A commonplace of our culture, and the complaint of teachers, holds that, of all subjects, science ranks as the most difficult to learn and therefore the scariest and least accessible of all disciplines. Science may occupy the center of our practical lives, but its content remains mysterious to nearly all Americans, who must therefore take its benefits on faith (turn on your car or computer and pray that the damned thing will work) or fear its alien powers and intrusions (will my clone steal my individuality?). We suspect that public knowledge of science may be extraordinarily shallow, both because few people show any interest or familiarity for the subject (largely through fear or from assumptions of utter incompetence) and because those who profess concern have too superficial an understanding. Therefore, to invoke Pope’s topsy-turvy metaphor again, Americans shun the deep drink that sobriety requires and maintain dangerously little learning about science.
But I strongly suspect that this common, almost mantralike belief among educators represents a deep and (one might almost say, given the vital importance and fragility of education) dangerous fallacy, arising as the product of a common error in the sciences of natural history, including human sociology in this case—a false taxonomy. I believe that science is wonderfully accessible, that most people show a strong interest, and that levels of general learning stand quite high (within an admittedly anti-intellectual culture overall), but that we have mistakenly failed to include the domains of maximal public learning within the scope of science. (And like Pope, I do distinguish learning, or visceral understanding by long effort and experience, from mere knowledge, which can be mechanically copied from a book.)
I do not, of course, hold that most people have developed the highly technical skills that lead to professional competence in science. But this situation prevails for any subject or craft, even in the least arcane and mathematical of the humanities. Few Americans can play the violin in a symphony orchestra, but nearly all of us can learn to appreciate the music in a seriously intellectual way. Few can read ancient Greek or medieval Italian, but all can revel in a new translation of Homer or Dante. Similarly, few can do the mathematics of particle physics, but all can understand the basic issues behind deep questions about the ultimate nature of things and even learn the difference between a charmed quark and a top quark.
For the false taxonomy, we don’t restrict adequate knowledge of music to professional players; so why do we limit understanding of science to those who live in laboratories, twirl dials, and publish papers? Taxonomies are theories of knowledge, not objective pigeonholes, hatracks, or stamp albums with places preassigned. A false taxonomy based on a bogus theory of knowledge can lead us badly astray. When Guillaume Rondelet, in his classic monograph of 1555 on the taxonomy of fishes, began his Hst of categories with “flat and compressed fishes,” “those that dwell among the rocks,” “litde fishes” (pisciculi), “genera of lizards,” and “fishes that are almost round,” he pretty much precluded any deep insight into the truly genealogical basis of historical order.
Millions of Americans love science and have learned the feel of true expertise in a chosen expression. But we do not honor these expressions by categorization within the realm of science, although we certainly should, for they encompass the chief criteria of detailed knowledge about nature and critical thinking based on logic and experience. Consider just a small list, spanning all ages and classes and including a substantial fraction of our population. If all these folks understood their engagement in doing science actively, democracy would shake hands with the academy, and we might learn to harvest a deep and widespread fascination in the service of more general education. (I thank Philip Morrison, one of America’s wisest scientists and humanists, for making this argument to me many years ago, thus putting my thinking on the right track.)
1. Sophisticated knowledge about underwater ecology among tropical fish enthusiasts, mainly blue-collar males and therefore mostly invisible to professional intellectuals who tend to emerge from other social classes.
2. The horticultural experience of millions of members in thousands of garden clubs, mostly tenanted by older middle-class women.
3. The upper-class penchant for birding, safaris, and ecotourism.
4. The intimate knowledge of local natural history among millions of hunters and fishermen.
5. The astronomical learning (and experience in fields from practical lens grinding to theoretical optics) of telescope enthusiasts, with their clubs and journals.
6. The technological intuitions of amateur car mechanics, model builders, and weekend sailors.
7. Even the statistical knowledge of good poker players and racetrack touts. (The human brain works especially poorly in reasoning about probability, and I can cite no greater impediment to truly scientific thinking. But many Americans have learned to understand probability through the ultimate challenge of the pocketbook.)
8. In my favorite and clinching example, the dinosaur lore so lovingly learned by America’s children. How I wish that we could quantify the mental might included in all the correct spellings of hideously complex dinosaur names among all the five-year-old children in America. Then we could truly move mountains.
Common belief could not be more ass-backward. We think that science is intrinsically hard, scary, and arcane, and that teachers can only beat the necessary knowledge, by threat and exhortation, into a small minority blessed with innate propensity. No. Most of us begin our education with an inborn love of science (which is, after all, only a method of learning the facts and principles of the natural world surrounding us, and how can anyone fail to be stirred by such an intimate subject?). This love has to be beaten out of us if we later fall by the wayside, perversely led to say that we hate or fear the subject. But the same love burns brighdy throughout the lives of millions, who remain amateurs in the precious, literal sense of the word (“those who love”) and who pursue “hobbies” in scientific fields that we falsely refuse to place within the taxonomie compass of the discipline.
