Look at the scholar, he has still not gone to bed,
Raking the dictionaries, darting at locked presses,
Hunting for keys. He stacks the books to his oxter,
Walks across the room as stiff as a shelf.His nightwork, to make the price of his release:
Two words, as opposite as his and hers
Which yet must be as close
As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard
Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note
On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle —
As close as the grain in the polished wood, as the finger
Bitten by the string, as the hairs of the bow
Bent by the repeated note —
Two words
Closer to the bone than the ones I was so proud of,
Embrace and strict to describe the twining of bone and flesh.The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.–Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin
Gloss / Clós / Glas.
Mongolia to Restore Traditional Alphabet.
Ankhtuya reports on the latest linguistic developments in Mongolia:
Mongolia has announced plans to restore the use of its traditional alphabet by 2025, replacing the Cyrillic script adopted under the Soviet period as it moves away from Russian influence. It will take transitional measures to prepare for the “comprehensive restoration” of the traditional alphabet, which is written in vertical lines, said a representative of the ministry of education, culture, science and sports.
The ministry has ordered the department of information and communication technology to adopt traditional Mongolian to the “electronic environment”. Scientific, literary and state registry offices have been asked to establish a system for Mongolian names. Media are required to publish in both scripts until 2024, and schools must increase learning time to study the traditional vertical script. Cultural centres must study and promote the Mongolian written heritage, according to an official statement.
Mongolia, which is between Russia and China, adopted the Cyrillic alphabet in the 1940s as Moscow sought to control it as a buffer against Beijing. For many years Mongolia was seen as the “16th Soviet republic”. The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed Mongolia has been returning to its linguistic roots. A generation has grown up without learning Russian, and in 2003 it was replaced by English as the mandatory foreign language in schools.
A tip o’ the Languagehat hat to Garrigus Carraig.
Eveleigh.
I discovered that Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story was published by Eveleigh Nash in 1914, and Pankhurst being the most notorious of suffragettes, I wondered if Eveleigh Nash was a woman. No, it turns out he was a he (and married Mrs. Alice Gibson Smith in 1930), so then I wondered about the unusual name Eveleigh; it was originally a surname, and this site provides the origin:
Recorded in several spelling forms including Everleigh, Eveleigh, Everley, Eversley, and Everly, this is an English locational surname. It originates from either of the villages called Everley, in Wiltshire and Yorkshire, or Eversley parish in Hampshire, or possibly for some nameholders from a now ‘lost’ medieval village believed to have been in the West of England. The name is believed to translate as ‘boars wood’ from the Olde English pre 7th century ‘eofor’ meaning a boar, and ‘leah’, an enclosure in a forest used for agriculture. Like most locational surnames, this is a ‘from’ name. That is to say that the name was given as easy identification to people after they left their original homes and moved elsewhere. It is also a reason why most locational surnames are to be found recorded in several spellings. The first recording of the surname in any form is that of John de Eversele of Kent in the year 1273, whilst recordings from surviving church registers include: Anne Everlaye, on October 1st 1580 at St Olaves church, Hart Street, Marie Everlie at St Brides church, Fleet Street, and John Everlegh on June 10th 1753 at St Lukes, Old Street, all city of London.
Which is well and good, but really all of this is just an excuse to post this 1906 photograph of William Tufnell Le Queux and Eveleigh Nash. What a pair of names! A charming image, too; one wouldn’t have minded having a glass of port and a chat about the literary scene with that pair.
Prose Helps.
I just opened Randall Jarrell’s The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969) and my eye fell on his introduction, which I don’t remember having read before. I was struck by this passage:
I have read these poems many times to audiences of different sorts, and all the audiences liked listening to them better, and found them easier, if I said beforehand something about what a ball turret was, or a B-24, or Tatyana Larina — and said it in “plain American that cats and dogs can read.” Not that my poems aren’t in plain American, but there it’s verse, not prose. Prose helps; it helps just by being prose. In the old days, when readers could take or leave prose, poets sometimes gave them a good deal of it: there are hundreds of pages of notes and prefaces and reminiscences in Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s Collected Poems. But nowadays, unless you’re reading Marianne Moore or Empson or The Waste Land, you rarely get any prose to go along with the poems.
