COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: GOETHE'S FAUST AND THE FAUSTIAN PERSONALITY

 

               Although I began consciously assimilating the lives and ideas of those contributors to Western Civilization that I encountered by reading to Mr. Cohen, I realize now that a life is being continually constructed by the culture that surrounds us and the opportunities that come our way.  I realized this when I first read Goethe’s Faust.  He wrote the play in two books.  Book I is the familiar theme of Faust the professor, discontent with his life at 50, making a pact with Mephistopheles to explore life to the full as a restored 20 something.  It is the story of his love affair with Marguerite and the calamity he brings in his wake as he discovers the sensual life he had neglected.  Book II deals with the next 50 years of his life and he tries out exploring, money-making, militarism, conjuring back Helen of Troy (and producing a child homunculus with her), and as he approaches his hundredth year he applies everything he learned to laying out a design for a city, serving as a city manager, helping to design harbors, turn pestilential marshlands into fertile soil for bumper crops, and allow opportunities for the growing population to engage in international trade and the diversity of culture it brings.  It is at this point where he tells Mephistopheles that he wants to continue serving humanity through science that he loses the bet with the devil.    But before Mephistopheles can claim his soul, God intervenes and takes the dying Faust’s soul to Heaven, praising him for having striven to fully explore the gift of his humanity. 

               I read this for the first time when the Honors College at Stony Brook University was formed about 1989 and this was one of the books assigned to the freshman class on “progress and its discontents.”  As I read the book I realized I had a Faustian personality.  I did not repeat a year.  I always looked for something new to add to my knowledge, some new skill to acquire, and a zest for plunging into life and enjoying it as much as I could. Fortunately I had a moral restraint Faust lacked until his decrepitude.  My high school exposure to those Greek thinkers and writers had as firm a grip on my desires as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” had on the economy and its usually beneficial outcomes.  The Faust theme still resonates in my mind and I have a draft of a novel with the working title: Faust: My First Fifty Years. In it I explore Faust’s childhood.  I make him the grandson of Gutenberg’s business partner, Johan Fust (who changed his name to Faust as his printing business prospered).  I have my Faust become a priest and physician who teaches the science and math courses in the Renaissance universities he moves to.  He is also assimilating the findings of the Renaissance and I have him meet Fracastoro, Machiavelli, Da Vinci, Columbus, and Copernicus as he travels in Europe buying and copying manuscripts for his father’s printing company.  He is in Wittenberg when his student, Martin Luther, begins the Protestant Reformation.  I make my Faust the proto-scientist who learns from experimentation and whose work leads to the Faust legend of his being a magician, in league with the devil, and a sinister character, chased from one place to another whenever his past catches up with him or when he introduces the findings of his science to his medical practice. I am still revising this book and hope it will be finished before I am. 

 

ON TURNING 82

 

 

On July 15, 1931, I was born in Brooklyn, New York.  I am now 82 years old living in Bloomington, Indiana.  My life has taken me from New York City (22 years) to Bloomington, Indiana (5 years) to Kingston Ontario (2 years), to Los Angeles (8 years) , to Setauket, New York (42 years), and back to Bloomington (3 years so far). I have enjoyed a life as a scholar, a professor, a geneticist, a historian of science, and a writer.  I have enjoyed being the father of five children and seeing them launch their own careers and families.  I learned my own (and Helen’s) inadequacies in a first marriage that failed after four years.  I have enjoyed 54 years of a happy marriage with Nedra and we have never failed to encourage each other through our relatively rare moments of self-doubts. I was not fully on my own with a permanent job until I was 27 as a freshly minted PhD.  During those two years in Canada I learned how to publish my research, how to get grants to support it, and how to teach.  For the scholar the process of becoming independent takes time. At UCLA I became recognized as a geneticist, a scholar, and a teacher.  I enjoyed a busy laboratory with six students obtaining their PhDs.  It was also the 1960s, an era that was searing in its social turmoil on campuses.  It profoundly changed what I taught and shifted me away from the laboratory and into teaching non-science majors as my response to the needs of the 1960s.  It also shifted me to Stony Brook University where I could develop my Biology 101-102 course using a “humanities approach.”  When I turned 65 I did not feel old but I gave myself five years to explore what I wanted to do when I retired.  My Lifelines column was a result of that effort and I continue to enjoy bringing the life sciences to an adult public that prefers the “humanities approach” to what is called popularized science. I see the former as stimulating our world view and the latter as adding to our factual understanding.  Both are needed but I find the humanities approach relatively uncommon. 

