Bridging two great traditions

(First of two parts)

I live with unruly and curious folk. Galileo peers at me from one of my bookshelves. His face is portrayed on the front cover of Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter. He leans toward John Brockman’s frontier science essay collection New Humanists Science at the Edge and away from Carl Zimmer’s brainy book Soul Made Flesh. Precariously slanted on top of Galileo’s head is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale and a palm stretch away is Neruda’s ticklish An Anthology of Odes. Biologist Richard Dawkin’s The Ancestor’s Tale bespeaks his heavy intellectual weight on the subject of evolution and perhaps, his temper, but seems to silently acquiesce to Italo Calvino’s The Uses Of Literature kissing its flap.

Then, there are the artbooks, most of which were gifts, except one that I saved for – The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich. It taught me how to see and feel Rodin’s embrace from within me in his sculpture The Kiss and made me see the beauty and meaning of unfinished work in his sculpture, The Hand of God. It also finally rid me of conceptions that there is such a thing as THE real art. I got a two-volume set of Van Gogh’s works from a sidewalk sale after realizing that I could not stop looking at Van Gogh’s works, deeply curious as to why they made me feel the way they did. Galen Rowell’s exquisite photographs of landscapes and wildlife were a gift and they pulled me from the other side of the page to his visions in captured light that I once found myself haphazardly mimicking the Zen-like concentration the flamingo needs to stand on one leg at a time.

For many years, I kept rearranging these books and the other covered mindworks in my shelves as a librarian would – fiction here, non-fiction there, science books here, poetry there, travel books here, art books there. But in no time, they would be in a jumble again, as if they had a drinking club that met whenever I was not looking. Then at some point I figured – why, if you were not a librarian, should you have to classify books as a librarian does? Is it by a weaker reason to put a book of visual arts beside a book about the science of light rather than right next to the book of cartoons? Should I classify the filial expressions of Galileo’s daughter as a science book just because she has Galileo’s genes or should I place the book beside the collection of science-related letter exchanges of Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman, chosen by his own daughter? Am I way off tangent if I put my desert geology books beside Mark Twain’s brilliantly funny treatise on the versatility of a desert flora like sage brush as fuel source but its "distinguished failure" as a vegetable? In my curiosity about the domestication of plants, should I make sure that Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire, a scientific, historical and lyrical take on the subject is yards away from an artbook that featured the romantic pastoral scenes of Amorsolo? And in my desire to understand the genes that make us preserve ourselves, is it strategically wise for my understanding to place the books on evolutionary behavior behind Sun Tzu or beside artworks depicting war?

I could no longer find the reason to reclassify my books the traditional way save to keep any librarian who would visit my home, from falling apart. I remembered how most of my schooling broke the world in pieces for me to classify and fit into boxes. I was now free – free of being told there is only one way to look at things, depending on the subject being taught, or that the borrowed time on the pasted card at the back of my library book was running out. I can now get one book and weave an invisible string of thought from a page to stick on to a distinguished page in another book and yet another, until I have a weblike lace from which I can hang all the thoughts that could move me to write about a kaleidoscope world.

C.P. Snow is someone important to know if you want to remind people why the sciences and the humanities have grown farther and farther apart. He has observed this and articulated it in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). He noted how most scientists arrogantly claimed a better understanding even when they have not read a literary work and in the same breath, how most artists remained untickled to know the physical nature of reality. He was convinced that the isolation of the sciences and the humanities from each other is what is keeping the world from having a better understanding of itself that could make it a better place.

I cannot console C.P. Snow in the flesh anymore but I now draw an invisible string from his written works and place it beside the sensual tour of the inner life in Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses where it will be stitched onto an intricate tapestry of sensual experiences of the world. I will take C.P. Snow’s thoughts and soak it in the female life – steeped in genetic richness and historical patience – all lathered in Natalie Angier’s beautiful prose. If C.P. Snow thinks that the science of his days conceived time as a mere dimension of reality, I will take him to float in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams where different configurations of time dance in Lightman’s poignant language. Works of Ackerman, Angier and Lightman are only three works in a growing body of work that have been, not just sparklingly clear, but also moving in the beauty and elegance of their metaphorical explanations of how outerspace and innerspace work.

Science brings us to discover physical laws that are universal. Art makes those laws meaningful to our existence with imagery and metaphor – the two-fold skin of the artist’s imagination. A cognitive scientist can methodically lay out how we perceive the world while in art, Escher’s works elicits perceptual responses that instantly tame the scientific jargon used to explain human perception. Neuroscientists help me forge an understanding of the hormones responsible for why I feel the way I do when I am in love, eating chocolate or smelling luscious scents. But Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat relives, suggests, illustrates a multitude of pleasures in "a loaf of bread... a flask of wine, a book of verse and thou" that make me feel that I am a heap of romance as much as I am a heap of hormones. Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass beckons a reader from lethargic thought far more stirringly than any abstract in a neuro-cognitive journal, even if both are saying that we should stop being afraid, cultivate wonder and start knowing the world for ourselves.

(To be concluded)

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