And so, finally, the task of nurture and rescue falls to those people who represent what I have often called the most noble word in our language, the teachers. (Parent holds second place on my list; but teachers come first because parents, after an initial decision, have no further choice.) Rage (and scheme) against the dying of the light of childhood’s fascination. And then emulate English literature’s first instructor, the clerk of Oxenford in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the man who opened both ends of his mind and heart, for “gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”
12
Requiem Eternal*
IN 1764, THE ENGLISH SAVANT DAINES BARRINGTON tested a visiting musical prodigy for his skills in memory, performance, composition, and improvisation. The amazed listener expressed great skepticism about his subject’s stated age of eight, and wondered if father Leopold had been passing off a well-trained adult midget as his young son. Barrington therefore delayed his written account for six years until he could obtain proof, in the form of a birth certificate for Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart (later shortened to Wolfgang Amadeus by the composer himself), from an unimpeachable source: “his excellence,” in Barrington’s description, “Count Haslang, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the electors of Bavaria and Palatine.”
Barrington noted that many precocious geniuses die young, and ended his article with a prayer that Mozart might live as long as Britain’s most celebrated German import, G. F. Handel, who had died five years previously at age seventy-four. Barrington wrote: “It may be hoped that little Mozart may possibly attain to the same advanced years as Handel, contrary to the common observation that such ingenia praecocia are generally short lived.”
Well, Mozart lived long enough to become Mozart, while failing to attain even half Handel’s age. He died in 1791, at age thirty-five, with his greatest and final work, his Requiem, unfinished. He wrote the very last note of his life to the painfully appropriate text: Lachrymosa dies illa—this day full of
tears. No musical composition has ever moved more people to tears, or inspired more mythological nonsense, including tales of a masked man commissioning the piece in secret, and a mysterious poisoner using the opportunity to end an opponent’s life. (Peter Shaffer, of course, wove all these fictions together into a sublime play full of psychological truth—Amadeus.)
I have been a choral singer all my active life, and I love the Requiem with all my heart. I have sung the work at least a dozen times, spanning more years than Mozart lived (from a first undergraduate performance at age nineteen to a latest effort at age fifty-five). I do not even care to imagine how much poorer life would be without such music. As with any truly great work of human genius (I have, for example, read Darwin’s Origin of Species once a decade, each time as an entirely fresh and different book), the Requiem never fails to instruct and inspire. As Shakespeare said of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
Unpredictable contingency, not lawlike order, rules the pathways of history. A little branch called Homo sapiens inhabits this earth by good luck built upon incalculably small probability. Do we not all yearn for the power to tweak those probabilities just a teeny little bit—to replay the tape of history with an apparently inconsequential change that cascades to colossal effect in subsequent times? Suppose, following this greatest of undoable thought experiments, that we alter nothing until 1791, but then let Mozart live to 1830, thus matching Handel’s age. Can we even contemplate the added joy, measured in quanta of pleasure for billions of people, provided by another forty symphonies and a dozen operas, perhaps on such sublime texts as Hamlet, Faust, or Lear? Can we even imagine how differently the history of music, and of human creativity in general, might have run in this ever-so-slightly altered circumstance?
We should, I think, count our blessings instead. Let us not lament an early death at less than half Handelian age. Let us rejoice that smallpox, typhoid, or rheumatic fever (all of which he suffered as a child) did not extinguish Barrington’s prodigy before he could grow up to become Mozart. If he had died after Mitridate (a teenaged opera of indifferent status), Mozart might only have become a footnote for lamentation. Instead, we received the most sublime swan song ever written—this Requiem, fitted with a closing text that might well be read as a prayer of thanks for the sublime gift that Mozart gave to all humanity, and for all time, with his music: lux aeterna, eternal light.
10 Originally written for the pamphlet accompanying a Penguin CD of Mozart’s Requiem.
13
More Power
to Him
IN 1927, WHEN MY FATHER TURNED TWELVE, AL JOLSON inaugurated the era of sound movies with The Jazz Singer, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat opened on Broadway, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of Saint Louis across the Atlantic nonstop to Paris, the state of Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti, and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season.
Roger Maris bested the Babe with 61 in 1961, the summer of my nineteenth birthday—with teammate Mickey Mantle batting just afterward, and reaching 54 in one of the two greatest home run derbies in baseball history. This summer, Mark McGwire will surely break 61, and may even reach 70* (with Sammy Sosa just behind, or perhaps in front, in the other greatest derby ever). My two sons, both fans in their different ways, will turn twenty-nine and twenty-five.
This magic number, this greatest record in American sports, obsesses us for at least three good reasons. First, baseball has changed no major rule in a century, and we can therefore look and compare, in genuine continuity, across the generations. The seasons of our lives move inexorably forward. As my father saw Ruth, I followed Maris, and my sons watch McGwire. But the game also cycles in glorious sameness, as each winter of our discontent yields to another spring of opening day.
