Georg was working on equations when Rudolph got home from Kindergarten. 

“Daddy!, I found out today that a Cantor is a Jew who sings holy songs in the Synagogue! I love singing songs about the bible! Are we Jewish?” A full answer to that question is that Georg’s father got in fights with many men who suggested that. But Georg didn’t know if his father found it so offensive because it was a truth or a lie. The safer answer was

“We’re lutheran. If you want to sing about God you can join the Lutheran church choir”. And Rudolph took him up on it.

Georg had six children. Some existed because he and his wife loved kids, some existed because he and his wife loved sex, but Rudolph alone was born to save his soul.

Georg thought a lot about infinity, it was probably what history would remember him for. 

If one had an infinite amount of time and paper one could write all the whole numbers from one to infinity. Writing all the rational fractions could also be done…. In fact it wouldn’t take any longer. But there were also irrational numbers that could only be expressed as a decimal that goes on forever. Pi was one. If one created an infinitely long list of irrational numbers it would still be incomplete. Imagine an infinitely long list of irrational numbers between 0 and 1. Now you can create a new number by taking the first digit of the first number and adding 1 to it, the second digit of the second number and adding one to it and so on down to the infinitieth digit of the infinitieth number, and this is will be a number between 0 and 1 that is not yet on the list. So there was not just countable infinities but uncountable ones… and these uncountable infinities were far greater than the countable ones, because any 2 rational numbers have an infinite number of irrational ones between them….

What is real is what can be described by numbers… and if there are infinitely more numbers unknowable to the human mind then there are understandable ones then there may be huge realities unknowable to the human mind. Realms of literally unthinkable horrors… one could not come to terms knowing that you might be surrounded by demons stranger than your nightmares which you look through because you lack the mental capacity to deal with them.

In the fall of 1884 these thoughts combined with the shortening of the days as winter approached led him into a dark depression. So Vally gave him another child, firm in the knowledge real life and death fatherhood issues would drive away theoretical monsters hiding among irrational numbers.

She was right, the exhaustion of getting up many times to look after a whiny baby  left no space for existential horror at demons dancing among unthinkable numbers.

When he could finally rest enough to open his eyes again to the unthinkable horrors… Rudolph helped him again.

“Daddy everyone knows demons and angels are the same kinds of thing. If these unknowable numbers can hide demons, they can hide angels too. And the angels are powerful enough to protect us” Rudolph explained

“Can you prove the angels are more powerful than the demons?” Georg asked seeing hope in this logic, but Rudolph didn’t answer, instead practicing songs for his choir.

“I will come to you in the silence/I will lift you from all your fears/You will hear my voice/I claim you as my choice/ be still and know I am near”

The demons were real… they had to be for nature abhors a vacuum, if a huge chunk of reality is unknowable to man… there must be SOMETHING unknowable there! But As long as Georg could tell himself the angels were more powerful it was fine.

His work attracted hostility… and it spread to personal attacks, with people saying his professional disagreements with colleagues were “Classic Jewish infighting”. This Made it hard to believe angels could possibly outnumber demons in any reality… but then he’d hear Rudolph practicing his Hymns

“I am hope for all who are hopeless/I am eyes for all who wish to see/In the shadows of the night/ I will be alight/Come and rest in me!”

But if Rudolph's angels truly were real, why was it Rudolph of all people who sickened? Why would a good god take away his hope? He was not a bad man was he?

Rudolph's voice was weak from fever and cracking from puberty, but he still practiced his hymns hoping for a day he could return to his choir .

“Do not be afraid I am with you/I will call you each by name/Come and follow me/I will bring you home/ I love you and you are mine”

Georg was in a mental institution when Rudolph died. He couldn’t help, so he surrendered to the darkness. Fighting was too hard.

When he got out he couldn’t contribute to mathematics. He couldn’t stare into the unknowable void without feeling the demons staring back at him. He continued teaching, because he still had a wife and five children to care for, and a reputation he could cash in on. But as far as serious use of his intellect… He tried to distract himself with questions about Shakespearian scholarship. He drifted in and out of depression for the rest of his life. It is hard to be happy when you know with logical certainty that unthinkable horrors are real.

As his students, and children were dragged into the great war, horrors that were all too thinkable were added to the unthinkable ones. He wanted to die. He wanted more than anything to either find oblivion or rejoin Rudolph.

But what if the angels were real?

What if the church told the truth?

Then as a suicide he’d never see Rudolph again… but he would see demons.

You’d think in a time of global war it wouldn’t be difficult to die heroically, but the army took a look at his age and famous name and refused him his pleas to serve at the front.

By 1917 he was in a sanitarium again… And was slowly starving to death with all the other inmates. Germany didn’t have enough food. First claim went to soldiers, then usefully employed civilians or children. The insane were given slightly less than prisoners of war.

He had his chance! Some of the people in the sanitarium really had hope of finding happiness, there were soldiers broken by what they saw in war, a man convinced his dog could talk and a woman who screamed everyone was looking at her sexually… He took his ration of food and split it among them. At first he thought he was slick and the doctors didn’t know. Then he figured out, they did, but it was a time when it wasn’t necessarily crazy to make hard choices, so they were respecting his.

His last request to his doctor was that his wife be told he died painlessly. It wasn’t literally true of course, but death was less painful then life.

His true last request was to one of the broken soldiers who used to sing in a choir before poison gas damaged his lungs. He asked to hear a final Hymn

“O come o come emmanuel! Come ransom captive israel!”