A series of unhappy years followed for the exam-phobic Mendel, whose timidity turned to stark terror in the face of performance. He tried twice to gain the certificate to allow him to teach in the high school system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After his second failure before the examiners in Vienna, he gave up, accepted the humiliating (or at least humbling) position of substitute teacher, settling eventually back into the damp Augustinian abbey in Brno where at least there was a lovely garden and greenhouse. Here he lived the rest of his life.
Mendel was destined to remain in the backwaters of science, picking up the slack when someone on the regular faculty got sick or was away. But then he was from a backwater, a village in Silesia where he was born into a peasant family. Humility was his native realm.
Yet everyone in his village seems to have seen that this peasant boy had intellectual ability—his sister gave him her dowry so he could attend university. His entrance into monastic life may have been a way for a poor boy to further his education. Not only a poor boy, but also a profoundly shy boy (his baffling failure of his oral exams surely was evidence of social panic). Was he a man of faith or was religion merely a choice of convenience? Theology in the service of biology suggests that he wasn’t much of a believer.
That’s how our age tends to see it.
But here may be another modern reading of an earlier century’s struggle that’s more about us than about Mendel. We may limit the notion of “belief” in this secular age as Colette limited “romantic friendship” to sexual behavior (of course thinking she was liberating it). Faith in our time can seem like signing on the dotted line of a prefab doctrine composed of absurdities.
But another version: faith isn’t what you think, what you “believe.” It’s what you do. Religion may be more practical than our secular age imagines. Language holds on to this notion, covertly. The question, for example, isn’t are you a believing Catholic? It’s are you a practicing Catholic? Language instinctively gets it—what you “believe” is less important, in fact becomes mere speculation or brittle dogma, in the presence of a way of life.
The Ladies of Llangollen devised their System—a thing of daily living beauty to them. So too the solitude of monastic life could offer not just a free education to a poor boy from the sticks, but an appealing order, gently shaping life, grounding it for an essentially contemplative endeavor that required not intellectual fireworks but profound patience. This daily domestic order would have great appeal to a teeming mind, one shy of the grit of social maneuvering, lacking the sharp elbows of ambition, loving instead the things of the earth, the focus on the immediate growing world, the daily round of life. Time’s seasonal shape. Monastic life is, among other things, profoundly domestic. A lot of bread baking, honey gathering, wine making in that way of life.
Mendel was a natural gardener, as attentive to his patch of pea plants as the Ladies to their Shrubbery, if far more inquisitive about the inner workings of those pea plants than they were of their boxwood.
Darwin, who trained originally in theology, struggled with the relation of religion and science. He remains our model of that enduring opposition. Mendel, on the other hand, lived in religion, apparently without significant intellectual struggle. In time he even became the abbot of his monastery. Religion was his day job, his avocation in science a thoroughly focused fascination, and quite naturally fitting into the rest of his life. The pea plants were part of creation. No problem, as we say.
Mendel’s contribution to science, unlike Darwin’s, didn’t stray into theoretical matters. Yet his study of the reproductive patterns of the edible pea (green versus yellow, smooth skinned versus wrinkled) revealed the inner workings of cellular evolution that remained vexingly elusive to Darwin. Mendel’s conception of the gene was perhaps the greatest modern scientific act of the imagination, right up there with Einstein’s theory of relativity, on the cellular rather than cosmic scale.
* * *
—
On the drive to Znojmo, Anna and I had spent an afternoon in Brno at the Mendel museum housed in the old Augustinian abbey where he’d lived, now part of Masaryk University. I tried to follow the intricacies of his meticulous notations mounted on the displays, his careful transcription of peapod family life, the spidery lines connecting small circles, dividing, combining, reconfiguring change and chance over vegetal generations.
But what I took away was not a sudden understanding of the science, any more than I had comprehended genetics from the unit in high school biology (and girls—Gregor Mendel was a monk, a contemplative). What I saw in his charting was clear evidence not of genetic theory, but of patience, tenderness. A gentle soul, a gardener. I wandered off to the gift shop and bought a coffee mug (pea green, naturally) with the museum’s peapod logo, and sat on a stone bench in the abbey-museum courtyard. Out with the notebook, reminding myself once again about my grandmother’s kitchen garden, her perennial border of heavy-headed maroon and white peonies, my grandfather behind his toolshed, training green beans up a rattan lattice, tying off the tendrils with cotton twine. My florist father hoodwinking Easter lilies and poinsettias to bloom in perfect time for the holidays. Care and tending, the pacific life of gardening, the Edenic assignment that predated laboring “by the sweat of your brow.”
Mendel read Darwin in a German translation of Origin of Species. It appears, however, that Darwin did not know Mendel’s work. He came heartbreakingly close to reading Mendel’s paper on his pea experiments (published in an obscure Moravian agricultural journal). Mendel’s paper is mentioned in an omnibus review of recent work of the time. Darwin made notes on his copy of this review, curiously skipping over the mention of Mendel’s paper without a marginal note. It’s possible, had Darwin read this modest document with its careful study of pea plant patterns, that genetics would have been a nineteenth-century discovery—and considered the capstone of Darwin’s remarkable career. Perhaps.