I did not begin to feel old until I was in my mid seventies. Aging is like walking through a mine field and you never quite know what is ahead. I have been fortunate that no major surgeries have come my way and my mind is still alive, curious, eager to learn, and eager to share what I have learned.  I can’t count on that luck to accompany me for what my physician desires “of seeing you through to your 90th year and after that, we’ll see.” I have a modest arthritis compared to my father whose gnarled fingers and frozen joints still haunt my memory.  The greatest gift of retiring at 70 was the freedom it gave me to write as much as I wanted and at my own pace, subsidizing my own scholarship and not having to worry about earning a paycheck or honorarium. For this I give thanks to Andrew Carnegie who introduced the TIAA retirement program for professors.  Without his foresight I would have had to subtract five books from my publishing record, wondering when, if at all, I could find time to write them.    

COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE AND THE PERSONAL ESSAY

 

 

               No individual has had a greater influence on my intellectual life then Morris Gabriel Cohen, my high school teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn.  He was legally blind from Leber’s optic atrophy, a mitochondrial genetic disorder he inherited from the cytoplasm of his mother’s egg.  I had the good fortune of reading out loud to him for five years (one year in high school and four years in the morning before heading to NYU).  During those years I assimilated an immense range of books, plays, memoirs, and other writings of the classics of Western Civilization. Mr. Cohen was a Pulitzer Prize scholarship winner at Columbia.  He served in WWI before he became a high school teacher and before his vision began to deteriorate.  He never married and the only woman with whom he corresponded was a young woman he met in Britain in 1919.  She was killed during an air raid in London in 1940. 

               I particularly enjoyed the essays of Montaigne. Don’t read the Florio translation which is Renaissance English.  Read the Donald Frame translation (1958) in modern English.  I read the Cotton translation which was in the Modern Library series of classic books. Montaigne wrote 107 essays during his lifetime.  He was born in southern France where his parents had an estate and sold wine and fruits that they grew in their orchard.  His mother was from a Converso family of Spanish Jews who fled across the Pyrenees. This probably gave Montaigne the tolerance he had for all religions and he was successful in settling disputes as a magistrate after getting a law degree.  Montaigne enjoyed life.  He converted a silo on his farm into a library and study where he would have the solitude to write and read.  He suffered from kidney stones all his adult life. He loved conversation and entertained with a circle of acquaintances who enjoyed discussing history, philosophy, and the issues of the day in a broader context than their politics.  He read most of his classics in the original Greek or Latin. 

               Montaigne invented the personal essay.  He reflects on what he reads and the implications of human behavior from his work at court, his observations of his peers, and from the numerous examples he culls from his vast reading. Each essay brings the past and present together with his own personal experiences.  I learned from Montaigne that the personal essay is more powerful than the abstract essay which tends to be more like an encyclopedia entry.  The personal essay shows that the topic is alive and at least filtered through the person writing it.  It was this essay style I mimicked in my high school and college English classes.  It was the personal essay that was my model for my Life Lines columns for the Times Beacon Record newspapers on Long Island, New York, that Leah Dunaieff publishes.  I loved Montaigne’s essay “How by many paths we arrive at the same end.”  His very moving essay on friendship celebrates the life of his closest friend, Etienne de Boétie who died young.  By reading his essays I got his biography, not in a linear way but the way we learn about our own families growing up.  I have used that for my own memoirs (with a working title of Bits and Pieces) when I read aloud chapters at the Emeriti House on the IU campus with my fellow retirees. 

COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: SAMUEL PEPYS AND KEEPING A DIARY

 

 

Most of my life I have kept a diary. I am now on the 102^nd volume.  Most are 300 page Record Books I have bought at stationary stores or black covered bound artist sketch books of about 200 pages that I have bought at Barnes and Noble.  I started in 1948 using speckled composition books.  My inspiration for keeping a diary was Samuel Pepys.  I read aloud to my high school English class from Pepys’s description of the London fire of 1666 and the plague year before that and trembled with excitement as I realized he was writing this as it happened.  History was unfiltered. A few months later I bought a set of Pepys’s diaries at a used bookstore  on 59^th street in Manhattan and paid 50 cents a week (my allowance) until I paid for all 12 volumes.  Pepys is, as far as my readings go, what I would call the first modern man to write about himself. He was ambitious, talented, loved good food, cheated on his wife although he loved her, collected books, played and composed music, sucked up to power (especially the court of King Charles), recorded gossip and relished it, took bribes, served as secretary of the Royal Society, rebuilt the British Navy and made it the world’s most powerful fleet.  He kept his diary for eight years and then his eyesight began deteriorating and he quit.  In his later career he was accused of Catholic sympathies (Pepys was tolerant of many points of view, especially in his religious beliefs) and because his wife was French and his accusers claimed her conversion to the Church of England was insincere. He was to be tried of plotting to overthrow the King.  His accuser, John Scott  (from Setauket on Long Island in New York), was a scoundrel who sold colonial lands to the British that did not belong to him).  Pepys did not go to trial because Scott murdered another man in a bar room brawl and fled the country.

               My life is not as adventurous as that of Pepys.  What I admired was his simple narrative style of recording the day.  He did not use his diary to meditate or create an image of himself for the future readers of his diary.  He wrote it to capture the day.  That is what I have tried to do.  But my diary has also given me the gift to never feel writer’s block, to write in a narrative style that is as comfortable as breathing, and to have as a resource for checking dates and events in my family’s lives. Some of my diaries I have donated to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory library archives.  I plan to do so with the rest of them.   

COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: EPICURUS

 

 

Of the billions of people who have lived, perhaps one million have written books or left behind some record of their teachings or beliefs.  Of those one million fortunate enough to be remembered by name, probably no one person alive knows more than a few hundred or few thousand of these writings.  Scholars make it their business to know a lot. But most of humanity settles for a relatively few of these contributors to our civilizations.  The farther back we go the fewer will be remembered or end up in course notes, text books, or referred to in popular literature. There are many good reasons why this is so.  We prefer to dwell on the issues of our generation, not the issues of those who lived 2300 years ago.  We feel the more modern writers have more to say because they have been exposed to so many more findings and interpretations of the universe, life, and the things that matter. I am sure many people live relatively happy lives without ever having heard of Epicurus.

               I was exposed to his ideas when learning about Western Civilization from my blind high school teacher, Morris Cohen. I liked what I heard and I looked at a book I had at home, Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things.  It described the ideas of Epicurus.  It gave me a picture of how the ancient world saw the universe.  I learned more about the philosophy of Epicurus from a book I bought recommended by Mr. Cohen.  It was Walter Pater’s novel, Marius the Epicurean.  Epicurus (341-270 BCE) was a Greek philosopher who never married and who earned his living by teaching.  He taught from the garden of his home and his academy was called “the Garden.”  He was the first philosopher to accept both female and male students. He believed the universe was not fully determinate as Democritus had taught, but was largely indeterminate because it was more complex than Democritus believed.  Instead of atoms moving like billiard balls in straight lines, he believed atoms occasionally swerved and this created indeterminacy and free will. He rejected taking anything on faith and claimed we should only accept as real what we see, what we can deduce logically, and what we can experience by hands-on activity.  He said happiness comes from avoiding pain and fear.  He believed that death extinguishes both a body and its soul.  He claimed gods do not punish or reward humans. Our object in life should be avoiding power, sexual excess, and glory.  Instead we should live in moderation, savoring the simple pleasures of life, especially the companionship of others, the satisfaction of the good things the world offers us, and avoiding harm to others or to ourselves. 