The war — the Second World War — has been over for a long time; there are names and events people knew they would never forget which, by now, they have forgotten they ever knew. Some of these poems depend upon, or are helped by, the reader’s remembering such names and events; other poems are helped by the reader’s being reminded of some particular story or happening or expression — something you remember if you have lived in the South, or been in the Air Force, or gone to Der Rosenkavalier, or memorized some verse of the Bible. I’ve put into this introduction some prose sentences about a few of these things. But they are here for the reader only if he wants them — if you like poems without prose, or see after a few sentences that I am telling you very familiar things, just turn past this introduction.
That’s both a helpful attitude and an odd thing for a poet to say; since the days of Wordsworth and Tennyson, poets have generally felt that their poems should speak for themselves (and it’s generally thought that Eliot’s ostentatious notes for The Waste Land were not a good idea). And some of Jarrell’s really are very familiar things: “A blind date is an unknown someone you accompany to something: if he promises to come for you and doesn’t, he has stood you up,” forsooth. Mind you, there’s a lot of useful information there, things you wouldn’t have known: “In ‘A Pilot From The Carrier,’ genius is another form of the word jinnee.” But I have to say, it does nothing to dissuade me from the sense that Jarrell’s gift was for prose (he was a fine critic); when I flip through the poems, none of them speak to me very distinctly and there are few lines that make me want to say them out loud or that sink into my memory. The exception, of course, is “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” of which that Wikipedia article says “Jarrell came to fear that his reputation would come to rest on it alone.” I fear his fear was not unjustified.
Another thing that struck me: when he wrote “The war […] has been over for a long time,” it had only been ten years!
The Importance of Punctuation.
From Gian Biagio Conte, Ope Ingenii: Experiences of Textual Criticism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013):
The mishap that befell Abbot Martin, according to a burlesque French tradition of the XV century, is well known: this devout figure had thought of embellishing the entry to his monastery with a sign saying:
Porta patens esto. Nulli claudatur honesto
Let the door remain wide open. Let it not be closed to any honest man.
But the stonemason who was given the task of engraving this inscription got the punctuation wrong:
Porta patens esto nulli. Claudatur honesto
Let not the door be opened to anybody. Let it be closed to the honest man.
What should have been a warm welcome, inspired by Christian charity, was turned into a curt message of rejection. The end of the story relates that, as a punishment for this, Martin was deprived of his ecclesiastical rank.
[…]
It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of punctuation for the textual critic. Editors do not always devote the necessary attention to this aspect of their work; often, indeed, in their effort to choose the authentic reading among those transmitted, and to correct verbal corruptions or crypto-corruptions, they end up by accepting texts which require a more careful distinctio. This kind of intervention, too, can produce quite remarkable results for the restoration of a corrupt text. The rule will always be one, and one alone: try to translate the text you are reading literally; it is only in this way that, as you try to find a precise equivalent for the single words, you discover all the obstacles that a reading of the text as a whole overcomes and simplifies.
Via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti. (Note that, whatever the punctuation, the Latin line is a hexameter.)
A Priceless Ignoramus.
Jim Holt’s NYRB review (July 19, 2018 [archived]) of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, translated by Pamela Mensch, starts off in Holt’s usual lively fashion:
Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen supposedly said. Well, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers showed up. And by dint of that, its author has become what Nietzsche called “the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.”
