(s)he was little or nothing but life

tonight i picked up the most recently published collection of susan sontag’s essays and speeches, at the same time. the pleasure i derive from reading sontag’s essays is the pleasure of participating in the life of the mind, and of knowing it’s possible to say something in spite of wittgenstein’s or marlow’s (or my) protestations otherwise. while i think she sometimes misses the mark completely when writing politically, in a world that so often proves es konnte auch anders sein — that it could just as well be otherwise — i remember sontag for her unwavering humanity and for her ability to say what needed to be said precisely when she needed to say it:

literature was freedom. especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

it is that ability i so honestly lust for and so deeply admire.

sweet land of liberty

i bought bernard-henri lévy’s american vertigo this weekend. just as i opened it up on the subway and started making my way through the preface’s dizzying sequence of appositions (that could rival even faulkner’s), i was disturbed — fittingly — by a group of inexcusably vociferous harvard jocks joking about shitting their pants.

i’ve had tonight’s evgeny kissin celebrity series concert on my calendar since december, but i somehow forgot to get tickets in the midst of my unusually busy week. scipro — the science mentoring program i coordinate — ended yesterday, and i’m sad to see the kids go. we rune editors handed over the final draft of our magazine to the publisher. i’ve been productive.

but i’m in no mood to do mathematics, and i have an assignment due in the morning. it’s going to be a hellish week; i’m presenting at my lab’s lab meeting on tuesday, and i have a music paper and differential geometry assignment due friday.

i never say here precisely what i mean to say and am always unsettled at the mind or self my public writing exhibits; i don’t have time to write the essays i want to write — and my agony for words being the case, the stilted prose and arbitrary narrative i post here is self-defeating. stein recognized in picasso what sontag said defined the writer: a will to “pay attention to the world.” in her essay “what are master-pieces and why are there so few of them,” she [stein] observes that “he once remarked i do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.”

i try to
hide the old fool playing the fool, but you

hear, don’t you, the young man, still young,
still under there saying yes yes to the new

days darkened howsomever:

the part
of the part plots
ending in for the most part bolts

it’s a sad day here at mit.

marilee jones, our dean of undergraduate admissions, resigned today after twenty-eight years here, ten in that position. it was verified this weekend that she misrepresented her academic credentials to the institute, claiming on her resume some thirty years ago to have received three degrees from schools she’d never attended. the nytimes article on the ordeal is currently their eighth most-emailed. this comes in the wake of two student deaths announced last week.

my heart sank when i heard this news. my admission to mit was placed on hold when i received two near-failing grades in high school, and ms. jones was incredibly supportive. i still have the email she sent me nearly two years ago; in it, she writes:

Finally, I assure you that we made no mistake in admitting you, Matt. We know exactly who you are and have complete faith that you are one of our own. Many students at MIT have troubling family situations and economic issues and there are so many resources on campus to help ease those kind of stresses. Promise me that you will reach out and take advantage of those resources should you need them. I’m always happy to help point you in the right direction if you get stuck. The whole point is for you to thrive here and to be happy…

You are a remarkable person with enormous talent and a kind heart and we can’t wait to have you join us in late August. Please check in with me in the fall to say hi because if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep my eye on you. Enjoy the rest of your summer – make sure to do some things for fun and just for *you* – and we’ll see you in late August.

ms. jones has done so much to encourage authenticity in our fake and specialized system, to stand up for the humanization of education when no one else would. perhaps she was working out of a reaction to her own mistakes she made thirty years ago. her bright personality and enthusiastic commitment to education — hypocritical or not — will be sorely missed.

in the meantime, i’m at a complete loss. the episode has shaken the whole community, and an unnerving number of people are already touting a return to objective, dehumanized, meritocratic admissions standards. too many people are angrily and aggressively declaiming ms. jones’s character when the character of this institution’s average student is tenfold worse than hers ever could be. a student who lives in my dorm thought he shared sentiments with others about this whole ordeal, and posted to our dorm list this ludicrous invective, somehow meant as sarcasm:

Finally someone saying what needed to be said. She is a fucking Bitch. The quality of MIT students in general has been going down ever since she arrived. All the fucking goddamned backward hat wearing flip flopped course15 Californian Bible Koreans in fucking west campus. Oh no.. I’m an Asian Female and my mother will beat me and lock me in my room if I don’t study Biology and go to Harvard medical school… I’m asian and can’t think for myself. It makes me want to go on an ethnic cleansing rampage. I hope they put someone good in her place so we can make MIT “pure” again.

the only evidence for the declining quality of students at mit is that someone myopic and hermetic enough to post his ill-formed sarcasm to a public list containing many people grieving for the loss of ms. jones was somehow admitted to this institution. and people defended him! [oh, he's not really racist or xenophobic, so let's worry about the real evil out there and not flame someone making a bad joke; oh, it's just a joke, you're at fault if you take offense because you're reading it too seriously.] i don’t read the claim seriously, because we obviously shouldn’t; what we read seriously is that people like the person who wrote this thought this was funny in the context of today’s news. it was the thought that they thought they could do it –

this place continues to prove itself an inhuman and disinterested wasteland. at times i wish i could resign, myself.

le nozze di figaro at the boston lyric opera

i saw my first opera, madamma butterfly, from the very top row of the chicago lyric opera house at least three years ago, while visiting chicago with my high school marching band in order to march in the st. patrick’s day parade. i wasn’t very moved by the performance, since i could hardly see the stage — and since my musical tastes then were much more aesthetically naive. i was a kid; most vocal music (opera included) and piano music (especially french romantic, a la chopin and liszt) sounded too haughty, too complex to move me.

