I was about to say earlier that if I had not read Roemer on the 30th of April 1985 the world would be short a genius; I said that the world without the Infant Terrible would be like the world without Newton & Mozart & Einstein!
-- Sibylla (I)

Importance: Early in the novel, Sibylla considers the manifold factors that lead to her son’s “genius.” She realizes that relatively minor changes in the course of events—such as her “not read[ing] Roemer on the 30th of April 1985”—might have precluded Ludo’s brilliance. In this way, Sibylla gestures towards the possibility that genius is, ultimately, a random quality. She imagines that the existence of geniuses like “Newton & Mozart & Einstein” arises not from some prefixed exceptionalism, but from the random twists and turns of chance.

Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound...
-- Sibylla (I)