............
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
A little later in the poem, these haunting lines appear:
I grow old ... I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
In South Florida, those trousers may be polyester, but I have seen them walk upon the beach. In South Florida, those trousers may have an elastic waistband and be part of a lady’s three-piece pantsuit, but I have seen those trousers rolled. There in South Florida, I have seen them on tired women and on retired men. And I have seen old men with their hair parted just behind the ear with a few thin strands stretched across their pates. I have seen them—men and women—walk upon the beach and not dare to eat a peach. Or drink a cup of undecaffeinated coffee after 4:00 p.m., and I wonder—oh! I wonder—when does caution become reason? And I wonder, did any of these men, did any of these women, ever ask, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”
Who does ask, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”
And who does disturb the universe?
Kings did, and politicians do. The Wright brothers did, and NASA does. Martin Luther did, and John Paul does. Sigmund Freud did, and Dr. Ruth tries to. Rachel Carson did. Ralph Nader did. Betty Friedan did. Shakespeare did, and so did Michelangelo. Mozart did, and so did Picasso. Any creative act in some way disturbs the universe. A few great works change all the works that follow. No one who paints cannot not know the Sistine Ceiling, and no one who composes music cannot not know Beethoven—even if that person has never seen the Sistine Ceiling and even if that person has never heard Beethoven’s Fifth. Michelangelo and Beethoven are there, somewhere; they tore up the ground they walked on, and they changed its contours, and even if we do not know whose footsteps we are following, we are walking over prepared soil.
We are beyond having a universe in which there is no Shakespeare.
If we are to discover what it takes to plow up the universe, let us examine the lives of some men who did. Let us track the lives of three men who disturbed the universe so profoundly that none of us in this room today can conceive of our universe without thinking of their disturbances. The three are men of science, and their work has dealt directly with our physical universe. All three are megamen of science, and they are—in order of appearance: Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. I have chosen them for two reasons: one, their disturbances are so profound that they are beyond value judgments. That is, we need not question the merit of what they have done as some might question the merit of the work of Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx or—in the Florida legislature at least—the work of Charles Darwin. And two, their accomplishments are so large that they allow us to examine in blow-up details that we might miss in lesser lives.
Let us go then, you and I, and examine the steps between a peach and the universe.
First Galileo.
Galileo was born in 1564, the year that Shakespeare was also born, and the year that Michelangelo died. When Galileo made himself a telescope—one which is on display to this very day in Florence—he discovered the moons of Jupiter. When he published his findings in a book to which he gave a beautiful title, The Starry Messenger, a Florentine astronomer proved in the following way that the satellites of Jupiter could not exist:
There are seven windows given to animals through which air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body …
What are these parts of the microcosmos? Two nostrils, two eyes, two ears and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in a macrocosmos, there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries and Mercury undecided and indifferent. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, et cetera, ... we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. Moreover, these satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye and therefore would be useless and therefore do not exist. Besides the Jews and other ancient nations, as well as modern Europeans, have adopted the division of the week into seven days and have named them after the seven planets. Now if we increase the number of planets, this whole and beautiful system falls to the ground.
That was the mind-set that existed in Florence when Galileo lived there.
Galileo again turned his telescope toward the heavens and discovered something worse: Copernicus was right. The earth, by damn!, moved. The earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa.
And here Galileo’s real troubles began.
The pope, Urban VIII, said that Galileo left no room for miracles. Monsignor Riccardi, the chief censor of the Roman Catholic church, said that Galileo was being blasphemous. He was correcting the Bible. Had not Solomon written:
… the Earth abideth for ever;
The Sun also ariseth,
and the Sun goeth down,
and hasteth to his place
where he ariseth …
And wasn’t Solomon writing God’s words—and Hemingway’s future titles?
Galileo had an answer. He said, “The Bible shows the way to go to Heaven, not the way the heavens go.” But that answer was too wonderful, too witty, and it only made matters worse.
Remember, at this time the Catholic church was still reeling from the effects of the Reformation. It was the time of the Inquisition, and no one, especially the chief censor, could be accused of having a sense of humor in church matters.
But Galileo desperately wanted to publish, so he and the chief censor worked out a compromise. The chief censor said that Galileo could publish his findings if he agreed to write a preface in which he qualified his theories as “dreams, nullities, paralogisms, and chimera.”
So, in 1632, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems was published. The two world systems were the Ptolemaic, that the sun revolved, and the Copernican, that the earth did. Galileo lived up to his part of the agreement, and he published his work with the disclaimer as approved by the censor.