What made this fellow so lucky? It’s not hard to explain why certain works survive. We still have Plato’s dialogues because they were diligently preserved by the Academy. Aristotle too founded a school, and his treatises were widely copied and studied. (Still, the nineteen or so dialogues Aristotle composed—esteemed for their literary quality by Cicero as “a river of flowing gold”—were somehow mislaid by Western civilization.) But Diogenes Laertius didn’t have a school, as far as anyone knows. In fact, almost nothing is known about the man. Even his slightly absurd Greco-Roman name is a puzzle—was “Laertius” some kind of nickname? Judging from the historical references in Lives (which stop just short of the Neoplatonists), he probably lived early in the third century CE. There is a hint in his text that he might have been a native of the eastern city of Nicea. Beyond that he is a cipher. That his work should endure, when the vast majority of the philosophical writings he drew on perished, may simply have been a “quirk of fate”—so guesses James Miller, the editor of this welcome new translation.
I don’t remember noticing the Greco-Roman nature of his name before. [That’s because it’s not Greco-Roman; Λαέρτιος is perfectly good Greek. See comments below.] And here’s a great passage from later in the review:
An especially complete portrait is given of Diogenes of Sinope, the most prominent of the Cynics. And this is not the only Diogenes in play. There is also an entry for the less famous Diogenes of Apollonia, whom Diogenes Laertius, in an embarrassment of Diogeneses, manages to confuse with Diogenes of Smyrna. (It should be noted that Diogenes Laertius lived five or six centuries later than the multiple Diogeneses he writes about.)
Shades of Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich…
The Art of Book Covers.
The Public Domain Review says “we thought we’d […] publish some of our favourites from the first hundred years of the book cover (as we commonly understand it today)”:
Inspired by rising literacy rates and advancing technologies, the nineteenth century saw the book transform from a largely hand-made object to a mass-produced product. In this new environment the book cover took on added importance: it was no longer merely a functional protection for the pages but instead became a key platform through which to communicate and sell the book. Prior to this covers had — bar a smattering of highly bespoke one-off creations (e.g. embroidered covers for personal libraries) — mostly been plain leather bound affairs. From the 1820s, with the rise of mechanical bookbinding, these leather covers of old gave way to new cloth coverings which, in addition to being inexpensive, were now also printable. A wide variety of cover printing techniques were employed over the decades: from embossing to gilt to multi-colour lithography. A totally new artistic space was opened up. As you can see in our highlights below it was one in which illustrators and designers flourished, producing a range of covers as eclectic in aesthetic approach as the myriad contents they fronted.
The covers are some of the most gorgeous I’ve seen. Enjoy!
Chekhov and Bunin.
In my reading of Chekhov stories I’ve gotten up to Степь [The Steppe], a convenient divider between his early and later stories, and it seems like a good time to post about a couple of those early stories and things they made me think of. One of them is Перекати-поле [Tumbleweed, 1887], translated by Constance Garnett as “Uprooted.” It’s from Chekhov’s Gogolian/Leskovian period, when he wrote a good bit about religion and very little about women; here the narrator is at the Sviatogorsk Lavra in eastern Ukraine, named for the Holy Mountains (Святые горы) among which it was built, for the feast-days of John the Apostle and St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker, presumably May 8/21 and 9/22 (though Garnett’s footnote absurdly says of Nicholas “his day was December 6” — the story is clearly not set in winter, and Nicholas, like all major saints, had several feast-days). Because of the huge crowds, the monk in charge of sleeping quarters asks if he would mind letting a young man, “a short figure in a light overcoat and a straw hat,” share his room; he agrees, and the story is mostly about the interactions between the two. The young man turns out to be a converted Jew, and he tells his life story, from his difficult childhood (he loved learning and longed to read newspapers, but his parents wanted him “to know nothing but the Talmud” and he ran away from home) to his peripatetic life (“when my uncle tried to catch me in Shklov, I went off to Mogilev; there I stayed two days and then I went off to Starodub with a comrade… Later on he mentioned in his story Gomel, Kiev, Byelaya Tserkov, Uman, Balt, Bendery and at last reached Odessa”); now he’s passed his examination as a village schoolmaster: “In Novotcherkassk, where I was baptized, they took a great interest in me and promised me a place in a church parish school.” The narrator says, “Up to the time of my departure we strolled together about the Monastery, whiling away the long hot day. He never left my side a minute; whether he had taken a fancy to me or was afraid of solitude, God only knows!”