But, as geneticists now marvel, it was not until 1900 that Mendel’s work was “discovered,” finally seen for what it is—the key to cellular life and the mysterious workings of heredity. This was sixteen years after Mendel had died in relative obscurity, known as the abbot of his Augustinian congregation, not as the father of genetics—a word not even coined in his lifetime.
As a monk, Mendel passed his days within the liturgy of Hours, wedded to the seasonal world in spiraling patterns of great resonance, prayers belonging not to any creed or dogma, not even to Christianity. These ancient texts of the Hebrew Psalms structure the Western monastic day, season, year as they have since the desert fathers.
Mendel’s was a way of life, then, organized by poetry. A life never more than a few hours distant from the Psalms, poems that form the genetic code of Western lyricism, its grief and fury, its exultation. For the West, the Psalms are the enduring communal trace of the experience of being alive, passed on and on, over generations in ancient cries and murmurs, mutating over time, moving from one religion to another into monastic chant, finally into lyric poetry. Between the sacred lyric and the secular lyric there is no argument. They form the same enterprise, the full range of living consciousness from rage to jubilation running along the lifeline of the West. Kinship. Heredity.
Eventually, after Mendel became the abbot of his monastery, he abandoned his plant experiments as he shouldered the administration of the monastic household. He had presented his findings—in a characteristically obscure regional journal. We do not know if he was disappointed in the ripple his work did not make.
Mendel was sixty-one when he died in Brno in 1884. And then was forgotten. Even the fact that Leoš Janáček played the organ at his funeral is not a sign of his eminence: Janáček wasn’t Janáček yet, just a young Moravian musician with a church organist job, his operas and the Sinfonietta years ahead, his own humble researches into Moravian folk song, the genetic code of his music, all in the future, part of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, as Me
ndel’s work too ends up resurrected in the twentieth century. Playing for Mendel’s funeral was simply Janáček’s job. As being abbot was Mendel’s.
* * *
—
We’re eating very slowly now, meditatively. The last night in Znojmo, after another big day in the countryside—a castle, a walk through vineyards, that most elegantly arranged farmland, retaining as no other cropland does the sense of a garden. Anna insisted we take a detour in her little car to see the border between Moravia and Austria, a patch of the Iron Curtain left standing as a “cultural marker” with a national parks insignia on a sign in a broad swath of tall grass overlooking open terrain. East on this side, West on the other. The barbed-wire fencing (once electrified, now just rusting) led to the guard tower, a weathered wooden perch on stilts, not so different from a deer stand in Minnesota. There was a hospoda and a kavarna on the road where people stopped for a beer or coffee after walking up the gravel pathway to the guard tower. Older couples, quiet, standing still, looked across to Austria, the formerly illicit landscape. And young families, the children held by the hand, the situation explained to them, and then let to run free up the path, begging to climb up the rickety wooden tower. No, no, that was not allowed, the parents yelled, their voices caught and blown westward by the wind.
Did people get shot trying to escape across the border? Ano, ano, Anna said. Yes, that happened. Vlasta nodded, turned away. But the suicide numbers were much higher. Why would someone commit suicide while trying to escape to the West? No, it wasn’t the ones fleeing. It was the soldiers told to shoot them. They were the suicides. Many. They chose young conscripts, not real soldiers—who didn’t want such a job. And told them to shoot anyone getting past the electrified wire. Many of these boys could not bring themselves to do that. We stood by the barbed wire, looking out at the landscape identical to the one on our side. The children were tearing around the guard tower, a game of tag, their parents calling to get back to the car.
And then we were back on the road, off to a picnic site and wine tasting on the edge of—what was it the edge of? Some hidden glen between forest and meadow, a stream-fed pond nearby, down a pathway after we abandoned Anna’s little mixmaster of a car. I would never be able to find the place again. It lives in memory with the improbability of a fairy tale.
There, in this secluded spot, families, lovers, old couples, friends (Vlasta, Anna, me) spread out blankets on the ground before a makeshift little stage where several men, each with a glass of white wine by his chair, sat with instruments—accordion, banjo, sax—and played their hearts out. Dixieland jazz, a Czech specialty, no one knows why. Jazz was illicit—therefore a form of freedom—during the Cold War. It endures now as part of the Czech songbook. Sitting in that mushroom-loving landscape, drinking local white wine, I didn’t find it odd. Dixieland seemed very Czech.
A table was set up with bottles of local wines from a nearby sklep (wine cellar). For a small charge we were given a wineglass, and went up to the table, tasting one white wine after another, Vlasta pursing her lips, swirling her glass. She asked, chin raised in inquiry, which did I like best? I sensed my answer would reveal the quality of my mind—the palate is a kind of intelligence, evidence of discernment. I swirled the pale gold in my glass, sipped, swallowed. Then the next wine, the next. You mustn’t rush this. I had no idea which was best. I went back for the second, the ryzlink vlašský, pointed to it. Vlasta nodded. Ano—yes. I had chosen correctly. You see, you see, Anna cried—always her cri de coeur when I had understood something, when I got it.
