It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a parent in possession of a potty-training toddler, must be in want of a drink.
However little known the trials and pitfalls of such a parent may be on her first undertaking to rear children, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of experienced parents, that her attempts at organized super-mom-ness during phases such as toilet training, the short-lived attempt to force down vegetables, and enthusiastic attendance at idiotic Mommy & Me classes, are cordially laughed off and responded to with a silent handing over of a gin and tonic.
“My dear John,” said the two-year-old’s mother to him one day, “do you remember that if you go poop on the potty you get two chocolates?”
John Henry looked up from his trucks and replied that he wanted chocolate.
“But you must go poop on the potty,” returned she; “for your Granny and aunt recommended that method, and told me all about it.”
John Henry made no answer.
“Don’t you want some chocolate?” cried his mother impatiently.
“You want to give me some, and I have no objection to eating it,” he might have said, had he been capable of sentence formation.
His uninterested expression was exasperation enough.
“My dear, you must know, if you go poop on the potty, your Granny living in the north of England advised that you get two chocolates; she sent a well-wrapped parcel to ensure that you had enough of them, and I would be so delighted with you if you went poop on the potty, that I would give them to you immediately; that you would probably be out of your hated diapers by the Equinox, and that I could have some organic cotton underpants in the house for you by the end of next week.”
“No pants?”
“Underpants. And chocolate.”
“I want chocolate.”
“If you go POOP. On the POTTY.”
[John Henry proceeded to ignore his mother, and ten minutes later she caught the telltale strained expression that informed her he was proceeding to crap in his non-organic cotton underpants from OshKosh.]
…
John Henry was so odd a mixture of stubborn will, rare speech, reserve, and contrary desires, that the experience of two and a half years had been insufficient to make his mother understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develope. She was a mother of unimaginative persistence, little patience, and short temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself introverted. The business of her life was getting her son to feed himself and wipe his own bum; its solace was the glug-glug-splash of a freshly opened bottle of pinot noir after the child had gone to bed.
(With thanks and apologies to Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
Monday, March 22, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Do We Need God to Be Good?
Last night I heard theologian and author Bart Ehrman discussing his new book with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air, in a show titled "Jesus And The Hidden Contradictions Of The Gospels." While I am always interested in an expose of the Christian Bible's flaws and contradictions, it was Ehrman's own religious evolution that held me near the radio long past my son's bedtime.
As a young man, Ehrman had a religious awakening and became a born-again Christian, an evangelical, "a fundamentalist" (his description). He held on to this viewpoint for years, even in the face of increased realizations about the flawed humanity behind the assembling of the writings that make up the Bible. It was a long time, he said, before he was able to look on the Bible as anything other than the direct, unquestionable word of God.
It was even longer before he was able to let go of his religious beliefs almost entirely and become agnostic. He was concerned, he says, that without belief in Christianity and Christ's divinity, he would no longer have any moral compass or code. He truly believed that without Christianity he would become a bad person. He would no longer have any moral code to live by. Without the Bible, and without his beliefs, he thought "I would become a completely licentious reprobate."
I have heard this viewpoint before, and it never fails to fascinate me. I have had friends, believers, Christians, ask me flat out how I manage to live as an atheist. What sort of moral guidelines can I follow? How can I possibly be a good person -- a Christian person -- without faith in God and the Ten Commandments at a minimum?
Unlike many questions with regards to faith and ethics, I don't always know how to answer this one. What creates an internal moral code? For me it might be empathy. I want to live without hurting others, hopefully through actively helping others, especially those in dire need and those close to me. But these explanations go absolutely nowhere in trying to cross the divide between those of faith and those without.
Listening to Ehrman's discussion of his own fears about living without faith forced me to turn the question inside-out. How can you live a morally good life when your only guideline is faith in a seemingly arbitrary set of rules that might have nothing to do with your understanding of your own capabilities as a human being? The dependence on Christianity for morals, to me, is indicative of a howling chasm in the formation of one's own existence. If a man truly believes that his morals exist only in relation to faith in a particular divine being, they rest on very shaky ground.
(This is not to say that I think people of religious belief have no morals; the questions relate specifically to those who cannot see a way to live morally without religion.)
It seems pretty obvious that faith in the Ten Commandments is no guarantee of a morally upright life. Look at the number of religious leaders and politicians who truly believe that they fear and love God, but at the same time commit adultery or embezzlement, engage in the same-sex relationships they claim to revile, or are just plain mean, nasty greedy people who make the world a much less "Christian" place to live.
So take those Commandments as a guidepost. Christianity certainly didn't invent, say, the idea of adultery. To a person who is afraid to live outside the religious box, adultery is not allowed because it might send you to hell.
