I Have Not Time (Évariste Galois)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You failed the entrance exam twice —
once because the examiner
couldn't follow your reasoning
and once because you threw an eraser
at the examiner's head
when he couldn't follow your reasoning
which tells you everything
about the distance
between what you could see
and what the century
had built chairs for
You were sixteen
and you had already solved
the problem that had been open
for three hundred and fifty years —
which equations can be solved by radicals
and which ones cannot —
and the answer was a structure
so new that the vocabulary
for describing it
had to be invented
by the same boy who needed it

[Verse 2]
You joined the revolution
because you were nineteen
and French
and the streets were full of the kind of noise
that a nineteen-year-old mistakes
for the sound of the future arriving
They arrested you twice
and you spent your jail time
doing mathematics on the walls
the way other prisoners
carve calendars —
except your marks
were not counting down to freedom
but counting up
toward something
the walls could not contain

[Chorus]
The night before the duel
you sat at your desk
and wrote everything —
every theorem you hadn't published,
every proof you hadn't finished,
every structure you could see
but hadn't had time to name
You wrote in the margins
because the pages ran out
and in the margins you wrote
je n'ai pas le temps —
I have not time —
over and over
as if saying it
could make the night longer
or the mathematics shorter
or the pistol less patient

[Verse 3]
You were twenty years old
and the duel was over a woman
or over politics
or over the specific way
that a boy who can solve
any equation
cannot solve
the one written in another person's anger
They shot you in the abdomen
at dawn in a field outside Paris
and you lay there
and a farmer found you
and you died the next day
in the hospital
and your brother came
and you told him
do not cry —
I need all my courage
to die at twenty

[Bridge]
The manuscripts sat unread
for fourteen years
until Liouville opened them
and spent months
trying to follow the reasoning
of a boy writing faster
than ink was designed to carry
and when he finally understood
he stood before the French Academy
and said these words:
the work is beyond all praise
And the theory that poured out
of that single desperate night
became the foundation of modern algebra,
the architecture of symmetry,
the language every physicist uses
when they describe the way
the universe organizes its own laws

[Outro]
Twenty years —
that is not enough
for what you carried
and you knew it,
you knew it in the margins
where the handwriting leans harder
and the equations crowd each other
like passengers boarding a train
that is already moving
The drawer where they keep your work
was written in one night
by a boy who could see the shape
of the next two centuries of mathematics
and knew he would not live
to see the morning after the duel
and wrote it anyway —
every page a wager
that someone, eventually,
would be able to read
what he did not have time to explain