* * *
—
Finally back at the apartment, the last supper, and Vlasta has outdone herself in the offhand way of a master indulging the audience with an encore. It is the season of the meruňka—apricot time. It’s unclear when, exactly, she had time to make the dough for the little pillows of these dumplings, when she managed to buy the apricots, though we passed many hand-lettered Meruňky signs along the narrow, tree-lined roads we drove to the picnic site in the afternoon.
She pours melted butter over the ivory lumps in our shallow soup plates, then a brief snowstorm of sugar and crumbled white cheese, dry and salty. We pierce the puffery of the dough with big dessert spoons. Out comes the yellow-orange fruit, melting from the dumpling’s creamy white, like a perfectly coddled egg. Oh my, I say. They both beam at me. You see, you see, Anna says, as if I have finally seen the light she keeps trying to show me. My pleasure is proof that, in spite of everything I get wrong, maybe I’m learning after all what matters in life.
* * *
Back home after the Moravian interlude with Mendel. Or really with Anna and Vlasta, the time-wasting idyll Anna says is left over from the sequestered days of the Cold War when nobody could go anywhere, when ambition (outside the Party) was impossible, when all that was left of personal freedom was to enjoy yourself in the littleness of the moment, wine in the countryside, perfecting the apricot dumpling, frittering the day with friends stuck as you were stuck. Real friends, dreamers—the people you knew had integrity.
That was the through-the-looking-glass sensation I’d experienced in Prague during the Cold War, and hadn’t understood at the time. Beyond all the obvious differences we in the West loved to tote up—our freedoms, their oppression—there was this beguiling whatever quality to social relations in Czecho, people hanging out, listening to music, cooking, slow coffee-drinking afternoons skimming into wine-drinking evenings, late, late into the night. The chuta life—cottage life—weekends tending gardens, lying low. Living. Of course the new world market order has changed all that, but it’s still there, still part of the sense of time and how to spend it. That is, waste it.
I always think I can bring it back with me, as if after a trip to Spain or Italy, you could import the siesta culture into the cold North. Can’t be done. It’s not about taking a nap in the middle of the day. It’s about—well, that’s the question, that’s what keeps me going back not only to Czecho, but to Montaigne, that lax, drowsy man in his tower.
So back home—with Montaigne as I absurdly think, as if he were riding shotgun with me wherever I go. The big lug of his essays I carry around, the audio version on my iPhone in my pocket, plugged into my ear as I walk the dog. I’m still hesitating to visit his château, still in schoolgirl mode, doing my homework—I even try reading some of the Essais in the original French, I reread the Donald Frame biography. I suppose it’s an obsession, an attempt to find, across the maw of centuries, some kind of explanation for the kinship I feel.
I keep coming back to music—that lute player following him around the château of his childhood. No lutes in my childhood, but there is my Czech father with his determination to fill my mind with music too.
Piano. Originally pianoforte. But by the twentieth century the loud register had been dropped from the word. The idea of quiet and slow and soft—the Italian word piano—was all that was left to carry the whole bulky piece of musical furniture. Montaigne never knew one, never heard one. He was a century too early for the piano. His father, Pierre, would certainly have been an early adopter.
In any case, he gave his boy a very pianissimo childhood.
Pierre also employed a German who knew no French and “was very highly paid” to be the boy’s Latin tutor. He wanted to be sure his son’s native tongue was the language of classical Rome. Even the servants were required to address the boy only in Latin.
“It is wonderful how everyone profited from this,” Montaigne reports in an essay recounting his early education. “My father and mother learned enough Latin in this way to understand it . . . as did also the servants who were most attached to my service. Altogether, we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side. . . . I was over six before I understood any more French or Perigordian than Arabic.”
This Latin immersion was contrived, by the relatively uneducated but doting Pierre, so that his son would learn
the international language of the age “without artificial means, without a book, without grammar or precept, without the whip and without tears.” The only way to learn, Montaigne always believed. Perfect for the sluggish, lax, drowsy child.
In his lethargy the boy displayed the requirements of the particular kind of writer he became—disregard for received knowledge and a mandarin disdain for received form, coupled with acute observation and the punch and fluency of expression on the fly. He found his métier early—the essay.
Except the métier didn’t yet exist. He found his talent, then. And awaited its purpose and its form. Waiting suited his temperament after all—sluggish, lax, drowsy. As it would suit the voluptuous unspooling of his apparently artless art, a mind awakened every morning not by command, not even by thought, but by a fugitive strand of music.
* * *
—
Piano, piano! The entreaty of the long-suffering Bernard Weiser. Not a noun, not invoking the elephantine instrument I was meant to master, but a cautionary adverb. We sat side by side, he at his grand, I at mine, both of us enduring the weekly lesson in his cramped Scott Hall studio. Gently, gently! Every week he urged me down from my wrestling matches with Bach, with Scarlatti—he counted on them to tame me. But nothing could gentle my melodramatic relation to music.
It was my single year as a music major, the year the jig was finally up. My high school musicianship (much indulged, much inflated) gave way in college to the truth of my mediocrity, and late in my freshman year I skulked off to Vincent Hall, joining all the other lost souls in the morose building the English Department shared with Mortuary Science.
The Art of the Wasted Day Page 12