it’s hard to say what’s changed over the last few years. on what terms should we try to trace the evolution of a mind or personality? i’ve grown up: but what does growing up entail? how does the bildungsroman signal maturity? what can maturity mean? the discovery of wisdom? but where shall wisdom be found? and what is the place of understanding? here’s joyce on the matter, framing the problem in an aesthetic context as i’m wont to do:

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt him from the companionship of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a Synopsis Philosophiae Scholasticae ad mentem divi Thomae. His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire-consumed; and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in revery at least he had been acquainted with nobility.

whatever maturity means for my musical tastes, a friend of mine in the music department got two free tickets (that otherwise would have been $50) for tonight’s open rehearsal of le nozze di figaro at the boston lyric opera. an hour before we were to leave for the performance, he decided he was too tired to go, and i went by myself.

and the performance was absolutely stellar.

it’s certainly difficult to imagine someone writing such clever, beautiful music, but it’s as equally difficult to imagine there are people capable of bringing it to life. i happened to see an mit music professor at the performance, and he said it was the best performance of the opera he’d ever seen. when i mentioned my friend didn’t come because he was too tired, he laughed, and joked: “then he must be too tired for life; he’s missing the best opera ever written.”

three’s company

h. robert horvitz is giving the killian lecture here at mit today, so i thought i’d read a little bit about his career. i was delighted to find an incredibly detailed autobiography over at the nobel foundation website, in which horvitz admitted:

My coursework probably suffered, not in my grades, particularly, but in what I was learning. Mostly I would wait until the night before an examination, stay up all night, and learn what I needed to know to answer the questions the next day. For some courses I did nothing whatsoever until the week before the final examination. When one of my professors penalized me for turning in all of my problem sets at the end of the course, I thought he was being quite unreasonable. I majored in mathematics, with an emphasis on its theoretical as opposed to its applied aspects. However, I knew that in contrast to some of my classmates, I was not a mathematician in my soul. I had sufficient credits to graduate after three years, but did not want to do so, in part so that I could continue with my extracurricular activities and in part because I was simply having too much fun to want to leave. I decided to earn a second undergraduate degree, in economics.

horvitz took degrees in math and economics here and went on to study biology down the street at harvard under james watson. that’s the second world-famous biologist i’ve discovered who started out in theoretical mathematics. (eric lander was the first.)

and what snowfie points out in her comment is true; i mention horvitz and lander only because it makes me less anxious to know there are people who have done what i imagine myself doing in the future (moving away from mathematics and toward biology and medicine), and that they have made that transition so successfully that they’ve gone on to produce work that has earthquake consequences. it’s a way of coming to terms with where i am intellectually and professionally, of convincing myself it’s okay to have these diverse interests — and that it’s possible to still make meaningful contributions to the world despite my vested interest in so many unrelated fields. a.r. ammons studied general science as an undergraduate; helen vendler studied chemistry and did a fulbright in math before matriculating at harvard for graduate school in literature; atul gawande is a distinguished physician-writer who has written two wonderful books and writes for the new yorker. what i mean to say in writing a post like this is: wow, look at the variety of things we can do with our lives, look at the possibilities for breaking out of the overly specialized system, look — someone felt the same way i do.

april is the cruelest month

canker is a disease of plants,
cancer one of animals.

after six months of cold and rain (with the occasional bout of snow), boston’s finally in bloom …

and i’m allergic. we’re seeing the nicest weather of the year today, and i’m miserable with inflamed sinuses and fluid on my ears. although i like medline’s idea of preventative medicine (“during the pollen season, people with hay fever should remain indoors in an air-conditioned atmosphere whenever possible”), i’d like to actually be able to enjoy the first day of sunshine i’ve seen in a long time —

keeping going

an article about the principal investigator of my lab was published a few days ago in the boston globe. she took all of us urops (that’s mit-speak for undergraduate researchers) out to lunch on tuesday, and though she admitted she didn’t remember some of the other undergraduates names, she definitely remembered mine — and told me she had been thinking about me the other day when she caught up with one of her friends who got her phd in physics and was contributing a lot of new, exciting ideas to biomedicine. she seemed really interested in what i’m doing this summer at sloan-kettering. it’s small things like this that count most to me.

a year’s work in this lab is converging and we’re finally beginning to write our paper, which we’re hoping to publish in nanoletters — which, i just noticed today, has the highest ISI impact factor for journals of nanoscience and nanotechnology.

i started reading peer-reviewed papers when i was twelve. seven long years later i’m about to be an author on a paper of my own (third author, at that, only after the two graduate students i work with). i’ve been working most of those years to make a definitive contribution to science or knowledge in general — to achieve some sort of tangible emblem of success, to have something to point to and say look, i’m doing something with my life — and it’s strange finally being at that place.

but in a wide world with incalculable problems, pride can’t sustain itself very long, and for good reason. at the end of the day one lies down in anguished humility at what hasn’t been said, and does well if he can be seen rediscovering something in the morning, saying something in spite of the silence, keeping going

a continuity of historical recognitions

“some modern travelers still pretend to find acephalous people in america.”

– ephraim chambers, universal dictionary of the arts & sciences, 1728

bush vests interest in dignity of human life

renewing the promise of america begins with upholding the dignity of human life. in our day there is a temptation to manipulate life in ways that do not respect the humanity of the person. when that happens the most vulnerable can be valued for their utility to others, instead of their own inherent worth. we must continue to work for a culture of life–where the strong protect the weak, and where we recognize in every human life the image of our creator.

– president bush, at the national catholic prayer breakfast on april 13

bush’s talk was about stem cell research, of course, because he obviously couldn’t think of anything this country does that defiles the dignity of human life or manipulates lives in ways that don’t respect their humanity. here are some images from iraq, taken from undermars.com:

(the solider who sent in this picture gave it the caption: “new meaning to giving head.”)