As an atheist, I neither need nor believe in hell. Nor in heaven. But I do believe that adultery is wrong. Why? Because it hurts people. If you're in a relationship, no matter of what kind, the person facing you across the dinner table is trusting you to treat that relationship with respect, to treat them with respect, and with love. Adultery is a betrayal of that trust. That doesn't mean that you might not fall in love with someone else, or that the relationship might unravel. What it means is that you choose not to pursue a course of action -- a relationship or string of relationships -- out of cowardice or laziness. If you fall in love with someone else, or a relationship isn't working anymore, you owe it to the other person to be honest with them at the outset.
A lot easier said that done, I'm sure. A whole lot easier to stand stubbornly by a rule your faith lays out for you. No one ever said living without faith was easy. It requires imagination, a level of empathy and sympathy for the people around you. Murder, stealing, lying, betrayal, and coveting your neighbor's possessions (or spouse) are all possible with or without religion telling you it's wrong. (Worshipping God and having false idols is a bit of a moot point for an atheist.)
And I'm a big fan of resting one day of the week. Not that I've noticed our ever-so-Christian society is all that interested in keeping the Sabbath holy and resting on the seventh day of the week, not when there are profits to be made and shopping to be done. Whether those of faith are willing to admit it or not, Mammon has become the idol of our world, not the poor guy who lived in poverty and supposedly died to save others from suffering.
People like Bart Ehrman, or the devout man of faith he used to be, will continue to shake their head over atheists like me, will wonder how we manage to live without stumbling blindly from one sin to the next. I will continue to wonder how anyone can read the Bible as literal, and how millions stumble blindly through life depending only on a set of commandments and some badly misunderstood passages in Leviticus as guidelines for how to live morally. And I will, I am sorry, continue to pity those whose choices are determined by a fear of hell, or hope for heaven.
At the end of the interview, Ehrman says he was finally able to take a final step past religion to see that "there are lots of reasons to behave ethically. Many of us are simply hard-wired to love our neighbors as ourselves." I'll take that.
As a young man, Ehrman had a religious awakening and became a born-again Christian, an evangelical, "a fundamentalist" (his description). He held on to this viewpoint for years, even in the face of increased realizations about the flawed humanity behind the assembling of the writings that make up the Bible. It was a long time, he said, before he was able to look on the Bible as anything other than the direct, unquestionable word of God.
It was even longer before he was able to let go of his religious beliefs almost entirely and become agnostic. He was concerned, he says, that without belief in Christianity and Christ's divinity, he would no longer have any moral compass or code. He truly believed that without Christianity he would become a bad person. He would no longer have any moral code to live by. Without the Bible, and without his beliefs, he thought "I would become a completely licentious reprobate."
I have heard this viewpoint before, and it never fails to fascinate me. I have had friends, believers, Christians, ask me flat out how I manage to live as an atheist. What sort of moral guidelines can I follow? How can I possibly be a good person -- a Christian person -- without faith in God and the Ten Commandments at a minimum?
Unlike many questions with regards to faith and ethics, I don't always know how to answer this one. What creates an internal moral code? For me it might be empathy. I want to live without hurting others, hopefully through actively helping others, especially those in dire need and those close to me. But these explanations go absolutely nowhere in trying to cross the divide between those of faith and those without.
Listening to Ehrman's discussion of his own fears about living without faith forced me to turn the question inside-out. How can you live a morally good life when your only guideline is faith in a seemingly arbitrary set of rules that might have nothing to do with your understanding of your own capabilities as a human being? The dependence on Christianity for morals, to me, is indicative of a howling chasm in the formation of one's own existence. If a man truly believes that his morals exist only in relation to faith in a particular divine being, they rest on very shaky ground.
(This is not to say that I think people of religious belief have no morals; the questions relate specifically to those who cannot see a way to live morally without religion.)
It seems pretty obvious that faith in the Ten Commandments is no guarantee of a morally upright life. Look at the number of religious leaders and politicians who truly believe that they fear and love God, but at the same time commit adultery or embezzlement, engage in the same-sex relationships they claim to revile, or are just plain mean, nasty greedy people who make the world a much less "Christian" place to live.
So take those Commandments as a guidepost. Christianity certainly didn't invent, say, the idea of adultery. To a person who is afraid to live outside the religious box, adultery is not allowed because it might send you to hell.
As an atheist, I neither need nor believe in hell. Nor in heaven. But I do believe that adultery is wrong. Why? Because it hurts people. If you're in a relationship, no matter of what kind, the person facing you across the dinner table is trusting you to treat that relationship with respect, to treat them with respect, and with love. Adultery is a betrayal of that trust. That doesn't mean that you might not fall in love with someone else, or that the relationship might unravel. What it means is that you choose not to pursue a course of action -- a relationship or string of relationships -- out of cowardice or laziness. If you fall in love with someone else, or a relationship isn't working anymore, you owe it to the other person to be honest with them at the outset.