But he did two other things wrong. First of all, he published in Italian, not in erudite Latin, and thus made his work accessible to all, and second, he wrote beautifully. He was a gifted writer of exposition, and then on top of all this, the quality of the research was so powerful that it proved Coper-nicanism beyond a doubt. It was like publishing a paper with a preface stating that the color red does not exist and then printing the entire text in red ink.
So Galileo was called before the Tribunal and forced to declare that he “abjured, cursed, and detested” his past errors.
The normal punishment for such heresy was imprisonment, but the pope commuted his sentence to house arrest on the condition that Galileo “repeat once a week the seven penitential psalms”—and Galileo did—and never talk to any Protestants—and Galileo did not.
And that is what happened to you in the year 1633 if you dared to disturb the universe.
But was it really disturbing the universe that mattered so much? Was it really troubles with the universe that caused such profound troubles for the man Galileo?
Please remember that he was born in the same year that Shakespeare was. We all know that in 1633, when Galileo got into trouble, England had been Protestant for a hundred years. But Galileo wanted to publish in his neighborhood, not Shakespeare’s. If he had chosen to publish in a country just a little farther north, say Germany or Holland, he would have met with far fewer problems. Even Venice, an Italian city but one with a freer and looser society, would never have troubled him the way his own neighborhood did. For between a peach and the universe, there is the neighborhood, and those who dare disturb the universe must first have the courage to dare disturb the neighborhood.
It takes more courage to disturb the neighborhood than it takes to disturb the universe. And the price is often higher.
So, between a peach and the universe, we have the lesson of Galileo—that it takes more courage to disturb the neighborhood than it does to disturb the universe.
In the very year that Galileo died,
Isaac Newton was born into Protestant England, where the neighborhood was friendly to science. It is here, in the person of Newton, that Galileo’s work would be extended, and it is from the person of Isaac Newton that we can see what, besides daring to disturb the neighborhood, it takes to disturb the universe.
The year in which Newton was born was important, not only because his work started where Galileo’s left off-it did—but also because, having been born in 1642 meant that in 1665, Newton was ready to start graduate school at Cambridge University, and that year is significant because 1665 was a plague year. By August of 1665, one-tenth of the population of London had died of the plague, so in September Cambridge called off all its classes. School was closed; its students were sent home. Isaac Newton among them.
Home to Isaac Newton was a small stone house in Wools-thorpe, where his mother lived and where it is supposed there was an apple tree. Newton was devoted to his mother, and she to him, but there was no one in Woolsthorpe with whom he could discuss his intellectual achievements.
There, in those two plague years, 1665 and 1666, Newton formulated his three great laws of motion: inertia, gravitational attraction, and action-reaction; developed the laws of pendulum motion; worked out the inverse square law; proved Kepler’s laws of planetary motion; developed the mathematical treatment of wave motion; worked out the main irregularities of the moon’s motion; explained the tides; showed that comets are members of the solar system and that the density of the earth is between five and six times that of water, and figured out the precession of the equinoxes. He also conducted experiments that led to important discoveries about the refraction of light and the nature of color.
Not bad. But wait, there’s more.
As a mathematical tool to help himself solve the problems he was working on, Newton invented differential and integral calculus. He called his invention fluxions.
He invented something else as a tool. Just as Galileo was witty, Newton was handy. When he was studying light, he ground his own prisms, and when he was studying the stars, he invented the reflecting telescope. The reflecting telescope—and Newton himself along with it—came to the attention of the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, known as the Royal Society, and it was at the urging of its president that in 1687, his major work, The Principia, was published. The People magazine part of me makes me need to tell you that the president of the Royal Society at that time was none other than Samuel Pepys, the diarist, and the book itself was financed by Edmond Halley of Halley’s comet fame. The travel guide part of me makes me need to tell you that Newton’s telescope is on display at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
Most of us would have been proud to have claimed the invention of the reflecting telescope or the invention of calculus in those two plague years. I, for one, would have considered it an accomplishment to have mastered the use of calculus in two years. I certainly didn’t do it in two semesters at college.
There is an awful lot about Sir Isaac Newton that People magazine could have feasted upon. He was petty and mean, wise and generous, a mystic and a civil servant, but the aspect that I want now to emphasize, the aspect that I think all who are interested in disturbing the universe must know about, is his ability to profitably survive a plague year. I don’t mean physical ability.
I mean mental ability.
I mean mental agility.
I mean that those who would disturb the universe have a need for solitude. And that, I think, is the second step between a peach and the universe: the ability to be alone profitably—to enjoy solitude with vigor.
Like Newton, Einstein was isolated from other physicists at the time he published his first paper on relativity. He was working as a technical expert third class in the patent office of Bern, Switzerland.
And like Galileo, Einstein also disturbed his neighborhood.
