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Explanation and Analysis—Shevek and Takver:
As a partner, Takver makes Shevek’s life and achievements possible. She has much in common with Shevek, but her differences complement his character by opposing some of his most fundamental traits.
He is predisposed to isolation, while she is highly sociable; he is a physicist concerned with mathematical truth, she is a biologist concerned with the messy complexities of life; he is deeply anxious and prone to depression, she is eternally optimistic and confident. Even though Takver cannot change Shevek fundamentally as a person, she changes his understanding of the world completely, for example when she exposes him to the world of aquatic life that thoroughly contrasts with his own field of study:
Shevek, intent, followed the fish’s track and her thought’s track. He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist’s arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.
Takver holds a very different philosophy on life than Shevek, who can only see the big picture. Yet her appreciation for the miniscule and the individual is not portrayed as lesser. She is a layman, a proxy for the audience, to whom Shevek can articulate his conceptions of time and causality, but her perspective is just as valuable, even essential, to the application of such thought to human life. Take, for example, this conversation:
“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
“That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don’t want it! But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.”
Shevek’s concern with the whole is contrasted with Takver’s appreciation for the minute details of the here and now, the infinity that can be found in a single space or moment. She captures in life the eternity that Shevek thinks is only possible in death. In this moment, as in others, she provides a different perspective that enriches Shevek's own. Her vitality saves Shevek from stasis—just as revolutionary spirit saves society from stagnation.
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