by Isaac Asimov
On September 24, 1 actually mentioned my angina in my diary.
Life went on, however, and I even continued to pretend that I was well. I kept up my drumfire of lectures, traveling to Connecticut, and to Boston (to give one last talk for the medical school on October 3, 1983), and even as far as Newport News, Virginia.
On September 23, I met Indira Gandhi at a meeting she requested with a number of authors, and we gave her some books. She was a gracious, intelligent woman.
On October 17, on my monthly visit to [his doctor] I finally broke down and admitted ... that I was having anginal problems.
[He was sent to a cardiologist, flunked a stress test, got little benefit from nitroglycerine patches, and his angina increased in intensity.]
In my diary . . . I recorded that 1983 was on its way to being far and away my best year as far as income was concerned, but, alas, "I don't expect to long survive it."
Yet life goes on, and even at this crisis I made a trip to Philadelphia to give a talk. On the other hand, I was cautious enough to prepare a new will on November 4.
On November 14, I went to University Hospital for an angiogram. The coronary blockage was pronounced, but still not so bad as to deprive me of what [the cardiologist] called "options." I could have a triple bypass operation or I could choose to live on nitroglycerine tablets and perhaps live out a normal lifetime without an operation, but I'd be more or less a "cardiac cripple."
I said, "What are the chances of dying on the operating table ... T'
(The cardiologist] said, "About one in a hundred ..."
"And what do you suppose my chances are of dying within a year if I don't have an operation?"
"My guess . . . is one in six."
"All right," I said. "I'll have the operation." So [the cardiologist] made an appointment for me with a surgeon.
[Janet's note. Fearful of the dangers of surgery. I objected to this decision.
I ought to have started a new novel by now, but I refused to do so until I knew for sure that I would live long enough to finish it. I was not going to leave an unfinished novel behind me, as Charles Dickens did, if I could help it. That was why there was a one-year gap before Robots and Empire was published. However, I didn't loaf. I was working madly those months on the revision of the Guide to Science, hoping to complete a fourth edition before I died.
[The heart surgeon] asked if I wanted to wait till after ChristmasNew Year's for the operation. Actually, I had reason to wait, for I wanted to attend the annual banquet of the Baker Street Irregulars [BSI, an organization of the fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories] on January 6. 1 was preparing a song to be sung to the tune of "Danny Boy" and I wanted desperately to deliver it.
However, I dared not take a chance. I said, "No ... I want the operation at the earliest possible date."
I completed the song, sang it into a cassette, and told Janet that she must deliver it to the BSI if I couldn't make it.
A few days before I was due for the operation, I forgot my condition, and because I was having trouble getting a taxi, I ran for one that finally stopped at a red light. My intention was to get it before someone else did and before it drove away.
The flow of adrenaline kept me going, but after I got into the cab, announced my destination, and settled back, the adrenaline stopped and my heart, unable to get the oxygen it needed, yelled at the top of its voice. I had the worst anginal attack ever, and as I clutched at my chest and gasped for breath, I decided that this was it. I was going to have a second attack and this time it would kill me.
It seemed to me that the driver would reach Doubleday, where I was heading, and find he would have a dead man in his cab. Unwilling to go through the red tape of reporting me (so it seemed in my imagination), he would continue his drive, taking me to the East River, tumble me into it, and drive away-leaving Janet to go into a frenzy when I never came home.
I reached for my pad to write my name and address on it in large letters, with directions for calling Janet's number, but as I was about to do so, I felt the pain ebbing and when we got to Doubleday I was normal.-I was badly shaken, of course.
On the afternoon of [surgery], I was wheeled to the elevators and my last words to Janet were: "Remember, if anything happens to me, I have a $75,000 advance for a new novel that you will have to return to Doubleday.-
(When it was all over, I told Doubleday this, to impress them with the fact that I had no intention of taking money from them for a book I couldn't do. And they replied, as I might have guessed, with the old refrain: "Don't be silly, Isaac. We wouldn't have accepted the money.")
I had been filled with sedatives and I remember nothing at all after I got into the elevator. I was told afterward, however, that I wouldn't let the operation begin until I had sung a song.
"A song?" I said in surprise. "What song?"
"I don't know," said my informant. "Something about Sherlock Holmes."
Obviously my parody for the BSI was much in my mind. In fact, the evening before my operation, I indulged in an involuntary daydream. I had died on the operating table in my reverie, and Janet, all in black, came to the BSI to deliver the cassette.
"My late husband," she would say, brokenly and in tears, "with the BSI in his last thoughts, asked me to deliver this."
And they would play my parody to the tune of "Danny Boy." The first few lines were:
The song would be played and I knew that the audience would be in tears and that when it was done they would stand and applaud and applaud and applaud for twenty minutes. And, in my reverie, I listened to all twenty minutes of applause, and my eyes filled with tears of happiness.