               Over time Epicureanism got a bad reputation and it was misinterpreted as a selfish pursuit of pleasure involving over-indulgence in food, sex, drugs, or bad company.  Others saw it as a shallow philosophy of life in which seeking pleasure deflected us from piety, patriotism, or other civic virtues.  I consider myself an Epicurean in my philosophy.  I don’t think I could live as fully committed as Epicurus did.  The world does matter to me.  I may have shunned much of the pursuit of pleasure but I have abided to most of Epicurus’s outlook.  I reject the supernatural. I accept the finality of death.  I find life worth living.  I try hard not to harm anyone.  I do not abuse my body with such habits as tobacco usage, alcoholism, or overconsumption of chemicals in my foods and drinks that are known carcinogens or mutagens.  My own life is more than Epicurean.  Like Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.”  The voices of the past are well represented in my being. 

THE GREAT CHAIN AT WEST POINT AND A FAMILY CONNECTION

 

 

A reader of an earlier Blog noted a reference to one of his and Nedra’s ancestors, Andrew Babcock (1731-1801) who came from England in 1773 with his brother Edward. They were anchor makers and blacksmiths.  Andrew’s brother died a year after arriving, but Andrew became involved in 1778 with the making of “the Great Chain” as it is now called, across the Hudson River near West Point.  I learned as I read more of this project that the engineer for this fortification of West Point was Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the famous Polish patriot and Enlightenment scholar who was in France in 1776 and who came to America to offer his services to General Washington.  Kosciusko’s name I recognized from my high school history course, but I did not know he was an engineer, architect, artist, and musician.  He also was a foe of slavery and left his estate to Thomas Jefferson to use the money to free Jefferson’s slaves, which Jefferson did not do because it would have created problems for his fellow plantation  owners and family.  The case eventually was settled fifty years later by the US Supreme Court with Kosciuszko’s descendants being awarded what was left of the estate.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t much, because the trustees embezzled the money over the half century of litigation.  Kosciusko was much appreciated by George Washington because his engineering skills were used for several fortifications and military engineering projects that prevented the British from following up on their victories or achieving their conquests. 

               Andrew Babcock lived and worked near the northern reaches of Manhattan in  what was then part of Bergen County, New Jersey and now part of  Orange County in New York.  He helped make the links of the chain at the Noble and Townsend Forge located there.  Each link was 18 inches in thickness and two feet in length and weighed 114 pounds. The links (in batches of 4) were placed on rafts of logs and towed to West Point.  The Great Chain was 1800 feet in length and the blacksmiths joined them together.   The barrier was set up to prevent the British ships from attacking Albany and joining British forces in Canada.  That would have cut the US in half and isolated New England from the other colonies.  General Benedict Arnold devised a plan to take over the forts at West Point, release the chain and bring about a defeat of Washington’s army.  It was thwarted when a spy (Major Andre) was captured and Arnold was tipped off and managed to escape and sail back to England.