A lot easier said that done, I'm sure. A whole lot easier to stand stubbornly by a rule your faith lays out for you. No one ever said living without faith was easy. It requires imagination, a level of empathy and sympathy for the people around you. Murder, stealing, lying, betrayal, and coveting your neighbor's possessions (or spouse) are all possible with or without religion telling you it's wrong. (Worshipping God and having false idols is a bit of a moot point for an atheist.)
And I'm a big fan of resting one day of the week. Not that I've noticed our ever-so-Christian society is all that interested in keeping the Sabbath holy and resting on the seventh day of the week, not when there are profits to be made and shopping to be done. Whether those of faith are willing to admit it or not, Mammon has become the idol of our world, not the poor guy who lived in poverty and supposedly died to save others from suffering.
People like Bart Ehrman, or the devout man of faith he used to be, will continue to shake their head over atheists like me, will wonder how we manage to live without stumbling blindly from one sin to the next. I will continue to wonder how anyone can read the Bible as literal, and how millions stumble blindly through life depending only on a set of commandments and some badly misunderstood passages in Leviticus as guidelines for how to live morally. And I will, I am sorry, continue to pity those whose choices are determined by a fear of hell, or hope for heaven.
At the end of the interview, Ehrman says he was finally able to take a final step past religion to see that "there are lots of reasons to behave ethically. Many of us are simply hard-wired to love our neighbors as ourselves." I'll take that.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit my child's teething as proof of insanity
Oh, John, light of my life, bane of my existence. My son, my sleep-thief. Tee-thing-pain: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, so innocently, against the bones that cause such misery. Two. Year. Molars.
He was awake, plain awake in the morning, screaming upright in bed at four o'clock. He was stubborn at home. He was happy at school. He was flirtatious at the grocery store cash register. But in the depths of my night, he was always helplessly screaming.
Did it have a reason? It did, indeed it did. In point of fact, there might have been no screaming at all had there not been, one eon, a certain initial idiocy of evolution. Between the forestland and the sea. Oh when? About as many years ago as some fool decided our survival could stand an unimaginable torture called teething. You can always count on a mother for incoherently blaming existence.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the childless, the inexperienced, free-wheeling childless are snickering at. Look at this ream of sleepless nights.
(With thanks and apologies to Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)
He was awake, plain awake in the morning, screaming upright in bed at four o'clock. He was stubborn at home. He was happy at school. He was flirtatious at the grocery store cash register. But in the depths of my night, he was always helplessly screaming.
Did it have a reason? It did, indeed it did. In point of fact, there might have been no screaming at all had there not been, one eon, a certain initial idiocy of evolution. Between the forestland and the sea. Oh when? About as many years ago as some fool decided our survival could stand an unimaginable torture called teething. You can always count on a mother for incoherently blaming existence.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the childless, the inexperienced, free-wheeling childless are snickering at. Look at this ream of sleepless nights.
(With thanks and apologies to Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Did Einstein have phenomenal powers of concentration? Or was he simply free of responsibilities?
I've been mulling over this question since reading Einstein: His Life and Universe. Where does personal responsibility infringe on a person's powers of concentration? What level of responsibility-feeling do we have to relinquish in order to devote ourselves to the task at hand?
The author described a scene in which Einstein sat at his desk completely engrossed in a physics problem while the children ran around playing and yelling. "Which shows," he said, "what powers of concentration Einstein had."
This statement ruffled me. The scene: a man sitting at a desk, pen in hand, oblivious to the children playing around him and likely housework or cooking of some kind being done by his wife in another room.
No, this isn't a feminist response. What I found curious was that the author wasn't quite imaginative enoughg to apply a role of responsibility to the powers of concentration. Einstein may have had great such powers -- many people do -- but the reason he was able to practice them was that he felt no responsibility for what else was going on in the room: care of the children, attention to them, the need for meals to be cooked and clothes to be washed and floors to be cleaned. Mostly the children.
There is a great difference, somewhere in there, between someone who can concentate in distracting situations, and someone who can employ such concentration when they feel at some level responsible for the care and welfare of a household, or a relationship, or a pet.
Einstein was by all reports an attentive father, and even an enthusiastic one when his children were old enough to teach and on the few occasions they were in the same place. But it was understood that his energies were saved for his research, and his thinking.
It is easy to wonder how many women today have that luxury, and men, too. After years of trial and mostly error, I have discovered that I cannot write when other people are in my home, including my spouse and child. Nobody thinks anything of interrupting me to ask what we should do for dinner, or where I've put the phone bill, or if I could please come down and show them where the strawberry patch is among the weeds.
