Where cathedrals can be angels with Romanesque wings, where the sky is sometimes vibrant with the sunshiny tremolo of a Vivaldi sonata, and where sunlight reflects on the flavor of ever more delicious cake - for lack of a better word, a travel blog.
I've thought long and hard about whether to post this text (sketch? ultra-short story?) here. And I've thought long and hard about whether to write that I've thought long and hard about it. And whether- It's probably too personal. And the fact that I admit to realising that it's too personal makes it even more personal. And that in turn- The only consolation I have is that the fact that I have decided to - and am able to - post it means not everything is quite as described. Though the fact that I've admitted to realising that...
A silence. You finished talking. If I don’t say something now, the silence will go on forever. But it’s so difficult to say anything. And now I’m thinking about saying it, and the time for me to say it has passed...
– I – I’m talking now... They’re looking at me, you’re looking at me. Intensely. Like you think everything I say is worth listening to. Like I’m about to say something important. But this isn’t important! I’m just talking about myself again. I’m too shy to ask you about you. – I – Damn, now I’m stuttering. You’re looking at me, and I need all the strength I can muster to continue speaking. – sometimes have this thing – my voice sounds unnatural. You nod encouragingly. You know I’m finding this hard and you’re trying to help. But you’re making me think about the conversation again... – where I can’t start a conversation because – But this is ridiculous! Can’t start a conversation because I think about starting the conversation instead of simply starting it? Who’d be so insane as to mix up levels in such a way! And then I can’t finish what I started saying because I realise that I am now talking and start thinking about that, and then I think about all the times I thought about thinking about having a conversation in the middle of one... And I’m doing it yet again, thinking about thinking about thinking about... I can’t count it anymore – because... Never mind. I don’t know what I wanted to say. – I’m lying now, I’m lying now, I’M LYING NOW!
I have this thing sometimes where I can’t finish a text because I keep on thinking about...
I don't usually write book reviews, but this one just kind of happened...
I spend most of my days at Oxford thinking “I love my course. It’s the perfect course for me.” And there’s plenty of reasons for me to think that: I enjoy writing my essays, solving my problems, I feel I get a lot out of my tutorials and lectures, mathematical and philosophical problems prevent me from falling asleep often enough for me to satisfy any definition of a nerd. But all these are, one might say, positive reasons for believing one’s course of action is the right one – but what about the negative ones? I have evidence that what I’m studying is a thing I enjoy, not that it is the thing.
It was quite different in my high school – biology, chemistry and Polish lessons were all living proof that math and physics were the two sole interesting (or at least understandable) subjects of study in the universe (we didn’t have philosophy at our school). But how much of this was bad teaching, how much my prejudice, and how much actual boringness of the non-mathematical subjects and my lack of talent in those directions? At university I don’t have to go through boring biology classes – instead, I go to a popular lecture or two every once in a while, enjoy conversations over dinner with people studying wide varieties of subjects, and my interest in everything under the sun grows all the time, threatening to reach the level of a five-year-old soon.
And so I’ve spent the book vouchers I received for proving in exams that my course was made just for me on biological/ neuropsychological literature which is threatening to provide a counterexample to my proofs... One of the books I bought was Lewis Wolpert’s “How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells”.
I almost gave up on it in the middle of the second chapter. “When tall and short plants were crossed, the offspring were tall, and when these were crossed, one third were short, the others tall,” I read in the part about Mendel’s pea experiments... Now if I understood anything in biology lessons, it was Mendelian tables. And if I understood Mendelian tables, then one fourth, not one third, of the peas would be short. TT crossed with tt gives four Tts, Tt crossed with Tt gives one TT, two Ttsand one tt. One tt. One short plant, three tall ones. So one fourth of the plants were short, and the short to tall plant ratio was one to three. How difficult is it to understand this distinction? If Lewis Wolpert can’t tell the difference between p/q and p/(p+q), how can I trust him to tell the difference betweenDNA and RNA, say, and explain that difference to me?
