Alan Jacobs

The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

For my poetry students, there is a process I commend — take a poem that finds you, I will tell them, read it to yourself, then go to a quiet place, to your own space, and chant that poem, come to possess it. Find the space that the daimon of that poem inhabits and occupy it yourself. Then I ask my students to read the poem aloud in class. At this point in my life I find I’ve spent far too much time talking in class myself, and it is a pleasure for me now to listen to them. They are very bright, maybe brighter than students from decades ago, though also perhaps less well read. But I’ll ask my students also to begin a process of exegesis, to pull apart the thoughts of the poem, to delve into the words used, and that also is a process of appropriating, of coming to possess the poem, making it your own. But back to your point: poetry is an art of sound as much as an art of the printed word. The great work of poetry is to help us become free artists of ourselves. That work requires us to hear, and not merely to read, the poetry.

This process is also immensely important to the training and preparation of the mind. It was essential to the old tradition in education, a tradition to which we bid farewell in our graduate schools in the sixties. Now we live in an age of distraction, an age dominated by bombardment coming from the screen. Poetry, the process of making poetry your own, can be a refuge from that bombardment. But it’s also an essential disciplining of the mind, preparing one to think and speak critically and well.

Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.

I’ll tell you a weird thing about me: My mother was Lucy Pevensie.

Or OK, obviously my mom was not Lucy Pevensie, since Lucy Pevensie is a fictional character from The Chronicles of Narnia. But a lot of the same things that happened to Lucy Pevensie also happened to my mom. Both she and Lucy grew up in London in the 1930s. When WWII started, they were both evacuated from London – sent to a strange house deep in the quiet of the English countryside, to stay with a strange family, while Hitler bombed the crap out of their childhood home.

Lucy Pevensie, of course, found herself in a creaky old mansion with a quirky, avuncular professor. She hid in a wardrobe and found her way into Narnia. My mom — being from a very poor neighborhood, and class tensions in England being what they were – was deemed too uncouth by her hosts and promptly re-evacuated back to London, where fortunately all the bombs missed her anyway.

Later my mom won a scholarship to Oxford, where she studied with C.S. Lewis. Suffice it to say that in our house we took our Narnia pretty seriously.

The Lord of the Rings was the perfect fantasy for WWII-era Europe, the story of an external evil defeated by a courageous alliance. The Conan stories address a more insidious threat, the decay of civilization from within. Science fiction and the western took opposite tacks to create frontier adventures for a world with no more frontiers; Howard created a sort of nightmare inversion of both, a world in which the ragged edge of civilization is always rolling backward. “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” he wrote in the Conan story “Beyond the Black River.” “Civilization is unnatural. … And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” It wasn’t a cheerful form of escapism — Howard killed himself with a gunshot to the head in 1936, when he was 30 years old — but it was weirdly suited to a Depression America whose guiding institutions were widely perceived to have failed.

Philip guides you like an eager kid at his own personal science fair, pausing to scratch into the earth where Iron Age settlers once built a forge. He says that about one in seven of his experiments pans out, noting there is no such thing as a free education.

Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen.

Some people specialize, and certainly the modern economy encourages that. But there are still people, even if only out in the African wilderness, with a wandering curiosity, alighting on every interesting part of their environment.

The late Richard Holbrooke used to give the essential piece of advice for a question-driven life: Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

The Moomin canon, by contrast, has been well-tended in America with not only the children’s novels but picture books published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and with Drawn & Quarterly’s series of splendid editions of Jansson’s comic strips, which originally appeared in the Swedish-language newspaper Ny Tid and the London Evening News through the 1950s. But to split Jansson’s oeuvre into the serious and the commercial, the mature work versus children’s caprices, would be to miss the subtle, encompassing marvel of her project in fiction. For picture book and novella speak to one another, engage in a quiet but impassioned discussion of making and singing, lying and living. Whether a small troll living in a forest valley or a superannuated auntie summering on a Baltic skerry, Tove Jannson’s characters are artists every one. In love and resentment, ambition and rejection, the problems they address are artist’s problems: problems of noticing, representing oneself to others, and the power of names. Her tales have much to offer in this time of networked culture, when everyone is a kind of artist engaged in a perpetual exhibition of the self. And when hasn’t this been the case?

It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

The liberal camp includes many thinkers I admire, and it has produced some of the more eloquent reflections on biotechnology’s implications for human affairs. But at least in the United States, the liberal effort to (as the Goodman of 1980 put it) “monitor” and “debate” and “control” the development of reproductive technologies has been extraordinarily ineffectual. From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one — and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they’re either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives.

Tomorrow, they always say — tomorrow, we’ll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.

— Ross Douthat