As I read, something was nagging at my mind, and it turned out to be one of Bunin’s earliest stories, Святые горы [Holy Mountains] (1895), which I read during my Bunin marathon last year (1, 2). Bunin’s narrator is also visiting the monastery, but his tale is entirely different: half the story is about his attempt to get there on foot, he interacts with no one except a Ukrainian peasant he asks for directions (and gets answers in Ukrainian: “Тодi чума на скот була, так казали, що там пробував такий монах, що знав замовляти…”), and when he arrives he walks past the cathedral and heads straight up the steep stairway to the top of the hill above the monastery, where he meditates on nature and history:
Меня тянуло туда, к меловым серым конусам, к месту той пещеры, где в трудах и молитве, простой и возвышенный духом, проводил свои дни первый человек этих гор, та великая душа, которая полюбила горный гребет над Малым Танаисом. Дико и глухо было тогда в первобытных лесах, куда пришел святой человек. Лес бесконечно синел под ним. Лес глушил берега, и только река, одинокая и свободная, плескала и плескала своими холодными волнами под его навесом. И какая тишина царила кругом!
I was drawn there, to the gray chalk cones, to the site of that cave where the first man of these hills, simple and elevated in spirit, passed his days in works and prayer, that great soul who fell in love with the mountain ridge above the Lesser Tanais [the Donets]. It was wild and deserted then in the primeval forests where the holy man came. The forest stretched out beneath him, dark blue and endless. It choked the shores, and only the river, lonely and free, lapped and lapped with its cold waves against the overhang. And what silence reigned all around!
At one point he says “все думал о старине, о той чудной власти, которая дана прошлому… Откуда она и что она значит?” [I kept thinking about olden times, of that wondrous power that is given to the past… Where is it from and what does it mean?]. It’s pure Bunin, and the contrast with Chekhov is characteristic: the former solitary and meditative, the latter social.
Though Chekhov could include philosophizing as well; in his Свирель [The Pipe], also from 1887, Meliton meets an old shepherd who keeps saying “Всё к одному клонится” [Everything’s heading the same way] and expands thus on his depressing thought (Garnett’s translation; in the Russian text, it’s the passage starting “— Не одни птицы, — сказал пастух” and ending “цветик ли какой, всё к одному клонится”):
“Not the birds only,” said the shepherd. “It’s the wild beasts, too, and the cattle, and the bees, and the fish. . . . If you don’t believe me ask the old people; every old man will tell you that the fish are not at all what they used to be. In the seas, in the lakes, and in the rivers, there are fewer fish from year to year. In our Pestchanka, I remember, pike used to be caught a yard long, and there were eel-pouts, and roach, and bream, and every fish had a presentable appearance; while nowadays, if you catch a wretched little pikelet or perch six inches long you have to be thankful. There are not any gudgeon even worth talking about. Every year it is worse and worse, and in a little while there will be no fish at all. And take the rivers now . . . the rivers are drying up, for sure.”
“It is true; they are drying up.”
“To be sure, that’s what I say. Every year they are shallower and shallower, and there are not the deep holes there used to be. And do you see the bushes yonder?” the old man asked, pointing to one side. “Beyond them is an old river-bed; it’s called a backwater. In my father’s time the Pestchanka flowed there, but now look; where have the evil spirits taken it to? It changes its course, and, mind you, it will go on changing till such time as it has dried up altogether. There used to be marshes and ponds beyond Kurgasovo, and where are they now? And what has become of the streams? Here in this very wood we used to have a stream flowing, and such a stream that the peasants used to set creels in it and caught pike; wild ducks used to spend the winter by it, and nowadays there is no water in it worth speaking of, even at the spring floods. Yes, brother, look where you will, things are bad everywhere. Everywhere!”
