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Where the sharks'll have his body and the devil have his soul
I am returned from New York City, where I ran last night after class and where I spent about two hours waiting in Penn Station this afternoon. (People who live in New York City, do not hunt me down and kill me for not calling you: I didn't even see the one NYC resident that I automatically call whenever I'm even in the state.) My mother couldn't get away, but my father and brother took the train down from Boston yesterday and we all met up for dinner and a day of extensive museum-going. To wit, a good six hours at the Museum of Natural History, where I photographed all of the dioramas I love best and we saw the traveling exhibit on Charles Darwin. That was worth the whole trip, if for no other reason than that I'd never thought about Darwin's personal life—all the photographs I'd ever seen of the man were late in life, where he has the stately white beard and looks like an odd patriarch; a holy father of science. But there was a marvelous picture of him with his oldest child, where he looks every bit the Dickensian clerk, Bob Cratchit with one of the children (and Darwin had ten). It doesn't reproduce very well online, but still—
As the exhibit caption helpfully reads, "Above is the only known daguerreotype of Darwin with a family member. Done in 1842, it shows Darwin with his first son, William."
There's a man I can picture wandering around obsessing over orchids and pigeons. Someone also really needs to write a book or a screenplay about Darwin and his wife, because that fascinated me: not only all the romantic misadventure of their courtship, but what could it have been like to live with someone whose basic modes of thinking are so alien, no matter how much you love them, to yours? When you believe that the resurrection and the life to come are as real and unarguable as the earth underfoot, and your husband looks at that earth and sees geologic time, not the fingerprints of God; when your life runs on faith and his on scientific scrutiny? It's not an issue that's disappeared with the nineteenth century, either. I am not built for biography, but I'd love to read someone else's take on their lives.
I'd have liked some time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well, for my classical art fix, but we had to catch trains back: and there our luck deserted us, because the regional back to New Haven was fifty minutes late and the Acela to Boston broke down somewhere around Route 128 (although we did all make it back to our respective homes in the end). But I did arrive home to discovered that my ordered DVD of The Cuckoo had come in, so I plan to celebrate this weekend with crazy film in languages I don't speak.
I won't be able to afford another spur-of-the-moment trip like this for months, in terms of time and academia. But this was lovely. And my brother had better send me all those photographs.
As the exhibit caption helpfully reads, "Above is the only known daguerreotype of Darwin with a family member. Done in 1842, it shows Darwin with his first son, William."
There's a man I can picture wandering around obsessing over orchids and pigeons. Someone also really needs to write a book or a screenplay about Darwin and his wife, because that fascinated me: not only all the romantic misadventure of their courtship, but what could it have been like to live with someone whose basic modes of thinking are so alien, no matter how much you love them, to yours? When you believe that the resurrection and the life to come are as real and unarguable as the earth underfoot, and your husband looks at that earth and sees geologic time, not the fingerprints of God; when your life runs on faith and his on scientific scrutiny? It's not an issue that's disappeared with the nineteenth century, either. I am not built for biography, but I'd love to read someone else's take on their lives.
I'd have liked some time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well, for my classical art fix, but we had to catch trains back: and there our luck deserted us, because the regional back to New Haven was fifty minutes late and the Acela to Boston broke down somewhere around Route 128 (although we did all make it back to our respective homes in the end). But I did arrive home to discovered that my ordered DVD of The Cuckoo had come in, so I plan to celebrate this weekend with crazy film in languages I don't speak.
I won't be able to afford another spur-of-the-moment trip like this for months, in terms of time and academia. But this was lovely. And my brother had better send me all those photographs.
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As a child, "Uncle Lenny was found jumping up and down on the springs of the new sofa, an exercise which had been forbidden. His father said: 'Oh, Lenny, Lenny!' to which Lenny replied: 'I think you had better go out of the room.'"
And then there was Aunt Etty: "And when there were colds about she often wore a kind of gas-mask of her own invention. It was an ordinary wire kitchen-strainer, stuffed with antiseptic cotton-wool, and tied on like a snout, with elastic over her ears. In this she would receive her visitors and discuss politics in a hollow voice out of her eucalyptus-scented seclusion...If the window had to be opened to air the room in cold weather, Aunt Etty covered [Uncle Richard] up entirely with a dust sheet for fear of draughts; and he sat there patient as a statue, till he could be unveiled."
Nine
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Also, if an alligator high on methamphetamine appears on your block, I had nothing to do with it.
Might I come up to New Haven a weekend in February? Yes? Yes?
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Damn. I was hoping you'd have some leads on that.
Visiting. Hm. I would love to see you. The catch is that my exams are right around the end of this month and the beginning of the next, so that I have very little time; I don't suppose you're free in March?
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The man in the photograph reminds me of an old friend who died last year.
Now I want to start a website called "Am I Historically Hot or Not?"
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*snerk*
You should. You really should.
What are your other ideal versions?
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There's a sweet comic called The Sandwalk Adventures, designed to explain evolution to kids, but which does so by depicting Darwin in a domestic setting, walking up and down the sand walk in his garden - not quite the aspect you are reflecting on, but recommended nonetheless.
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I can completely understand his reservations about "less money for books" . . .
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All right, now I'm terrified: but if you ever write that, I want to read.
I find myself wishing for a really good biography, or better, a fictionalized version...
I kept thinking that a play or a movie would be ideal. Biographies are very "in" right now, but I'm almost more interested by retellings of people's lives; Hugh Whitemore's "Breaking the Code" for Alan Turing, Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love" for A.E. Housman, and so on; you can always look up the facts afterward, and I like to see what the lenses are through which people become folklore. (Besides, there's the whole truth-is-stranger-than-fiction aspect that comes into peculiar play. I'm thinking particularly of Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love, where the poet Swinburne is one of maybe three verifiably historical characters in a cast of fascinating fabricated ones; and he completely steals the show.) I don't suppose this is the proper political climate for a film about Darwin that isn't polemical, though. Alas.
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Definite agreement-- there can be so much more of some sort of truth when it doesn't have to stick with what provably happened. A story about Darwin could get at such interesting themes of creation-- religious views and scienctific views and where sense of wonder lies more strongly between the two of them. (Okay, maybe I will write it at some point, but the Jesus one comes first, and that one's not due until I'm 33...)
And "The Invention of Love" is great.
"Homosexuality? Homo - sexuality? What barbarity! It's half Greek and half Latin!"
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"Homosexuality? Homo - sexuality? What barbarity! It's half Greek and half Latin!"
Sadly, this sentiment was the very first thing that entered my mind when I heard the word "polyamory" for the first time.