I can concentrate through all this, although it gets harder to slip back into my writing bubble and some days I just give up. I prefer reserving my efforts for noisy coffee shops or bars, where I can concentrate just fine and nobody bugs me.
Harder than concentration is shaking the sense of responsibility. Say my husband Ian is looking after our son, while I catch up on some work in front of a notebook or computer. John cries for some reason. I ignore it, knowing Ian has his own way of parenting; I try not to interfere or impose mine on him. But John keeps crying and maybe my husband is engrossed in his email.
I don't want to parent for him, don't want to tell him what to do. He's given me a gift of time to work, and I want to take it. But I can't let go. I am pulled, always, every day, by responsibilities to my son, responsibilities to my husband, and responsibilities to my work. At this point in my son's life, on any given day, the responsibility to him is strongest. Because I spend more time with him every day than Ian does, I can tell that John wants his crayons, or for someone to let the plastic shapes out of his ball so he can put them back in, or he's lost his funky chicken somewhere.
Or maybe I'm trying to ignore the litany that comes from being a full-time mother: it's almost time for his nap, but he hasn't had lunch yet, and Ian doesn't know quite how to make the eggs so he likes them, and he should really take John outside to play because it's rained the last 4 days and he needs some sunshine, and I still need to pick up something at the farm for dinner or we'll end up eating pasta again and we're both trying to stick with eating more healthy, more vegetables.
And on and on. I bet Einstein never worried about whether someone was getting enough vegetables, or about cooking his young sons a nutritious lunch in good time for them to take a nap.
It's not as if it's easy for my husband, either. After all, he works hard and doesn't get much time to check his email, or just watch the news or dig in the garden or read a book.
The point is simply one of language. I felt ruffled because the author's admiration of Einstein implied that others (usually women) who can not work in the midst of their yelling children are somehow lesser beings.
Einstein of course had responsibilities, and took them seriously, especially in the area of providing for his family. This was not an egomaniac who expected all to be sacrified to his work. But it was his lack of responsibility in the area of home life that allowed him to practice his powers of concentration. Einstein was partly able to do what he did because he knew that someone else was taking care of the house and the children, of the little responsibilities that comprise daily life -- the daily life so demanding, so attention-consuming, so full of multi-tasking, that it keeps so many of us from concentrating on anything at all.
The author described a scene in which Einstein sat at his desk completely engrossed in a physics problem while the children ran around playing and yelling. "Which shows," he said, "what powers of concentration Einstein had."
This statement ruffled me. The scene: a man sitting at a desk, pen in hand, oblivious to the children playing around him and likely housework or cooking of some kind being done by his wife in another room.
No, this isn't a feminist response. What I found curious was that the author wasn't quite imaginative enoughg to apply a role of responsibility to the powers of concentration. Einstein may have had great such powers -- many people do -- but the reason he was able to practice them was that he felt no responsibility for what else was going on in the room: care of the children, attention to them, the need for meals to be cooked and clothes to be washed and floors to be cleaned. Mostly the children.
There is a great difference, somewhere in there, between someone who can concentate in distracting situations, and someone who can employ such concentration when they feel at some level responsible for the care and welfare of a household, or a relationship, or a pet.
Einstein was by all reports an attentive father, and even an enthusiastic one when his children were old enough to teach and on the few occasions they were in the same place. But it was understood that his energies were saved for his research, and his thinking.
It is easy to wonder how many women today have that luxury, and men, too. After years of trial and mostly error, I have discovered that I cannot write when other people are in my home, including my spouse and child. Nobody thinks anything of interrupting me to ask what we should do for dinner, or where I've put the phone bill, or if I could please come down and show them where the strawberry patch is among the weeds.
I can concentrate through all this, although it gets harder to slip back into my writing bubble and some days I just give up. I prefer reserving my efforts for noisy coffee shops or bars, where I can concentrate just fine and nobody bugs me.
Harder than concentration is shaking the sense of responsibility. Say my husband Ian is looking after our son, while I catch up on some work in front of a notebook or computer. John cries for some reason. I ignore it, knowing Ian has his own way of parenting; I try not to interfere or impose mine on him. But John keeps crying and maybe my husband is engrossed in his email.
I don't want to parent for him, don't want to tell him what to do. He's given me a gift of time to work, and I want to take it. But I can't let go. I am pulled, always, every day, by responsibilities to my son, responsibilities to my husband, and responsibilities to my work. At this point in my son's life, on any given day, the responsibility to him is strongest. Because I spend more time with him every day than Ian does, I can tell that John wants his crayons, or for someone to let the plastic shapes out of his ball so he can put them back in, or he's lost his funky chicken somewhere.