Then I had the operation and the next thing I knew I was opening my eyes and I realized that I was in the recovery room. I had survived. And my first thought was that now I wouldn't get the kind of applause I would have gotten if I had been dead.
"Oh-expletive deleted," I said in disappointment.
I have always thought of that moment as the ultimate testimony to the ultimate ham that I was.
[He went to the BSI banquet.] Everyone flocked about me to tell me how wonderful I looked (a sure sign that I looked terrible, indeed) and I sang my song rather hoarsely, for I'd had a tube down my throat for six hours while I was on the operating table. I got the applause, but it was only for two minutes, not twenty. There are disadvantages to being alive.
Thirty-Six.
HUMANISTS
[While suffering what could be called intimations of mortality, Isaac did not give up his humanist beliefs.]
I've never been particularly careful about what label I placed on my beliefs. I believe in the scientific method and the rule of reason as a way of understanding the natural universe. I don't believe in the existence of entities that cannot be reached by such a method and such a rule and that are therefore "supernatural." I certainly don't believe in the mythologies of our society, in Heaven and Hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons. I've thought of myself as an "atheist," but that simply describes what I didn't believe in, not what I did.
Gradually, though, I became aware that there was a movement called "humanism," which used that name because, to put it most simply, Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.
I received a copy of the "Humanist Manifesto" decades ago when I was still quite young. I read its statement of the principles of humanism, found that I agreed with them, and signed it. When, in the 1970s, an updated statement, "Humanist Manifesto II," was sent to me, I agreed with it and signed it as well. That made me an avowed Humanist, something in which Janet, entirely of her own accord (and as a result of principles she had developed before she ever met me), joins me ...
My humanism doesn't extend me
rely to the signing of statements, of course. I have written essays by the dozen that support scientific reasoning and in which I denounce all kinds of pseudoscientific trash. In particular, I have argued vehemently against those religious Fundamentalists who back the Babylonian worldview of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. These essays have appeared in a number of places, even in the June, 14, 1981, issue of the New York Times Magazine.
I also wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Times in which I disputed strenuously (and with justice, I think) the views of a prominent astronomer who published a book in which he maintained that the Big Bang theory was somehow anticipated by the biblical writers of Genesis and that astronomers were hesitant to accept the Big Bang because they didn't want to support the conventional religious view.
I expanded that Op-Ed piece into a book, In the Beginning, in which I went over every verse in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, in as evenhanded and unemotional a method as possible, and compared the literal interpretation of its language with the modern beliefs of science. It was published by Crown in 1981.
Then, of course, there was my earlier two-volume Asimov's Guide to the Bible-written from a strictly humanist point of view.
All this resulted in the American Humanist Association selecting me as the "Humanist of the Year" in 1984, and I went to Washington to receive the honor and to speak to the group on April 20, 1984. It was a small group, of course, for we Humanists are few in number. At least, those of us who are willing to identify ourselves as Humanists are few. I suspect that huge numbers of people of Western tradition are Humanists in so far as the way they shape their lives is concerned, but that childhood conditioning and social pressures force them to pay lip service to religion and do not allow them even to dream of admitting that it is only lip service.
Previous "Humanists of the Year" included Margaret Sanger, Leo Szilard, Linus Pauling, Julian Huxley, Hermann J. Muller, Hudson Hoagland, Erich Fromm, Benjamin Spock, R. Buckminster Fuller, B. F. Skinner, Jonas E. Salk, Andrei Sakharov, Carl Sagan, and a number of others of equal note, so I was in select company.
I gave a humorous talk on the occasion, dealing with the kinds of letters I received from religionists, letters that went to the extreme of praying for my soul, on the one hand, to that of consigning me to Hell, on the other. The talk was a huge success; too huge, for it meant that I was eventually asked to become president of the American Humanist Association.
I hesitated, explaining that I didn't travel and that I would be totally unable to attend conventions held anywhere but in New York City, and that, moreover, my schedule was so heavy that I couldn't engage in extended correspondence or involve myself in the political disputes that are inevitable in all organizations.
I was assured that I would not be expected to travel or to do anything I didn't want to do. What they wanted was my name, my writings (which I did anyway), and my signature attached to fund-raising letters.
Even with that settled, I still had to wonder what would happen if I heightened my profile in the Humanist movement to such an extent. My magazine, IASFM [Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine], was still quite young and one or two people had already cancelled their subscriptions "because Isaac Asimov is a Humanist." Would I be killing the magazine altogether if I became president of the AHA?
Then I thought that my editorials in the magazine were completely outspoken-so what worse could my presidency do? Besides, I didn't want to make a decision that was influenced by cowardice. I therefore agreed and I have been president of the American Humanist Association ever since.
[Isaac remained president until his death. Now he is prominent in the huge book, Who's Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalists, Rationalists, and Non-Theists, compiled by Warren Allen Smith and published in 2000.]
Thirty-Seven.
