THE TWENTY-FOUR ESSAYS in this collection were chosen from the last fifteen years; all have had a previous life in magazines and in other collections. These are the pieces that have made me happiest in the rereading and seem the most likely to keep doing so. Over time, I have come to understand there are three pleasures in writing. The first is the exquisite joy of writing itself, when one is completely alone; the second, more social, comes in moving readers with what one has written; the third pleasure, years later and finally solitary again, is rereading that fraction of one’s writing worth keeping and being surprised and grateful all over again. For the most part, writing is a selfish and self-centered profession. And the essay, as E. B. White has remarked, is probably the most egoistic of all forms. Here, the writer openly displays personal thoughts and adventures, as if his every sneeze and little observation will be of general interest.
The idea for my first essay came to me while I sat in a comfortable wingback chair, smoking my great-grandfather’s pipe and inhaling the ancient aromas long dormant within it. As described in “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe,” the pipe created a kind of intimacy with my ancestor, deceased before I was born, and set my mind puzzling about time travel. More importantly, it revived my relationship with my father. He was a pipe smoker himself and a taciturn man. For years, I had never known what my father was thinking, whether he was pleased or unhappy. But beginning in my college years, he had now and then presented me with one of his pipes and a brief story to go with it. Once he had given me a light-brown Kaywoodie from his World War II days and described how he used to smoke it while pacing on his ship before an invasion. My great-grandfather’s old briar, with its strange engraved markings, had rested in his drawer for years before he gave it to me, without comment. Then, a few days later, he sent me a wonderful photograph of himself as a little boy with Papa Joe, just the two of them, holding hands in front of a white clapboard house. My father wore knickers and Papa Joe a hat and mustache, just as I’d pictured him from the aromas in his pipe. I wrote my essay and mailed it to my father. Then, miraculously, we began truly talking to each other. And I, well on the way to becoming as quiet as my father, discovered that through writing I could open up myself and touch people I cared about.
That initial essay (as well as a second) was published in Smithsonian magazine. Then I began a long-running monthly column for the excellent but now defunct Science 80; then I wrote for other magazines when Science 80 went out of business in the mid-1980s. Encounters with magazines sober a beginning writer, who is often so enamored of his scribblings that he’s committed every word to memory. In magazines, sentences and whole paragraphs are often slashed by an editor to make way for the next story or even a cartoon embedded in the page for distraction. Despite this abuse, the writer continues to write, the habit being so insatiable and compulsive.
From the beginning, I found myself writing of science, my first passion and profession, sometimes of the hard facts of science but more often of the human texture and whimsy, the lived part of science. Science, for me, was the most rigorous and extreme expression of order in the physical world. Yet the desire for that order, and often the means to declare it, were human, oddly nestled against the emotion and wild flight of the human world. Where those two worlds met seemed a subject for literature. And I was partly propelled by something I’d learned from watching my colleagues: Scientists often make their greatest discoveries just at those moments when they follow their intuition instead of equations. In other words, when they behave the least “scientifically.” That secret, known to historians but rarely to scientists, became the hidden thread running through my essays.
While writing, I became fascinated by the creative tension between science and art, reason and instinct. Suspecting a great deal of instinct in science and reason in art, I asked science friends if they ruminated in pictures or equations, to what extent did they use aesthetic criteria in their work, if they believed in metaphors. I asked artist friends how ideas came to them, how paintings were balanced, why a particular splash of color was placed where it was. I came back to Einstein’s provocative comment that there is no logical path to the laws of nature, that the laws can be reached only by intuition and the “free inventions of the mind.” Could a scientist invent the world like an artist? Wasn’t there still a world outside of our minds? People had landed on the moon and returned. Which world was true?
One day, during the midst of my questions, I took my two-year-old daughter to the ocean for the first time. It was a mild, slightly hazy day in June. We parked our car a half mile from the water and walked toward the coast. A speckled pink crab shell lay on the sand and caught her attention. A hundred yards farther, we heard the rolling of the waves, in rhythmical sequence, and I could tell that my daughter was curious about what made the sound. Holding her up with one arm, I pointed to the sea. My daughter’s eyes followed along my arm, across the beach, and then out to the vast blue-green ocean. For a moment she hesitated. I wasn’t sure whether she would be puzzled or frightened by that first sight of infinity. Then she broke out into a radiant smile. There was nothing I needed to say to her, nothing I needed to explain.
The essay is well suited to my own unsettled identity as a scientist and writer. It is a generous form of writing, able to accommodate the philosopher, the teacher, the polemicist, the raconteur, the poet. All one requires is an initial idea, the willingness to become personal about the subject (often one’s self), and the discipline to shut up before the composition becomes a book. The subject of science poses special challenges to the essayist, for most people want to read about people, or at least things tied to people. Much of science, of course, is inanimate and far removed from daily life. In this regard, an essay about medicine or psychology may be intrinsically more engaging than one about chemistry or physics. People must be put into writing on science the same way M.F.K. Fisher puts them into her writing about food: What is the ideal number of people to invite to a dinner party, and why? What about the funny mustache of the waiter who served Ms. Fisher in that little restaurant in Dordogne. By the time she gets to the food, which invites on its own, our appetite has been whetted.
In many of these essays, science is merely a jumping off point into the uncertain terrain of human behavior. Nearly half of the pieces are part parable or fable or story. Beyond its particular subject matter, every piece requires a fresh approach, as much to entertain the writer as the reader. Like a short story, the conception of an essay either works or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t one must throw the thing into the wastebasket without pity. I hope I have thrown away all that I should.