Day: May 20, 2002

This evening I came home from work, wandered over to Metafilter, which I had been too busy to check for most of the day, and learned that evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould had died of cancer in his home earlier today. A little while later, I wandered into the bedroom and dug out my copy of Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, which like most of the nonfiction on my bookshelf has gone largely unread since first purchased. Thumbing through it now, two passages in particular stand out, and I offer them here without comment — not because they seem especially prescient or connected to Gould’s death, but simply because they are interesting ideas, and I do not wish to forget them:

We are driven to view evolution’s thrust as predictable and progressive in order to place a positive spin upon geology’s most frightening fact — the restriction of human existence to the last sliver of earthly time. With such a spin, our limited time no longer threatens our universal importance. We may have occupied only the most recent moment as Homo sapiens, but if several billion preceding years displayed an overarching trend that sensibly culminated in our mental evolution, then our eventual origin has been implicit from the beginning of time. In one important sense, we have been around from the start. In principio erat verbum.
God bless ignorance! If we were much smarter, or had been at it much longer, we might actually be approaching a right wall of complete (or at least adequate) knowledge, thus leaving scientists with little of interest to do. We are in no danger whatever of any such limitation over the next several generations. In other words, our current storehouse of knowledge lies so far from the right wall of what we might learn that science need not fear any obolescence.

I signed the lease to my new apartment this afternoon, but then I made the mistake of trying to do the math in my head on the way back to work. I am financially stupid, you must understand, and there are times when simple arithmetic is seemingly beyond me. I think I’ll be okay, although there are a few days of overlap in late July when I’ll owe both landlords money, and it looks like that month-long trip to Cancun will just have to wait.

An interesting article about “One Book, One City” programs in yesterday’s New York Times:

Despite what your high school English teacher may have told you, literature does not make us or our society better. To be seduced by fiction is to live at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life. I’ve never entirely succumbed to a story without blowing off housework, neglecting social obligations and flubbing career-critical deadlines….

We’re told to read the canon because it’s the repository of our cultural heritage, which is broadly true in the sense that some of our forebears read some of these books on occasion. In the narrow sense, however, most writers now considered canonical wouldn’t have recognized a Western idea if it bit them — they considered themselves Greek or Hebrew or Christian, not Western, and bitterly opposed most of the other ideas now mushed together into the porridge pot that is our idealized past….

Literature takes root in a rich and stubborn particularity, not in some powdery notion of communal uplift.

Also from yesterday’s Times:

President Bush told Russia’s foreign minister he is preparing for his first trip to Russia by reading the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the 19th-century author whose works explored the dark recesses of the Russian soul.

But Mr. Bush has picked the wrong author, Russians say, because the Russia he will be visiting this week is not the Russia of Dostoyevsky, with mystical saints and guilt-stricken madmen, but a more rational and forward-looking nation that is being pushed, prodded and promoted by his host, President Vladimir V. Putin.

“Bush is reading Dostoyevsky, but he should be reading Nabokov, because that is where the future is, not the past,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor in international affairs at the New School University.

Like Dostoyevsky, Mr. Putin is a nationalist. But like Vladimir Nabokov, the émigré writer, Mr. Putin also seems to have a clear understanding of what Russia lacks, and of what the West has to offer.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I just can’t imagine George W. Bush understanding, much less enjoying the novels of Vladamir Nabokov. I find it difficult enough to imagine him understanding Crime and Punishment.