One slip could happen to anyone, of course. But there were other reasons for me to give up on Lewis Wolpert at that point. First and foremost – he can’t write. Or at least he can’t write popular science. He writes like a child, maybe a student – chopped up simple sentences, hardly a relative clause in there, he tries to glue the whole with some “so”s and “therefore”s, but the connection between the parts seems superficial. He has problems with his paragraphs – he starts completely new thoughts in the middle of one, as if pressing that “enter” button was too hard a job.
Many of his sentences are, I feel, ones about which my tutor would ask – “Can you explain why you wrote that? What was the overall structure of your essay? What were you trying to get across?” – to which I would respond with shamefaced silence. One maxim I got out of last year’s tutorials is surely “When in doubt, don’t write it” (this applies to sentences in essays, not in blog posts) – but Wolpert’s text seems to me full of sentences that serve no purpose (he pours out lists of diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, genetic disorders, sometimes only explaining the nature of the disease in a single line – in short, he forms a shopping list, the entity, when discovered within an essay, frowned upon by my tutor with endless disapproval.) Sure, Wolpert isn’t writing a philosophy essay – but he’s not writing a Wikipedia article either. And his text, at the heights of its style, is only as good as one.
If it was just bad style, I’d maybe let it pass without mention. Even things like “The cells of all animals and plants have evolved from much smaller single cell organisms such as bacteria and other single-cell organisms”. (Though the way he tops up the repetition with an inconsistency in his spelling of “single-cell organism” is infuriating.) Or like his hypercorrect “it was basically downhill all the way to we humans” (even my Word tells me to change the “we” to “us”). But when Wolpert’s linguistic clumsiness turns comical, the urge to share it with the wide world becomes to strong...
“The region that will give rise to human eggs and sperm can be identified about halfway through gastrulation in the mouse and thus probably at a similar stage in humans.” “Are you man or mouse?” acquires a whole new meaning in this context...
Or this: “there are a thousand million synapses in a tiny piece of our brain the size of a grain of sand – and think how many grains of sand there are in our brains!” I should hope none...
So much for Wolpert’s inability to write. I did end up finishing his book, so it can’t have been all that bad. Indeed, sometimes I was laughing with his sentences, not at them. Like “We have ten times as many bacterial cells in our body as we have normal body cells – a fact so surprising that you may need to read that again.” I read the first part of the sentence three times before I read the second, and I almost laughed out loud when I got to that. There were some fascinating facts presented in the book, and I must say for its defence that it’s immeasurably more interesting than my high school biology textbook. I was amazed at how fascinating all those things I had hated in high school were – but then I thought that they obviously should be. It’s the way our bodies, we, are built we’re talking about. Sure it’s interesting! What I can’t understand is that I’ve never yet found a book which actually presents it as such. Wolpert manages to do it a few times, but not, in my opinion, enough.
Stephen Hawking was allegedly told by his publishers that every equation decreases book sales by half – why hasn’t the same been said about biological terms? I’d love it if Wolpert exchanged some of his technical terminology for equations... Of course, our bodies are fiendishly complicated – that’s part of the beauty of the subject matter – but do we really have to name every molecule before we can talk about it?
Another thing which made the account in “The Secret Lives of Cells” difficult to follow was the complete lack of illustrations. I remember diagrams of mitosis and meiosis in our old textbook, and though I understood very little of what I was learning back then, I would have understood even less if it hadn’t been for them. And because Wolpert didn’t include such diagrams in his treatment of the matter, I still don’t understand the process completely.
Finally, there is the question of the opinion part of “How We Live and Why We Die”. “Poor argumentation,” my tutor would surely say. Wolpert spits out assertions with all the certainty of an anti-religious, anti-philosophical “Scientist”. He argues that genes determine some of who we are, saying: “Only someone blinkered and unthinking could believe that all the differences are cultural” and proceeding to talk about the differences between men and women. Sure, men and women are different, of course they are! But once he begins to treat the fact that boys and girls play with different toys as evidence for further genetic differences and expects us to continue believing that only someone “blinkered and unthinking” could not agree with him, his only argument is a statement of his conclusion...
