I grew up nursing an illusion: that science was a humanity. Maybe this deliberate naïveté explains how breathlessly I fell in with romantic science. But that is a story with many roots. In any case, it is not a story of retreat, nor an antiquarian withdrawal from the problems of the present world. My turn to romanticism has always born the mark of its original motivation: to goad my contrary commitments to literature and to science — the rivalries I have allowed to grow, even fostered, within me — into a dialogue, to force them to confront each other and to speak.