What is most closely the central idea of the passage below (paragraph 7)?
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by
everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find
myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read
linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the
lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol,
thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering
if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.