remembered her mother’s voice landing on top of it like a lid on a pot, and the confusion of being told that the thing she was feeling wasn’t the thing she was feeling, and the way she’d gone quiet afterward. Not because it stopped hurting. Because she’d learned something about what happened when she said it did.

She was learning it again now, standing in a pub tent in Wales — or England, she still couldn’t remember — and her mother was smiling at her and her father was laughing at the bar and nobody was being cruel and nothing was wrong and she wanted to leave and she couldn’t, and she didn’t know why she felt like crying, so she didn’t cry. She said “okay” and she walked back out into the festival alone.

She wandered.

Past a stage where someone was playing folk music that sounded like it had been written specifically to make people feel thoughtful. Past a bookshop with tables out front covered in titles she didn’t recognize. Past a group of college-aged kids sitting in a circle on the grass, discussing something with the kind of intensity that made her want to throw a frisbee at them.

She sat on a low stone wall near the edge of the festival grounds, the stone cool through her jeans, and looked at the castle across the road and didn’t go to it. The wind came again, moving through her curls, carrying the smell of cut grass and something sweet from a food stall, and she let it go past. No one had come to find her.

Alejandro found her.

He came around the corner of a bookshop with Kathleen beside him, and his face was lit up — flushed, eyes wide, hands already moving before he started talking, the way he looked when an idea had hold of him and he hadn’t finished wrestling it into words yet. Kathleen was holding his hand and smiling the way you smile when someone you love is happy about something you can’t quite follow.

“There you are,” Kathleen said. “Where’d you go?”

“Pub. My parents.”

“You missed the rest of the talk,” Alejandro said, and the way he said it — like she’d missed the second coming — almost made her laugh.

“I’m devastated.”

He didn’t catch the sarcasm. Or he caught it and didn’t care. He sat down on the wall next to her without asking, and Kathleen sat on his other side, and he said:

“Okay, so. You know how there’s a part of you that just — sees things? Like, you look at a sunset and before you think ‘that’s a sunset’ there’s a moment where you’re just… in it? Before the words come?”

“Sure,” Persefoni said, because she did know that, even though she’d never said it out loud.

“That’s the Master. That’s the right hemisphere. It was there first. It sees the whole picture — everything, all at once, without cutting it into pieces. It doesn’t name things. It doesn’t categorize. It just… receives.”

He was using his hands now, the way he did when the words weren’t big enough for what he was trying to say. His left hand held up, open, like a cup. Receiving.

“And then there’s the other part. The part that comes in after and says ‘that’s a sunset, it’s orange, it’s 7:42 PM, I should take a photo.’ The part that breaks things into pieces and labels them and files them away. That’s the Emissary. The left hemisphere. It’s the helper. It’s supposed to serve the first one — take what the Master sees and organize it, make it useful.”

His right hand closed around the air. Grasping.

“Wait,” Persefoni said. “You did it backwards. The right hemisphere — the Master — you used your left hand.”

Alejandro looked down at his hands like he’d been caught. “No, that’s — the hemispheres cross. The right brain controls the left side of your body. The left brain controls the right. It’s called contralateral something — contralateral motor control. So the Master is rooted in your left side and the Emissary is rooted in your right.”

“Okay,” Persefoni said. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She was listening now, despite herself.

“But here’s the thing.” Alejandro’s eyes were doing the thing they did — that bright, almost feverish look he got when an idea had him by the throat. “The Emissary forgot. It forgot it was the servant. It started thinking it was in charge. It started thinking that its way of seeing — the labels, the categories, the pieces — was the REAL way. And it took over. And now the Master — the one who sees everything, the one who was there first — can’t be heard anymore. The servant locked the king in a tower and started running the kingdom, and the kingdom thinks the servant IS the king, and nobody remembers there ever was a real king.”

Kathleen squeezed his hand. “That’s beautiful, babe.”

And it was. It was beautiful the way Alejandro said it. Not the way the old man on stage had said it — Persefoni had tried, she really had, and all she’d gotten was hemispheres and analytical processing and the phenomenological world. But Alejandro turned it into a story. A king and a servant. A forgetting. A tower.

She could see it.

The Master — quiet, patient, seeing everything. Locked away. And the Emissary — busy, loud, labeling everything, running around the kingdom with his clipboard, absolutely certain he was in charge. Never once looking up at the tower. Never once wondering if there was someone in there who could see further than he could.

“That’s the book he wrote,” Alejandro said. “The Master and His Emissary. It’s like — it explains everything. Why people argue about things they both know are true. Why we can look at a forest and only see lumber. Why—”

“Why someone can feel something and be told they’re not feeling it,” Persefoni said.

It came out before she knew she was going to say it. Alejandro looked at her. Kathleen looked at her.

“Yeah,” Alejandro said, slowly. “Yeah, exactly like that.”

A silence. The folk music from the nearby stage drifted over, and someone laughed somewhere, and Persefoni was sixteen years old on a stone wall in a town she couldn’t pronounce, and she had just understood something without understanding that she’d understood it, and it was already gone — a match lit in a dark room, out before she could see what it illuminated.

“Can we get food?” she said. “I’m starving.”