Wolpert is well known for his claim that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”. It’s a nice phrase – but one which on reflection I think he is not entitled to utter. For he believes that the embryo is not a human being until it is roughly 36 days old. Gastrulation takes place at around 10 days – can he then, if it is not yet a personwho gastrulates, call the process a part of your life, let alone the most important part of your life? There is a debate going on among philosophers of mind as to whether we are essentially persons or animals – for Wolpert’s beliefs about gastrulation and the status of the embryo to be consistent he would have to opt for the latter option. That is probably the option one would expect him to choose anyway, but it is nonetheless quite a claim to make!
From finding Wolpert’s mathematical mistake in genetics to frowning upon his lack of style and argumentation, writing this text has convinced me that I need not worry whether my course is the right one.I would like to take this moment to thank Professor Wolpert for bringing certainty into my life.
We were late for the birth of the new world – the bloodied head of the sun was already peeking out of the waters as we ran towards the beach. A half disk with a horizontal line of light hair floating on the sea, it entered the sky with nearly visible speed.
When we got to the edge of the beach, the world was saturated with meaning. We took off our socks in awe and respectfully dipped our toes in the edge of the vast, all-engulfing plane of pink purpled by gently thundering waves.
The other edge was occupied by a sailboat, the sky was full of dancing birds, and I believed that generations of ears sophisticated by postmodernism and sacrilegious ringtones will never make Für Elise ugly.
Ferrara that day was a disappointment – tired after our morning walk, we were falling asleep.
And so it's happened. My blog has been degenerating into poetry for months now - possibly from the very beginning. I can't be bothered to write a proper introduction or glue my paragraphs together anymore, I've been writing "sketches" instead, but even those are starting to bore me - why put a verb in a sentence if you can just throw in a noun with an epithet?
Like the previous text, this one was written in Scotland. Since then I've spent three internetless weeks in Norway, so I'm putting it - an article about Scotland and the Scots - up now; something on (beautiful, amazing, unique) Norway is bound to appear in the not-too-distant future.
“Twenty thrrree pounds, please” – the accent of the man in the toll booth in front of the entrance to Traquair House is undoubtedly Scottish. My brother and I exchange gleeful glances – yes, I think Scottish is one of the most terrific accents there are (“terrific” with a very Scottish “rr”, of course), and I suppose my view of the Scots as an incredibly kind people is bound to be a biased one on this account; but it’s grounded in some evidence nonetheless, evidence which I shall present in what follows. And if it seems that this evidence comprises too small a sample to judge from, then the esteemed reader ought to acknowledge that at least the stereotyped view presented here is a positive one, and perhaps unfounded praise is more excusable than unfounded blame.
Twenty three, then, is the price of a family ticket, sold to us despite Dad’s “but our daughter’s a bit older than sixteen!” – a mark of the Scottish generosity we were to encounter so many times that week (however paradoxical that may seem to those who take stereotypes too seriously).
Traquair House, allegedly the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, is positively charming. With its tiny windows and whitewashed walls, it’s an overgrown cottage which sprouted towers in an effort to simulate castleness but managed only to acquire a “Moomins’ house” quality. We’re welcomed by a lovely lady whose reaction to our nationality seems genuinely warm, in contrast with the accusation I sometimes hear into museum welcomes in England. Interestingly, when we ask her how the name of the house is pronounced (at that point we didn’t know yet), she answers “Traqueer”, and when Dad faithfully repeats, “Traqueer”, she says “That’s right”, instead of “No, you should say ‘Traquare’, you’re not Scottish, silly”, like she surely should.
We’re shown around one of the rooms by an equally lovely man. “Feel free to ask any questions,” he encourages us, but when none are forthcoming, he proceeds to answer the ones we don’t think of. He shows us some fascinating things, including a cigarette lighter which always stayed upright, no matter how drunk its users were, and though he did indulge in some folk linguistics (“drawing room” was originally short for “withdrawing room” and did not, as he suggested, originate from ladies drawing their dresses across the floor), his enthusiasm was so boundless that he could easily be forgiven. He was so nice that I even managed to overcome my shyness and ask him about an intriguing snuffbox the shape of an elephant’s foot – it turned out to have actually belonged to the elephant’s smaller cousin, the hippo, and the news got me so childishly excited that I feel obliged to end this sentence with an exclamation mark!