A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched by the all-embracing ruin. Spots of light glistened on the mist and the slanting streaks of rain as though on opaque glass, and immediately died away again — it was the rising sun trying to break through the clouds and peep at the earth.
“Yes, the forests, too . . .” Meliton muttered.
“The forests, too,” the shepherd repeated. “They cut them down, and they catch fire, and they wither away, and no new ones are growing. Whatever does grow up is cut down at once; one day it shoots up and the next it has been cut down — and so on without end till nothing’s left. I have kept the herds of the commune ever since the time of Freedom, good man; before the time of Freedom I was shepherd of the master’s herds. I have watched them in this very spot, and I can’t remember a summer day in all my life that I have not been here. And all the time I have been observing the works of God. I have looked at them in my time till I know them, and it is my opinion that all things growing are on the decline. Whether you take the rye, or the vegetables, or flowers of any sort, they are all going the same way.”
Of course that bit about cutting down the forests reminds us of The Cherry Orchard, which brings me to the sound of the bucket in a mine. In that first story, the converted Jew describes one of his many difficult moments:
Был я на одних шахтах тут, в Донецком округе. А вы ведь видели, как люди спускаются в самый рудник. Помните, когда гонят лошадь и приводят в движение ворот, то по блоку одна бадья спускается в рудник, а другая поднимается, когда же начнут поднимать первую, тогда опускается вторая — всё равно, как в колодце с двумя ушатами. Ну, сел я однажды в бадью, начинаю спускаться вниз, и можете себе представить, вдруг слышу — тррр! Цепь разорвалась, и я полетел к чёрту вместе с бадьей и обрывком цепи… Упал с трехсаженной вышины прямо грудью и животом, а бадья, как более тяжелая вещь, упала раньше меня, и я ударился вот этим плечом об ее ребро. Лежу, знаете, огорошенный, думаю, что убился насмерть, и вдруг вижу — новая беда: другая бадья, что поднималась вверх, потеряла противовес и с грохотом опускается вниз прямо на меня… Что будете делать? Видя такой факт, я прижался к стене, съежился, жду, что вот-вот сейчас эта бадья со всего размаха трахнет меня по голове, вспоминаю папашу и мамашу, и Могилев, и Грумахера… молюсь богу, но, к счастью… Даже вспомнить страшно. […] Но, к счастью, она упала возле и только слегка зацепила этот бок… Содрала, знаете, с этого бока сюртук, сорочку и кожу… Сила страшная.
I was at a mine here in the Donets district. You have seen, I dare say, how people are let down into the mine. You remember when they start the horse and set the windlass moving, one bucket on the pulley goes down into the mine, while the other comes up; when the first begins to come up, then the second goes down — exactly like a well with two pails. Well, one day I got into the bucket, began going down, and can you fancy, all at once I heard, Trrr! The chain had broken and I flew to the devil together with the bucket and the broken bit of chain. . . . I fell from a height of twenty feet, flat on my chest and stomach, while the bucket, being heavier, reached the bottom before me, and I hit this shoulder here against its edge. I lay, you know, stunned. I thought I was killed, and all at once I saw a fresh calamity: the other bucket, which was going up, having lost the counter-balancing weight, was coming down with a crash straight upon me. . . . What was I to do? Seeing the position, I squeezed closer to the wall, crouching and waiting for the bucket to come full crush next minute on my head. I thought of papa and mamma and Mogilev and Grumaher. . . . I prayed. . . . But happily . . . it frightens me even to think of it. . . . […] But happily it fell beside me and only caught this side a little. . . . It tore off coat, shirt and skin, you know, from this side. . . . The force of it was terrific.