Or maybe I'm trying to ignore the litany that comes from being a full-time mother: it's almost time for his nap, but he hasn't had lunch yet, and Ian doesn't know quite how to make the eggs so he likes them, and he should really take John outside to play because it's rained the last 4 days and he needs some sunshine, and I still need to pick up something at the farm for dinner or we'll end up eating pasta again and we're both trying to stick with eating more healthy, more vegetables.
And on and on. I bet Einstein never worried about whether someone was getting enough vegetables, or about cooking his young sons a nutritious lunch in good time for them to take a nap.
It's not as if it's easy for my husband, either. After all, he works hard and doesn't get much time to check his email, or just watch the news or dig in the garden or read a book.
The point is simply one of language. I felt ruffled because the author's admiration of Einstein implied that others (usually women) who can not work in the midst of their yelling children are somehow lesser beings.
Einstein of course had responsibilities, and took them seriously, especially in the area of providing for his family. This was not an egomaniac who expected all to be sacrified to his work. But it was his lack of responsibility in the area of home life that allowed him to practice his powers of concentration. Einstein was partly able to do what he did because he knew that someone else was taking care of the house and the children, of the little responsibilities that comprise daily life -- the daily life so demanding, so attention-consuming, so full of multi-tasking, that it keeps so many of us from concentrating on anything at all.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Wanting more from life: the starvation of the intellect
I recently spent a very satisfactory month working my way through the 500-page biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. Satisfactory on many levels, as it was solidly written, well put together, and spent a great deal of time covering aspects of science and mathematics that will never fail to capture the hungry parts of my imagination and intellect -- even if that intellect is both out of practice and full of holes to begin with.
While reading, cirled repeatedly back to the same questions that prompted Julia and I to start Pooplosphy in the first place: where are the great discoveries and discussions of the current age occurring? Where are the collections of such immense minds as Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Schroedinger, and Heidigger now? Einstein's biographer tells of the meetings these people had, the letters and ideas they exchanged, the longs walks they took together through Berlin and the Alps, hashing out the issues of cutting-edge physics and mathematics.
Walking, together, and talking, while trying to piece together a tangible understanding of the nature of the universe.
Reading of these men and women made me both sad and envious, on many levels. Part of this is due to my own lack of understanding. Although I started university by studying physics, and ended with a degree in mathematics, these subjects were always far more difficult for me than for my colleagues. The four-year university format doesn't allow much room for the slow learner, or the one who needs a more foundational understanding of the nature of mathematics and science herself before delving fully into, say, real analysis and quantum mechanics.
The intricacies of general relativity will probably always be a closed book to me, even if described ten ways from Sunday using any amount of metaphor and analogy. Although I regret the non-genius nature of my rather woolly intelligence, I have come to terms with this fact. It detracts in no way from the pleasure I find in having long discussions in which a knowledgeable friend attempts to deepen my understanding. In fact, I assume it gives both of us pleasure; after all, I enjoy helping other writers improve their work and unearth their own literary voices. Why should not a physicist friend enjoy leading me to some glimmer of insight into Einstein's theories?
But this leads me to the aspect of envy that mixes with the sadness. While in the midst of this book, I made a quick trip back to the city of my university days for a roommate's wedding. I spent three hours wandering the campus and surrounds that had been home to the happiest years of my life.
The sadness came when I realized they had been the happiest. Yes, I now have a wonderful spouse and beloved child and a house in the country, but my mind seems to have spent the last ten years asleep. If I cannot have wilderness at my feet, I thrive equally on intellectual stimulation, perhaps even more so. And stimulation is what I found in those four years.
I have a great-grandfather whose occupation was to sit in his temple or his house and study the Talmud while his wife took care of everything else. He was so brilliant that famous chess players from all over the world came to his Ukranian village to play against him because he would not travel. The greatest dream of both my grandparents on that side was to achieve a Ph.D. in engineering. On the other side, my grandmother was a rare woman who pursued a master's in history in the 1930s and my grandfather went back to study politics in his 80s.
So maybe the intellectual thirst runs thick in my blood.
The jealousy stepped in as I paused in the coffee shop near my college (the place I used to earn my paycheck in the early mornings, my hair and math texts always full of the scent of roasted coffee) to read my book and step back just for a moment to the voracious student I used to be. Sipping coffee that reeked of nostalgia, I read of Einstein walking all over Berlin with his colleagues, talking their ideas over for hours.
That, I realize, is what I am missing in my life: the ability to walk out of the house to meet a friend and discuss anything from symbolic logic to what makes Jane Austen great, not as a set of thoughts in passing, but as the passionate focus of interest for a few hours.
And then, of course, to return to problems of potty training and why I can't get my toddler to eat anything more colorful than a scrambled egg. I wouldn't wish to lose the understanding being a mother has given me, both of the supposed nature of the universe, and of the true importance of the seemingly mundane activities of everyday life. But it is always easier to bend my mind to the problems of parenthood when I have stretched it to encompass the problems of quantum mechanics.
