Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  This may tempt you into magical thinking—that someone in the outer reaches of your circle will swoop down and deliver you to someplace new. But it’s more accurate to view these relationships as magnifiers of your own interest and attention. In all the cases I’ve mentioned so far, both future members of a pair had given the conduit a reason to introduce them. They hadn’t just dreamed their private dreams. They had taken steps, however tentative, to realize a vision. When you speak of what you want, and even one person hears, it may begin a generative loop.

  The second major way people meet vital partners—and enact the loop between personal interest and social connection—is by going to what the sociologist Michael Farrell calls a “magnet place,” or a locus for people with shared interests or yearnings.

  Schools are obvious magnet places. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the co-creators of South Park, met in an undergraduate film class at the University of Colorado. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who would go on to create behavioral economics, first connected when Kahneman invited Tversky to talk to his class at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google, met on a tour Brin led in the spring of 1995 for students (including Page) who had been admitted to Stanford’s grad school. James Watson, a twenty-three-year-old American whiz-kid biologist, met Francis Crick, a thirty-five-year-old Brit trained in physics meandering through his PhD thesis, when Watson went to Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory to work on x-ray crystallography, a method to study the atomic structure of molecules. Together they would discover the structure of DNA.

  Magnet places exude a power even for people who come without any concrete ambition. In 1967, a twenty-year-old poet and artist and dreamer named Patti Smith was drawn as though by a magnet to the Brooklyn neighborhood around an art college called the Pratt Institute, where some of her friends went to school. “I figured if I placed myself in their environment that I could learn from them,” she wrote in her memoir Just Kids. When she went to her friends’ house, it turned out they had moved, but the boy who answered the door pointed her to the back room where his roommate, also a Pratt student, lay sleeping. It was Robert Mapplethorpe, who would become Smith’s creative alter ego.

  Indeed, a magnet place needn’t even be an institution; it could be an event that lasts only a matter of hours, like the Atlanta church service in the fall of 1950 where two young preachers, Ralph David Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., met, the first contact of a partnership that led to the American civil rights movement. In 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-three-year-old CEO of Facebook, went to a Christmas party at the home of another Silicon Valley entrepreneur and met a Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, who three months later signed on as Zuckerberg’s COO.

  Sometimes, the magnetic pull radiates from one member of the eventual pair. Susan B. Anthony, a teacher, abolitionist, and temperance advocate, was a young soldier in reform movements when she came to Seneca Falls, New York, in 1851 for an antislavery conference. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, though only five years older, was that movement’s general, having drafted a Declaration of Sentiments that sounded a call for equality of the sexes unlike any the world had yet heard. They met on the street, and Stanton immediately took a liking to the younger Anthony, who would become her chief aide.

  Even as we note the great outcomes of these meetings, we should keep in mind how humbly, and with how much effort, they may begin. One day in 1960, a fourteen-year-old girl in Cincinnati, Ohio, danced her heart out for a visiting ballerina from New York, who was scouting for scholarship students for the School of American Ballet, affiliated with the choreographer George Balanchine’s company. Roberta Sue (Suzi) Ficker had danced for years and had often played a game with her friend where they would fall into armchairs and pretend they were collapsing into the arms of Balanchine’s leading men. Her technical skills weren’t enough to win her a scholarship. But when the scout heard that Ficker’s mother planned to move her girls to New York City, she suggested they call the school directly for another try.

  On August 16, 1960, her fifteenth birthday, Ficker had her audition. When she got to the rehearsal space, she was surprised to see Balanchine himself. He watched her dance with his head tilted back. She sang to accompany herself, hoping to fill the room’s “loud silence.” “It just seemed to go on forever,” she remembered. Finally Balanchine clapped his hands, said, “Fine. That’s enough. Thank you. Goodbye,” and left the room.

  She got a call the next day. She had been accepted.

  Some meetings seem accidental, but we just need to brush up on the context in order to see the influence of a magnet place. On July 31, 1960, Valentino Garavani, a twenty-eight-year-old fashion designer, came to a café on the Via Veneto in Rome with some friends, but they couldn’t find a table. Someone in Valentino’s group saw a handsome younger man—a twenty-two-year-old architecture student named Giancarlo Giammetti—sitting alone and asked if they could join him. Giancarlo and Valentino took a fancy to each other, began to date, and soon found themselves in business together, with Giancarlo building an infrastructure to prop up Valentino’s dream: to dress the world’s most beautiful women.

  It wasn’t chance, though, that caused their paths to cross. Valentino had come from a small town in the north of Italy; he was a dogged, relentless kid who made his way out of the provinces to Paris, where he was an apprentice designer. Then he broke out on his own and returned to Rome; he felt intuitively that the heat was there. Giancarlo was born in the city—his father had an electronics shop near the Via Veneto. But he was not from the privileged class, and it was no small bit of gumption for him to thrust himself into the scene made iconic by the Fellini film La Dolce Vita. Describing them meeting by “chance” at a hot-spot café in early 1960s Rome would be like describing an “accidental” encounter at New York City’s Studio 54 in the late 1970s. “Valentino and Giancarlo were at the right place at the right time,” Matt Tyrnauer, the director of Valentino: The Last Emperor, told me, “but it wasn’t an accident. They put themselves in that café, which was itself the epicenter of an historical moment.”

  Cafés are the epitome of city life, places where people brush up against new bodies and minds—the Enlightenment itself was fueled by the invention of the coffeehouse. And cities are magnet places writ large. Full of jangles and crowded spaces, they draw, and keep, people who endure the hassle because they’re seeking something—namely, one another.