Now, in another story from that year, Счастье [Fortune], Garnett’s “Happiness,” in which two shepherds and an overseer spending a night in the steppe talk about the treasures supposed to be buried in the area, Chekhov includes the following passage:
В тихом воздухе, рассыпаясь по степи, пронесся звук. Что-то вдали грозно ахнуло, ударилось о камень и побежало по степи, издавая: «тах! тах! тах! тах!». Когда звук замер, старик вопросительно поглядел на равнодушного, неподвижно стоявшего Пантелея.
— Это в шахтах бадья сорвалась, — сказал молодой, подумав.
A sound suddenly broke on the still air, and floated in all directions over the steppe. Something in the distance gave a menacing bang, crashed against stone, and raced over the steppe, uttering, “Tah! tah! tah! tah!” When the sound had died away the old man looked inquiringly at Panteley, who stood motionless and unconcerned.
“It’s a bucket broken away at the pits,” said the young shepherd after a moment’s thought.
And many years later, in his last play (Russian text; translation by Julius West, which I’ve altered to bring out the parallel), there is a famous moment with an offstage sound:
Все сидят, задумались. Тишина. Слышно только, как тихо бормочет Фирс. Вдруг раздается отдаленный звук, точно с неба, звук лопнувшей струны, замирающий, печальный.
Любовь Андреевна. Это что?
Лопахин. Не знаю. Где-нибудь далеко в шахтах сорвалась бадья. Но где-нибудь очень далеко.
They all sit thoughtfully. It is quiet. Only the quiet mumbling of Firs is heard. Suddenly there rings out a distant sound as if from the sky, the sound of a breaking string, which dies away sadly.
LUBOV. What’s that?
LOPAKHIN. I don’t know. Somewhere far off a bucket has broken away at the pits. But it’s very far.
I love the sound of that bucket, echoing down the years and tying stories and play together.
Addendum. I just found another striking parallel: in Степь [The Steppe], old Father Christopher says he’s had a happy life and has no complaints to make, then adds “Не век же вековать, надо и честь знать” [You can’t be around forever, enough is enough]. This is an echo of a line in Свирель [The Pipe], when Meliton, infected by the old shepherd’s pessimism, says “И то сказать, не век же миру вековать — пора и честь знать” [After all, the world can’t be around forever, enough is enough]. I’ve rendered the idiom “пора (or надо) и честь знать” as “enough is enough,” but it can be “it’s (high) time to stop,” “there’s a limit to everything,” “don’t overdo it,” or (in the original sense of taking one’s leave) “it’s (high) time (for me/we/you) to go,” “it’s time I was on my way,” “I/we/you mustn’t outstay my/our/your welcome,” etc.; “честь знать” literally means “to know (one’s) honor.”
Yankees Were Perplexed.
I’m finally reading Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
Yankees also had difficulty understanding Appalachian dialects and vocabulary. In Indiana one noted the difference in how the members of the two cultures would describe a runaway team of horses. “It run into the bush and run astride astraddle, and broke the neap, reach, and evener,” a Yankee would say. His Hoosier neighbor would interpret these remarks thus: “The horses got skeert and run astraddle of a sapling and broke the tongue, double-tree, and couplin pole.” Yankees were perplexed when young Borderlanders called their spouses “old woman” or “old man” and amused by their use of “yon” for “that,” “reckon” for “guess,” “heap” for “a lot of” and “powerful” where a New Englander would say “very.”
Incidentally, if you’re wondering about where “Hoosier” comes from, nobody knows.
The Importance of Stupidity.
Martin A. Schwartz’s “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” (Journal of Cell Science 2008 121: 1771) begins:
I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.
I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain.
For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can’t be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.
A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.
That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.
That resonated very strongly with me; I’ve been more and more aware of it since my own grad school days. All of us are almost completely ignorant of almost everything, and being aware of that is the only hope of lessening that ignorance even slightly. People to whom it is important that they always be right and that they be acknowledged as the smartest people in the room rarely learn much of importance, though they may accumulate lots of impressive information. (Via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti.)
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