Right now the imbalance is extreme in favor of motherhood. Where does your average housewife intellectual find such connection? Only on the Internet? Or through literary magazines such as Brain, Child? After reading Einstein's biography, it seems a poor life in which you cannot walk out your door with a good friend to discuss whatever most stimulates you both.
Shortly after finishing this book, and moving on to a much less interesting one about Blaise Pascal, I asked my husband to help me comprehend, just a little, general relativity. Einstein's great thought experiment ("what is it like to run alongside a light beam?") does not translate to a metaphor I can grasp, and my husband does, after all, have a Ph.D. in physics.
We spent a pre-toddler hour tangling ourselves in the knottiness of quantum space and the question of whole numbers and what they really represent, among other issues. This while he got ready for work and I folded laundry. Usually he's in a pre-coffee stupor and I'm frantically trying to write before our son wakes up.
I realized that this is a level on which we used to talk with each other all the time, when we met back in college. But modern life, outside of academia, makes little room to sate the frivolously intellectual appetite. Our spare hours are more often spent reading novels or hanging out on Twitter, when we're not talking about our son's development, household finances, work, or what the hell to do about the woodchuck under the front path.
I realized that the only intellectual friend I have physically living in my town -- my spouse -- is the one who, like me, has little spare time.
One could argue that physics was Einstein's job, and the job of those in the sphere he worked. But it wasn't, not at first. It was his passion -- Einstein worked in a patent office, and wrote physics articles in his limited spare time, until he became well-known enough to procure a university position. But even before he entered academia, he worked and studied and exchanged letters and discussions with some of the greatest minds of his day.
Maybe this life rarely happens outside the walls of academe. Maybe people like me should always move to university towns, progressive places, walkable communities that have ample supplies of both passionate intellectuals and attachment parenting practitioners.
Is it too much to ask in life -- a chance to study in depth, to absorb the gift of wilderness, to feed insatiable curiosity, to raise your children with love and intellectual stimulation and local organic food among like-minded people, to challenge your mind and understanding, to travel the world, to pursue your own creativity and feed others', to have a family dinner every night and still get enough sleep?
Most of us want more from life than what we've got. Right now I'd be grateful for long walks with a kind genius. Or at least a friend, smarter than I, who can explain Einstein's relativity in language I can understand.
While reading, cirled repeatedly back to the same questions that prompted Julia and I to start Pooplosphy in the first place: where are the great discoveries and discussions of the current age occurring? Where are the collections of such immense minds as Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Schroedinger, and Heidigger now? Einstein's biographer tells of the meetings these people had, the letters and ideas they exchanged, the longs walks they took together through Berlin and the Alps, hashing out the issues of cutting-edge physics and mathematics.
Walking, together, and talking, while trying to piece together a tangible understanding of the nature of the universe.
Reading of these men and women made me both sad and envious, on many levels. Part of this is due to my own lack of understanding. Although I started university by studying physics, and ended with a degree in mathematics, these subjects were always far more difficult for me than for my colleagues. The four-year university format doesn't allow much room for the slow learner, or the one who needs a more foundational understanding of the nature of mathematics and science herself before delving fully into, say, real analysis and quantum mechanics.
The intricacies of general relativity will probably always be a closed book to me, even if described ten ways from Sunday using any amount of metaphor and analogy. Although I regret the non-genius nature of my rather woolly intelligence, I have come to terms with this fact. It detracts in no way from the pleasure I find in having long discussions in which a knowledgeable friend attempts to deepen my understanding. In fact, I assume it gives both of us pleasure; after all, I enjoy helping other writers improve their work and unearth their own literary voices. Why should not a physicist friend enjoy leading me to some glimmer of insight into Einstein's theories?
But this leads me to the aspect of envy that mixes with the sadness. While in the midst of this book, I made a quick trip back to the city of my university days for a roommate's wedding. I spent three hours wandering the campus and surrounds that had been home to the happiest years of my life.
The sadness came when I realized they had been the happiest. Yes, I now have a wonderful spouse and beloved child and a house in the country, but my mind seems to have spent the last ten years asleep. If I cannot have wilderness at my feet, I thrive equally on intellectual stimulation, perhaps even more so. And stimulation is what I found in those four years.
I have a great-grandfather whose occupation was to sit in his temple or his house and study the Talmud while his wife took care of everything else. He was so brilliant that famous chess players from all over the world came to his Ukranian village to play against him because he would not travel. The greatest dream of both my grandparents on that side was to achieve a Ph.D. in engineering. On the other side, my grandmother was a rare woman who pursued a master's in history in the 1930s and my grandfather went back to study politics in his 80s.
So maybe the intellectual thirst runs thick in my blood.