In 1933 Philipp Lenard, a 1905 recipient of the Nobel Prize, wrote in the Nazi paper:
The most important example of the dangerous influence of Jewish circles on the study of nature has been provided by Herr Einstein with his mathematically botched theories consisting of some ancient knowledge and a few arbitrary additions … Even scientists who have otherwise done solid work … allowed the relativity theory to get a foothold in Germany because they did not see … how wrong it is ... to regard this Jew as a good German.
Later in a speech, Lenard said:
“We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew. Natural science ... is of completely Aryan origin, and Germans must today also find their own way out into the unknown. Heil Hitler.”
By 1933 Einstein had disturbed his neighborhood to the point of personal danger, so he left his native Germany and moved to Princeton. Shortly after moving there he wrote to a friend:
Princeton is a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts. Yet by ignoring certain social conventions I have been able to create for myself an atmosphere conducive to study and free of distraction. Here the people who compose what is called “society” enjoy even less freedom than their counterparts in Europe. Yet, they seem unaware of this restriction, since their way of life tends to inhibit personality development from childhood.
In that single statement Einstein summarizes how a need for solitude and the courage to disturb the neighborhood, points one and two between a peach and the universe, feed each other.
Do I dare ignore the neighborhood? And do I dare demand solitude?
It is Einstein who directly reveals the third ingredient that is necessary if a person dares to disturb the universe. He said, “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”
Einstein made that comment in a conversation with Janos Plesch about the similarities between writing fiction and working mathematics. And thus, this man of genius kindly makes a perfect transition for me, speaking about the creative process, applied—as I know it best—to writing fiction. For the third ingredient between a peach and the universe is the gift of fantasy.
As a writer of novels for middle-aged children, kids between the ages of eight and twelve, I have been concerned with each of these steps between a peach and the universe, for neighborhoods, solitude, and fantasy are not only what it takes to make me write, but they are also what I write about, for neighborhoods, solitude, and fantasy are the concerns of children between the ages of eight and twelve.
Let me start with fantasy.
Even if you are writer of realistic fiction for children, fantasy enters into the process of writing. The writing itself is the result of fantasy. I tell my children when they ask that when I sit down to write, I start the movie in my head.
But fantasy often enters into the actual story I am telling. From my very first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinlej and Me, Elizabeth, there has been at least one element of “let’s pretend” in each of my books. Up From Jericho Tel begins:
There was a time when I was eleven years old—between the start of a new school year and Mid-winter’s Night—when I was invisible. I was never invisible for long, and I always returned to plain sight, but all my life has been affected by the people I met and the time I spent in a world where I could see and not be seen.
I indulged a favorite fantasy, being invisible, when I wrote that book, but beyond that, I hope I give my readers a sense of suspending disbelief, a sense of fantasy.
Every now and then I get a letter that tells me I have done that. Here’s one such letter. It is dated September 18, 1970.
Dear Mrs. Konigsburg,
My name is Lorraine Piotrowski, and I am 11 years old. (I think that’s a sensible age, don’t you?) I live in Ontario and have read your books called: About the B’nai Bagels and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I thought both of them were delicious, and I ate them up in my mind, and now and then the taste comes back to
me …
When I get a letter like that, I know that even the most realistic fiction not only fills a need for fantasy in the reader but also feeds solitude. As Lorraine Piotrowski puts it, “I ate them up in my mind, and now and then the taste comes back to me.” Fiction makes solitude rich. Fiction makes solitude taste good.
The need for solitude has also been one of the concerns about which I write. It was a concern with the need of a suburban child to have time alone that most directly prompted my writing About the B’nai Bagels, one of the books that Lorraine Piotrowski mentioned. About the B’nai Bagels is the story of a young boy, Mark Setzer, who is middle-class suburban and whose time not spent at school is spent preparing for his Bar Mitzvah or at Little League. When his mother becomes manager of his Little League team, even his play time is invaded, and when she appoints his big brother Spencer as his coach, poor Mark cannot escape his family at all. I think we would say that his family had invaded his space.
I close that book with my young hero, Mark Setzer, solving a moral dilemma, having his Bar Mitzvah, and then this last paragraph. Mark is speaking:
According to Hebrew Law, now I am a man. That is, I can participate fully in all religious services. But I figure that you don’t become a man overnight. Because it is a becoming, becoming more yourself, your own kind of tone deaf, center-fielder, son, brother, friend, Bagel. And only some of it happens on official time plus family time. A lot of it happens being alone. And it doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it takes a guy a whole Little League season.
Even if you appreciate solitude, as Mark Setzer comes to, it is not always easy to come by.
The need for solitude gets no respect. Especially if you are a woman experiencing that need.
An American woman.
An American suburban woman.
A married American suburban woman.
A married American suburban woman with children … who works.
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