  Cities beget creative connection, and that’s one major reason they are thriving today. In the 1990s, when information technology unleashed workers from their cubicles, some social scientists predicted the demise of urban living, but the past two decades have actually seen sharp increases in urban populations throughout the world, and especially dramatic concentrations of what Richard Florida calls “the creative class.”

  Physical contact matters a great deal in creative work. A study in the late 1980s by Bell Communications Research looked at a large industrial research and development laboratory with about five hundred employees in the fields of physics, engineering, and computer and behavioral science. Researchers within the same discipline were twice as likely to collaborate with colleagues on the same floor than with ones just an elevator stop away. Researchers in separate departments who sat close together were six times more likely to collaborate with one another than with those in their own departments on separate floors.

  This study was published before the widespread use of e-mail, but even in the age of laptops and smartphones, the best work still seems to emerge from person-to-person contact. According to a 2010 study of thirty-five thousand papers in biomedicine that had at least one author from Harvard, the work of physically close collaborators resulted in many more citations (an indication of the importance of the research) than the work of collaborators who were farther from one another. According to the study, citations were negatively affected not only by collaborators’ working on different campuses but also by their working i
n different buildings on the same campus.

  Perhaps the most striking endorsement for direct interaction comes from the very companies who profit from virtual exchange. Yahoo insists that employees work in the office (rather than telecommute). When asked how many Google employees telecommute, the company’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, replied: “As few as possible.”

  Bodies matter, in part because of the well-established importance of nonverbal communications; several studies have shown that gestures are more than four times as important as words.

  And the advantages of personal contact include experiences we can’t consciously register. In a shared space, people plug into what the psychologist Daniel Goleman has called “neural WiFi,” “a feedback loop,” he writes in Social Intelligence, “that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies.” When scientists videotape conversations and slow them down to watch frame by frame, they detect synchronies between nonverbal elements—a shared rhythm very much like the beat that guides an improvisation in jazz. The movements themselves are coordinated to within a fraction of a second—our brains are taking in data on the order of milli- or microseconds. But conscious processing of information happens in the comparatively sluggish scale of seconds. When two people talk to each other, writes Goleman, “our own thoughts can’t possibly track the complexity of the dance.”

  The core value of a magnet place is the juxtaposition of mutual interests. Typically, we see this in places of concentration—like in the places favored by geeks. But it may also happen in places of relative isolation, as when two geeks find each other in a crowd of jocks. When a Danish teenager named Lars Ulrich moved to Newport Beach, in Orange County, California, in 1980, he found himself totally alone in his obsession with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which included bands like Saxon, Iron Maiden, and Def Leppard. In his high school, Lars told biographer Mick Wall, “it was literally five hundred kids in pink Lacoste shirts and one guy in a Saxon T-shirt—me . . . I was an outsider—doing my own thing . . . I’d walk around school with a Saxon T-shirt on and people would look at me as if I was from another planet.”

  Lars felt so isolated that he took out a classified in a paper called the Recycler: “Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with.” James Hetfield answered the ad. He was so shy that he couldn’t make eye contact, Ulrich remembered, but he had the same fervent interest in music. Metallica, the band they cofounded, would go on to sell more than one hundred million albums.

  Of course, many pairs don’t have a first-meeting story that we know about—or even that they know about. Most siblings—Orville and Wilbur Wright, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Joel and Ethan Coen—won’t remember a time they didn’t know each other. But even within that milieu, it is striking how many of these pairs create a world unto themselves based on shared interests. Vincent and Theo van Gogh were the first and third of six surviving children but their unusual rapport was noticeable to their sister Elisabeth, who said that even as a boy, Theo considered Vincent “more than just a normal human being.” “I adored him more than anything imaginable,” Theo said.

  The other common feature of early-intimacy pairs like siblings is that, as much as they share a world together from the start, their creative work begins only after a critical separation. After the death of his wife, John Wordsworth sent his son William away to school and his daughter Dorothy to live with relatives. They hardly saw each other for nine years. The Coen brothers went to the same high school and college, but Joel studied film in a graduate program at NYU and Ethan did graduate work in philosophy at Princeton. After Ethan graduated, he joined his brother in New York to write screenplays.

  The point is that pairs with deeply entwined early lives must also develop disparate experiences, attitudes, or emotional styles. This is the next layer to unpeel in meeting stories. The catalyst is not similarity alone but the joining of profound similarities with profound differences.

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  About the Author

  JOSHUA WOLF SHENK is an essayist and independent scholar whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and in the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Mother Jones, and other publications. He has been a correspondent for the New Republic, the Economist, and U.S. News & World Report. A contributing editor to the Washington Monthly and a faculty member at New School University, Shenk serves on the advisory council of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and consulted on the History Channel’s film Lincoln. He lives in Brooklyn.

  Footnotes

  * It has also been overlooked that Lincoln may have had the meeting that Drake suggested. During Lincoln’s five weeks at the Speed home in Farmington (see below), he rode most days into downtown Louisville, where he visited with James Speed, Joshua’s older brother, at his law office. Dr. Drake was, at the time, in residence at the Louisville Medical Institute. He saw patients in his office on the south side of Chestnut, between Eighth and Ninth streets, just a few blocks from James Speed’s office, on Seventh Street between Grayson (now Cedar) and Walnut (now Muhammad Ali). (G. Collins, The Louisville Directory for the Year 1841 [Louisville, 1841]).

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