Second, baseball records have clear meaning as personal accomplishments, while marks in most team sports can be judged only as peculiar amalgams. Wilt Chamberlain once scored one hundred points in a single basketball game, but only because his teammates, for that day, elected the odd strategy of feeding him on essentially every play. Home runs are mano a mano, batter against pitcher.
Third, and how else can I say this, baseball is just one helluva terrific game, long paramount in American sporting myths and athletic traditions—with the power and definitiveness of a home run as the greatest icon of all. You might argue that Babe Ruth failed to catch the ecumenical spirit when he said, in his famous and moving speech at Yankee Stadium in 1947, as Major League Baseball gathered to honor its dying hero: “The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball…. You’ve got to start from way down … when you’re six or seven … you’ve got to let it grow up with you.” But who would deny the Babe’s heartfelt sentiment?
As a veteran and close student of the 1961 Mantle-Maris derby, I thrill to the detailed similarity of McGwire versus Sosa. The two Yankees of 1961 embodied different primal myths about great accomplishments: Mantle, the deserving hero working all his life toward his year of destiny; Maris, the talented journeyman enjoying that one sweet interval in each man’s life when everything comes together in some oddly miraculous way. (Maris never hit more than 39 in any other season.) That year, the miracle man won—and more power to him (and shame on his detractors). Fluke or destiny doesn’t matter; Roger Maris did the deed.
Mark McGwire is this year’s Mantle. No one since Ruth has been so destined, and no one has ever worked harder, and more single-mindedly, to harness and fulfill his gifts of brawn. He is the real item, and this is his year. No one, even Ruth, ever hit more than 50 homers in three successive seasons—as McGwire has now done. (But will anyone ever break Ruth’s feat of hitting more than 40 in every year from 1920 to 1932, except for two seasons when injuries caused him to miss more than forty games? Hank Aaron, on the other hand, played as a marvel of consistency over twenty-three seasons. But he never hit more than 47 in a single year, and only once did he hit 40 or more in two successive seasons.) Sammy Sosa is this year’s Maris, rising from who-knows-where to challenge the man of destiny. More power to both men.
But we rightly focus on McGwire for the eerie and awesome quality of his particular excellence. Most great records descend in small and even increments from the leader, and no single figure stands leagues ahead of all other mere mortals. The home run record used to follow this conventional pattern: Maris with 61, Ruth with 60, Ruth again with 59, Foxx, Greenberg, and McGwire (last season) with 58, and Wilson and Griffey (also last season) with 56.
But a few champions stand so far above the second-place finisher that we almost have to wonder whether such a leader really belongs within Homo sapiens. Consider DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 (regarded by most sports statisticians, myself included, as the most improbable figure in the history of American athletics),* compared with second-place Keeler and Rose, both far away at 44; or Jim Thorpe’s lopsided victories in both the pentathlon and decathlon of the 1912 Olympics; or, marking a single man’s invention of the art of home run hitting, Babe Ruth’s first high figure of 54 in 1920—for with this number he exceeded, all by his lonesome, the sum total for any other entire team in the American League!
McGwire belongs to this most select company of superhuman achievers. He may well hit 70, thus creating the same sweep of empty space that separates DiMaggio and Thorpe from their closest competitors. Moreover, the character of his blasts almost defies belief. A 400-foot home run, while not rare, deserves notice and inspires pride. The vast majority of Major League dingers fall between 300 and 400. Well, only 18 of McGwire’s first 60 failed to reach 400 feet, and several have exceeded 500—a figure previously achieved only once every few years among all players combined.
When faced with such an exceptional accomplishment, we long to discover particular reasons. But I think that such a search only denotes a deep fallacy of human thought. No special reason need be sought beyond the good fortune of many effectively random moments grafted upon the guaranteed achievem
ents of the greatest home run hitter in the history of baseball. I don’t care if the thin air of Colorado encourages home runs. I don’t care if expansion has diluted pitching. I don’t care if the ball is livelier or the strike zone smaller. And I deeply don’t care if McGwire helps himself to train by taking an over-the-counter substance regarded as legal by Major League Baseball.* (What nonsense to hold McGwire in any way accountable—simply because we fear that kids may ape him as a role model—for an issue entirely outside his call, and fully in the province of baseball’s rule-makers. Let no such hypocrisy dim this greatest moment in our sporting life!)
Mark McGwire has prevailed by creating, in his own person, an ultimate fusion between the two great natural forces of luck and dedicated effort: the gift of an extraordinary body, with the skill of a steadfast dedication to training and study that can only merit the literal meaning of a wonderful word—enthusiasm, or “the intake of God.”
11 I wrote this piece for The Wall Street Journal to honor McGwire’s sixtieth homer and the certainty of his fracturing Maris’s old record of 61. Since nearly every forecast I have ever made has been ludicrously wrong, I do take some pride in the only example I can cite of a personal prediction that, for reasons of pure dumb luck, happened to come up golden. McGwire ended his season with exactly 70 dingers, Sosa with 66.