“My heart stopped,” Gleick tells me. “I have never had an experience like that as a biographer, before or since.”
1/N

Story of an extraordinarily written letter
2/N

Richard proposed. Arline accepted. With the eyes of young love, they peered into a shared future of infinite possibility for bliss.
3/N

Feynman began to glimpse the special powerlessness that medical uncertainty can inflict on a scientific person. He had come to believe that the scientific way of thinking brought a measure of calmness and control in difficult situations — but not now.
4/N

“Goodbye love letter”
5/N

His mother, who believed he was marrying Arline out of pity rather than love, admonished him that he would be putting his health and his very life in danger, and coldly worried about how the stigma attached to tuberculosis would impact her brilliant young son’s reputation.
6/N

Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips.
7/N

“I have a serious affliction: loving you forever,” he wrote.

8/N

Early in his scientific career, he had been animated by the nature of time. Now, hours stretched and contracted as he sat at her deathbed, until one last small breath tolled the end at 9:21PM.
9/10

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
10/N

We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

11/11