The jealousy stepped in as I paused in the coffee shop near my college (the place I used to earn my paycheck in the early mornings, my hair and math texts always full of the scent of roasted coffee) to read my book and step back just for a moment to the voracious student I used to be. Sipping coffee that reeked of nostalgia, I read of Einstein walking all over Berlin with his colleagues, talking their ideas over for hours.
That, I realize, is what I am missing in my life: the ability to walk out of the house to meet a friend and discuss anything from symbolic logic to what makes Jane Austen great, not as a set of thoughts in passing, but as the passionate focus of interest for a few hours.
And then, of course, to return to problems of potty training and why I can't get my toddler to eat anything more colorful than a scrambled egg. I wouldn't wish to lose the understanding being a mother has given me, both of the supposed nature of the universe, and of the true importance of the seemingly mundane activities of everyday life. But it is always easier to bend my mind to the problems of parenthood when I have stretched it to encompass the problems of quantum mechanics.
Right now the imbalance is extreme in favor of motherhood. Where does your average housewife intellectual find such connection? Only on the Internet? Or through literary magazines such as Brain, Child? After reading Einstein's biography, it seems a poor life in which you cannot walk out your door with a good friend to discuss whatever most stimulates you both.
Shortly after finishing this book, and moving on to a much less interesting one about Blaise Pascal, I asked my husband to help me comprehend, just a little, general relativity. Einstein's great thought experiment ("what is it like to run alongside a light beam?") does not translate to a metaphor I can grasp, and my husband does, after all, have a Ph.D. in physics.
We spent a pre-toddler hour tangling ourselves in the knottiness of quantum space and the question of whole numbers and what they really represent, among other issues. This while he got ready for work and I folded laundry. Usually he's in a pre-coffee stupor and I'm frantically trying to write before our son wakes up.
I realized that this is a level on which we used to talk with each other all the time, when we met back in college. But modern life, outside of academia, makes little room to sate the frivolously intellectual appetite. Our spare hours are more often spent reading novels or hanging out on Twitter, when we're not talking about our son's development, household finances, work, or what the hell to do about the woodchuck under the front path.
I realized that the only intellectual friend I have physically living in my town -- my spouse -- is the one who, like me, has little spare time.
One could argue that physics was Einstein's job, and the job of those in the sphere he worked. But it wasn't, not at first. It was his passion -- Einstein worked in a patent office, and wrote physics articles in his limited spare time, until he became well-known enough to procure a university position. But even before he entered academia, he worked and studied and exchanged letters and discussions with some of the greatest minds of his day.
Maybe this life rarely happens outside the walls of academe. Maybe people like me should always move to university towns, progressive places, walkable communities that have ample supplies of both passionate intellectuals and attachment parenting practitioners.
Is it too much to ask in life -- a chance to study in depth, to absorb the gift of wilderness, to feed insatiable curiosity, to raise your children with love and intellectual stimulation and local organic food among like-minded people, to challenge your mind and understanding, to travel the world, to pursue your own creativity and feed others', to have a family dinner every night and still get enough sleep?
Most of us want more from life than what we've got. Right now I'd be grateful for long walks with a kind genius. Or at least a friend, smarter than I, who can explain Einstein's relativity in language I can understand.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
How to make potty training your toddler really fun
In an early diaper-free phase take your toddler to a playground far away from home. Sit on a bench, kick off your favorite ballerinas and think "How cute!" when she slips them on and stumbles off. When she stops to take them off and pour out the pee, don´t follow your reflex to hide and deny any relationship with your offspring. Just swallow your pride and disgust, put your shoes back on and squeak home.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Story River: Why We Write in the Dark
Last spring I attended an author's luncheon for my local library. I even helped organize it, which shows how much I love libraries, as fidgety as meetings and committees make me. One of the authors who spoke had won a Pulitzer and taught at a nearby college. She was eloquent and honest, and discussed why it was that, say, Philip Roth has published many books and she has only published two. She talked about teaching and children and life. "Novels grow in the dark," she said, a quote I wrote down and spend some spare moments musing over. When she said, though, that "I have not a regular relationship to the work, but a faithful relationship to the work," the distinction brought immense relief to my own writing life.
I get frustrated, often, with how long my work takes. It can take months for an essay to reach what I feel is completion, years sometimes for a story, perhaps because I am simply more practiced at nonfiction. When the final narrative finally emerges, and still feels whole and smooth even several months later, I know I'm done with it. And wish, repeatedly, that I could have just written it right the first time around. At which point the whole process starts over again with something new.