SENIOR CITIZEN
AND HONORS
I passed my sixtieth birthday safely, a milestone I had feared I might not reach after my 1977 heart attack. Then I approached my sixty-fifth birthday, another milestone I had feared I might not reach in the nervous month before my triple bypass.
Now here it was. On January 2, 1985, 1 turned sixty-five, an age that is often considered the official dividing line beyond which a person is a "senior citizen," a phrase I detest with all my heart.
What I was, at sixty-five, was an old man.
Sixty-five is, of course, the traditional age for retirement, but that is only true if someone is in a position to fire you and call it retirement. As a freelance writer, I can be rejected, but not fired. Publishers may refuse to put out my books, but they cannot prevent me from writing them.
So I threw a "nonretirement party" for over a hundred people. Janet and I specified "no presents" and "no smoking." A smoke-free party was the best present I could get and it went off magnificently, with all my publishers and friends smiling at me, and my brother, Stan, making a funny speech, and so on.
And my writing career passed right through my sixty-fifth birthday as though there was nothing there.
On February 7, 1985, however, the government caught up to me and I was called in to see some officials who wanted to look at my birth certificate and my tax returns. (I might have mailed them in, but my birth certificate, a fragile piece of old paper from Russia, was not something I cared to trust to the mails-or to the government officials, for that matter.)
I was told that I qualified for Medicare and I accepted that with a certain guilt since I buy ample medical insurance ... [but] I had just gone through a nasty and expensive medical procedure and might have to go through more ... so when the officials told me I had to accept Medicare, I acquiesced.
Social security was another thing. I flatly refused to accept that. I said, "I have not retired. I make a good deal of money and will continue to do so. The social security payments are not needed by me and they are needed by others, so keep my payments in the social security fund and pay it out to those others."
The person behind the desk said, "If that's what you want, all right, but only till you're seventy. After you turn seventy, you will have to take your social security payments."
I shrugged that off and forgot about it until January 1990 when a government check arrived that I couldn't account for until I remembered the social security bit. I consulted my accountant, and he said, "You paid for it, Isaac. It's your money."
So it was. And then I thought of the [money] I pay each year in taxes and how much of it finds its way into the pockets of greedy politicians and businessmen-and I hardened my heart and accepted the payment, which, believe me, is not a large one.
One can't live a normal lifetime and accomplish anything at all above the level of being a drunken bum without getting awards for something. I have been at numerous conventions in the course of my oratorical adventures and there are few of them where awards aren't handed out to various people-sometimes in gratitude (I think) for their consenting to retire.
Even in science fiction, awards keep proliferating. There is the Hugo Award (given in ever increasing categories) and the Nebula Award. In addition, there are awards in the names of dead superstars of science fiction; awards named for John Campbell, Philip Dick, Ted Sturgeon, and so on. Perhaps in time to come there will be an Isaac Asimov Award. [yes]
Naturally, I have collected a number of awards (and would collect more if I were willing to travel more than I do). Some are quite trivial, and the most trivial of them, and one I rather like just the same, is a fancy plaque that says on it: "Isaac Asimov, Lovable Lecher." That's something to get an award for, isn't it?
I've also collected diplomas; not only my own legitimate Ph.D., which is framed and up on the wall, but fourteen honorary doctorates as well, stored in a trunk.
I never had an academic robe of my own (I refused to attend my own graduations) and so each school for which I gave a commencement address had to supply me with one, and with a mortarboard and tassel. When I got my honorary degree from Columbia,
however, they let me keep the academic robe instead of taking it back at the end of the proceedings. What a pleasure! Now I could wear my own.
However, the very first time I wore it at another commencement, it started raining during the address, for the first time it had ever rained on such an occasion. I had to put up an umbrella while speaking so as to protect my precious robe.
I have never worn it again, because I am getting too old to sit in the sun for two hours and watch hundreds of youngsters get diplomas, just so that I could make a twenty-minute speech.
There were also honors I got for reasons that had nothing to do with my accomplishments, but simply came to me because of where I was born, or the circumstances of my childhood.
Thus, when projects arose for renovating Ellis Island as a kind of museum to honor the achievements of immigrants who had come to the United States during the years when it was the Golden Door to the Promised Land, Life magazine decided to find some people who had actually come through Ellis Island. It meant finding old people, for Ellis Island had been shut down decades before.
I was one of the old people they found. On July 28, 1982, I was taken down to the lower tip of Manhattan (in a driving rainstorm, as it happened) and was ferried over to Ellis Island. It was the first time I had set foot on it since that time in 1923 when I arrived and got the measles to celebrate the fact. The buildings were in a state of shabbiest decay and I was photographed sitting rather glumly in the middle of one of them.
The photograph appeared in Life, and everyone who saw it asked, "Why are you wearing rubbers'?"
And I said, "Because it was raining heavily. Why else?"
A couple of years later, I was awarded some sort of medal or other for having (a) been an immigrant and (b) done something to make the United States not too sorry that I had arrived.