***
The man in Jedburgh abbey had a wonderful habit of putting “-like” in most every sentence he said – this linguistic device is quite distinct from the “, like,” of American teenage girls; while they would claim “It was, like, cool”, his expression of choice would be of the form “It was cool-like”. The habit was one that was likely found, like, likable-like. He spoke of the merits of a five day pass encompassing various Scottish tourist attractions: “It’ll save you seventeen pound-like just on Edinburgh castle”; when we worried that five days would not be enough he replied “How about I just sell you the pass and won’t write today’s date in? That way you’ll get in here for free-like, and you can start your five days tomorrow-like”. Scottish generosity-like. I like it. Like, a lot.
***
To our disappointment, the caretaker of “our” first Scottish cottage – and our neighbour for a week – had no trace of a Scottish accent. She had lived in Scotland for forty years, though, and so perhaps her incredible niceness shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
When we first arrived and she noted with approval Chris’s Beatles t-shirt, commenting that she had just been watching a documentary on John Lennon, we knew she was a wonderful person. Then one evening we found a whole pile of rhubarb under our doorstep, with a note explaining that it was from her neighbour, an avid gardener, who thought we might like it. From a complete stranger! – not for the first time I wondered how Scotland could have such beautiful mountains and such wonderful people. The rhubarb tart Mom made with the gift was obviously excellent.
Our neighbour was a great gardener too – there was a fantastic garden right outside our window, and she said we could take some of the herbs there if we wanted. Chris and I ate a few wild strawberries as well...
We had the pleasure to spend a lovely evening with her, and when the topic of conversation strayed to Scottish food, she exclaimed “You know what, I’ll make you some Scottish shortbread, if you want. Yes, I will,” she finished with a smile. Real, homemade Scottish shortbread!
***
“I can show you around some of the exhibits here, if you want. It may be of some help, but it may be a hindrance as well – sometimes it’s more of a hindrance than a help,” the volunteer guide at Melrose Roman history museum, an older woman who, despite her crutches, strides from one end of the room to the other with all the vigour one could ever wish for at any stage of life, smiles apologetically. She’s being unduly dismissive of her abilities to paint Roman universes with her words, to transport visitors to strange new places and to pour her never-ending enthusiasm into them by the gallon; but luckily for us, she is unable to take her worries about being a hindrance seriously for long.
We find out that this was the site of the only Roman settlement north of Hadrian’s Wall. “They had an amphitheatre here, and they found pins from the shoes of soldiers which fell out when they stomped their feet when they saw something they liked – or didn’t like. When I saw them, scattered by the dozen, the hair on the back of my neck literally – and I’m not exaggerating – stood on end. I felt the Romans were just so near, like they were watching me.” The relentless stream of words flowing out her mouth is gloriously multileveled – she interweaves archaeological facts, her own experiences and feelings, and even metacomments about how quickly she is speaking or how she just dropped her crutches and how she does this a good few times a day. She’s a real master of rhetoric, I feel – her words are real, close to heart.
“We’ve just visited Rome this Easter, so this is a nice connection for us,” Dad remarks casually on our way out of the museum. “Oh, have you?” she replies, genuinely interested, but with a hint of sadness in her voice. “It must have been wonderful. I never have myself, actually. I’ve always wanted to, and my son promised to take me, but then I had the heart attack, and I don’t want to go when I almost can’t walk. It would be torture, seeing all these places from a distance and not being able to really see them...” She trails away, then with an eyeblink-long shake of her head composes herself. “Ah, it doesn’t really matter. Not everyone can do everything. Besides, the other volunteers here regularly visit Rome, and they bring back many stories and photographs. Perhaps it’s best that way.”
Real heroes know how to smile.
***
In the words of a guide in Edinburgh castle: “For those of you who aren’t Scottish – don’t worry, nobody’s perfect”.