After the War Andrew Babcock married Susan White and they had four children, Edward E. Babcock, Rachel Babcock, Sarah J Babcock, and James Babcock.  Nedra is descended on her mother’s side from Edward Babcock the great great grandfather of Nedra’s mother, Florence (nee Dawald) Miller.  On her father’s side Sarah Babcock is the great great grandmother of Harold Miller, Nedra’s father.   Susan White Babcock was widowed in 1801 and cheated of her land in Greene County, Pennsylvania.  She used a flat boat and with her four children and belongings followed the rivers and canals to settle near Cincinnati.  The Babcocks made their way into Indiana in the 1830s, especially in Fulton County, Indiana.   There were other Babcocks who came to North America several generations earlier in the 1600s. Some of those Babcocks were loyalists and supported the British during the American Revolution and many of those moved to Canada, particularly in the Brockville, Canada, region, not far from where Nedra and I lived when I was teaching at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario.  The memories of Ontario residents were set in a bronze marker by the St Lawrence seaway and I recall reading “These fortifications were emplaced by order of her Majesty, Queen Victoria, as protection against American aggression.  I didn’t learn that in my high school history class!  After the Revolutionary War thirteen of the links were saved to form a monument  at the West Point Academy and the rest of the Great Chain was melted down and sold to recoup some of the costs of the war. 

HOW SHOULD OUR REPUBLIC RESPOND TO GERRYMANDERING PRACTICES?

We properly respond to accusations of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, and sex. These required heroic efforts. The woman’s movement in the United States was chiefly due to the leadership in the 1800s of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and many other women inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft and others a generation earlier. It took until 1916 for women to get the right to vote. It took a Civil War to end slavery and a constitutional amendment to give African Americans the right to vote but it took almost a century more for those African Americans to earn the civil rights of the white among whom they lived, including their legal right to vote. Religious discrimination was severe during the Colonial era and remained so into the nineteenth century with lots of discrimination against Catholics (“Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” as a campaign theme during the 1896 Presidential election). It was not until 1962 that a Catholic became President of the United States. I recommend reading an old classic of Gustavus Myers, A History of Bigotry in the United States. It was published in 1943 shortly after he died. The term gerrymander was introduced to describe the practice of drawing a map of an electoral district that would favor a political party or an incumbent during election. Both Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed this practice which is usually carried out every ten years, following the latest national census. The assumption is that it evens out in the long run for Democrats and Republicans because the issues change every generation. Remember the Dixiecrats, as liberals called the 1950s southern Democrats, who were then rabidly racist and did their best to keep blacks from voting and who thought Jews had horns on their foreheads, and that the Pope was a minion of Satan? Many of them and their children now vote Republican. This portion of the Republican party does not share the Republican values of Senator Javitz of New York, Wendell Willkie of Indiana, Nelson Rockefeller, or even the conservative values of Senator Bob Taft of Ohio. I mean they favor the far right agenda of Creationism, suppression of women’s rights to make medical decisions about their bodies and families, homophobia, unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism, and a virtual dismembering of social services for those who are not fortunate. Those gerrymandered districts are designed to keep those likely to vote Democrat from voting. Who are those feared Democrats? They are largely the poor, African-Americans, Hispanics, union laborers, and college students. By making it as difficult as possible for them to vote and by drawing election district boundaries to pull them out of districts that tend to vote Republican or that are in toss-up districts, the local candidates (US House of Representatives, State House districts, and State Senate Districts) can be made safe for at least a decade and more likely even longer. When a State has solid majorities in all branches of the government, watch out for the “tyranny of the majority.” This applies to both parties. I would like to see a national movement for a people’s initiative to put initiatives on the ballots of all states to pass restricted gerrymandering laws. There are lots of ways to do this. When Utah was admitted as a state, the governing body created districts by assigning households to one party if they lived in odd numbered street addresses and the other party was given the even numbered addresses. We use such methods for “rationing” gasoline during a crisis (license plates with odd numbers get their gas on M W F and even numbers get theirs on T TH S). One way would be to create a grid for each state, each square being a senatorial district. Congressional House Seats could be decided by a panel of judges chosen by lottery to evaluate complaints of discrimination because of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, or age. I’m sure political scientists could work out such an initiative to be placed on state ballots. Why should we put up with this self-serving interest by politicians instead of forcing candidates to debate important issues in their districts and allow a fair unbiased representation of all the people in a state?