I carry drafts of essays and stories around with me all the time, as if they were children, or cats waiting to be taken to the vet. Sometimes I read over the first few pages and sigh, wondering how on earth I'm going to fix whatever is wrong with a piece that I know is essentially good. And then I put it back in my bag because I also know, instinctively, that I cannot push a piece, or force it to be done, or inflict endings and scenes it was never meant to have. It has to wait. Maybe it is gestating, or maybe the door to that particular piece is closed for the moment, and I have pay attention to see when it opens again.
I know by now that I am not really in charge of "my" work. The best work does not come from "I," but from some "other," some easy, flowing place where the story runs through like a stream or river or brook, depending on its nature. Maybe that's why it's so hard for a writer to capture it all at once. The story is moving, drifting, changing all the time, not sitting there like a written book ready to be picked up, or even a baby ready to be born.
Or maybe it is like a baby, a complete self at every moment of its life, as is any course of running water, but, also like a river or stream or creek or spring, is never the same being it was a moment before, changing at every instant. And yet, the watercourse or human being, while seeming to change, has a core of being-ness or completeness that all can sense, some unchanging purpose or existence that sits at the center of the joyful and wild ripples of change and life.
This is also true of a story. The attempts to catch it in its flow -- which for me can take years of repeated efforts -- are simply attempts to describe the story-river so completely as to come as close as possible to describing the core of it.
The goal, however, of a writer or human or artist or storyteller is not, in fact, to simply tell the central, unchanging truth, although that is what we feel we are reaching for. The core is not a story. It is simply a word, or a sense: truth, wrong, love, hurt, joy. These words describe the central essence of our works, and we wrap stories around them to help us make sense of them. To help us understand what we already instinctually know. Because every person, writer or reader, has their own river of truth, knowledge, and experience. Behind each of these are truths we all share, but the only way we can reach understanding of how close we are is to describe our rivers -- our stories -- to one another so fully that maybe another will recognize one of ours and say, "Yes, that is a lot like mine, my story."
There is a delicate balance between letting the story come through you (that which is true), and letting the "I," or the ego, manufacture it. With time and practice every writer learns to sense where he or she is writing from. And with time and practice, we learn that satisfaction in our work, "our" creations, come not from us, but from that other place that, like nature itself, gives its gifts freely -- if we're paying attention.
I get frustrated, often, with how long my work takes. It can take months for an essay to reach what I feel is completion, years sometimes for a story, perhaps because I am simply more practiced at nonfiction. When the final narrative finally emerges, and still feels whole and smooth even several months later, I know I'm done with it. And wish, repeatedly, that I could have just written it right the first time around. At which point the whole process starts over again with something new.
I carry drafts of essays and stories around with me all the time, as if they were children, or cats waiting to be taken to the vet. Sometimes I read over the first few pages and sigh, wondering how on earth I'm going to fix whatever is wrong with a piece that I know is essentially good. And then I put it back in my bag because I also know, instinctively, that I cannot push a piece, or force it to be done, or inflict endings and scenes it was never meant to have. It has to wait. Maybe it is gestating, or maybe the door to that particular piece is closed for the moment, and I have pay attention to see when it opens again.
I know by now that I am not really in charge of "my" work. The best work does not come from "I," but from some "other," some easy, flowing place where the story runs through like a stream or river or brook, depending on its nature. Maybe that's why it's so hard for a writer to capture it all at once. The story is moving, drifting, changing all the time, not sitting there like a written book ready to be picked up, or even a baby ready to be born.
Or maybe it is like a baby, a complete self at every moment of its life, as is any course of running water, but, also like a river or stream or creek or spring, is never the same being it was a moment before, changing at every instant. And yet, the watercourse or human being, while seeming to change, has a core of being-ness or completeness that all can sense, some unchanging purpose or existence that sits at the center of the joyful and wild ripples of change and life.
This is also true of a story. The attempts to catch it in its flow -- which for me can take years of repeated efforts -- are simply attempts to describe the story-river so completely as to come as close as possible to describing the core of it.
The goal, however, of a writer or human or artist or storyteller is not, in fact, to simply tell the central, unchanging truth, although that is what we feel we are reaching for. The core is not a story. It is simply a word, or a sense: truth, wrong, love, hurt, joy. These words describe the central essence of our works, and we wrap stories around them to help us make sense of them. To help us understand what we already instinctually know. Because every person, writer or reader, has their own river of truth, knowledge, and experience. Behind each of these are truths we all share, but the only way we can reach understanding of how close we are is to describe our rivers -- our stories -- to one another so fully that maybe another will recognize one of ours and say, "Yes, that is a lot like mine, my story."
There is a delicate balance between letting the story come through you (that which is true), and letting the "I," or the ego, manufacture it. With time and practice every writer learns to sense where he or she is writing from. And with time and practice, we learn that satisfaction in our work, "our" creations, come not from us, but from that other place that, like nature itself, gives its gifts freely -- if we're paying attention.
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