{geni:about_me}




BELONGING
A Memoir



Robert W. Fuller












© 2013 Robert W. Fuller
1716 Parker St.
Berkeley, CA 94703
E-mail: robertwfuller@gmail.com
Tel: 510 841-0964









It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is
quite tame. We have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until by-and-by we beginto suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Intellect
















To Arlene


BELONGING


Table of Contents


Prologue: Quests and Questions

Chapter 1: Beginnings
Chapter 2: Longing to Belong
Chapter 3: Becoming
Chapter 4: Belonging
Chapter 5: Banishment
Chapter 6: American in Paris
Chapter 7: Casting a Wider Net
Chapter 8: A Starter Identity
Chapter 9: A Case of Mistaken Identity
Chapter 10: Steps toward a New Identity
Chapter 11: Identity Inflation
Chapter 12: A Somebody Is but a Once and Future Nobody
Chapter 13: Sojourn in Nobodyland
Chapter 14: Trading on a Former Identity
Chapter 15: A Better Game than War
Chapter 16: Quests and Questions
Chapter 17: Inward Odyssey
Chapter 18: Looking for Dignity
Chapter 19: Stumping for Dignity
Chapter 20: Nobodies Liberation

Epilogue: Who Wrote This? Who Is It About?

Acknowledgements: Mentors, Teachers, Allies, Co-Creators

PROLOGUE: QUESTS AND QUESTIONS

Nothing shapes our quests more than our questions. My questions are ones of being, becoming, and belonging. This memoir tells of my search for answers.

Nothing shapes our future more than the stories we tell of our past. These stories have shaped me.

CHAPTER 1: BEGINNINGS
(1936–1945)


Arlene

In the fall of 1943, on the first day of second grade, our teacher had announced two inviolable rules: Each pupil must carry a fresh handkerchief and have clean fingernails. Every morning began with an inspection. One day Arlene failed. Her fingernails were dirty, and Miss Belcher told her to go out into the hall and stay there until her fingernails were clean. I wondered how Arlene could clean her nails in the hall. I pictured her holding her fingers in the water trickling from the drinking fountain and doubted it would work—cold water, no soap.
Later, as the class filed out for recess, we snuck glances at Arlene. Standing alone, slumped against the wall, hiding her face, she shrank from our snickers. She was the smallest kid in our class, and I can still picture her running to catch the school bus when it stopped near the farm where her father labored. She was tiny and thin and wore the same faded plaid dress every day. Most kids bounded onto the bus, greeting their friends, but Arlene struggledup the steps, averting her eyes and sitting by herself.
When I got home I told my mother what had happened to Arlene, and every morning for the rest of that year she checked to see if my nails were clean and made sure I had a fresh handkerchief. I was never sent to the hall. To this day, I heed Miss Belcher’s rules.

The Spinach Standoff

Every family has its legends. One of my family’s is The Spinach Standoff.
When I was about four I refused to eat the canned spinach my mother set before me. If you’ve ever seen a Popeye cartoon, you’ll remember canned spinach. Whenever Popeye faces a crisis that calls for a muscular solution, he opens acan of spinach and pours it directly down his throat. Canned spinach flows like pond scum.
My refusal to try even a spoonful ran up against the moral my mother had drawn from the Great Depression—that we must lick our platters clean. To break the impasse, she issued a threat: Until you eat the spinach, you get nothing else. When I refused even to try it, I was sent to my room. Every few hours my mother would come to my bedroom door, open it a few inches, and poke a spoonful of the dark slime through the crack.
There’s some disagreement about how long this stalemate lasted, but all parties agree that it was at least forty-eight hours. By then the twin pressures of my hunger and my mother’s guilt produced a deal: I would part my lips andpermit the spoon to enter the hollow of my mouth, but she would withdraw it without my having to swallow its contents. With this deferential gesture, I won release from exile and regained my seat at the dinner table. Canned spinach was never served again. My mother had put me to the test, but in the end she allowed me to save face. Not lost on me was that my gesture of acquiescence enabled her to save hers.
The spinach standoff was not about spinach, or about wasting food. It was about who was boss. It was a struggle over the balance of power in the parent-child relationship. On my side, the issue was personal autonomy, and my weapons were intransigence and guilt tripping. For my mother, the issue was parental authority, and her weapons were to deprive me of food and recognition, and threaten my sense of belonging. The way the impasse was resolved—by allowingboth parties to save face—held a lesson that would serve me in many other contexts.
The lick-your-platter-clean school of culinary discipline was widespread during the Great Depression. Usually it took the form of no dessert until your plate is empty. The explanation “because I say so” was regarded as unimpeachable. Military-style obedience—to a parent, teacher, doctor, or employer—was the norm. Rank ruled, right or wrong, no questions permitted. The bumper sticker “Question Authority” would not appear for decades.
In those days, no public agency would have intervened in a power struggle between parent and child—even one threatening the health of the child, which the spinach standoff did not do. Domestic conflicts of all sorts fell under theumbrella of “nobody’s business.”
But imagine a deadlock that goes on for a week or more. There comes a point when a parent’s authority must be overridden. The difference between proper and improper uses of rank is the difference between the dignity of belonging and the indignity of banishment. Carried to extremes, that can mean the difference between life and death.
My brothers and I were spanked. Physical domination has always been used to establish rank, and bullying has long figured in child rearing. I uncritically adopted this form of discipline with my first child, became ambivalent withthe second, and dropped it entirely with the third and fourth. I’m chagrined that, as a young parent, I mindlessly accepted such brutal social norms.

Our Town

Chatham sat on the border between rural and suburban New Jersey, about twenty miles west of New York City and a few miles from Bell Telephone Laboratories, where my father worked. Many of my classmates’ fathers commuted to white collar jobs in New York City. Most of our mothers saw themselves as housewives and homemakers, not as wage-earners.
My classmates were a mix of religions—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—but religion didn’t matter to us. Race wasn’t much of an issue either, because all of us were white. I learned later that realtors conspired to keep non-whitesout of Chatham.
Up until second grade we all seemed pretty much alike to each other—just a bunch of kids, blind to things like religion, race, class, and our varying aptitudes. None of us had yet separated from the pack.
But about this time a powerful distinction began to creep into our judgments of one another—the distinction between “smart” kids and “dumb” kids. I couldn’t tell whether Arlene was smart or dumb because she hardly ever spoke, andthen only in a whisper. But I could tell that Miss Belcher thought she, as well as some of my friends, were dumb. I was unsure about dumb and smart, because although this difference seemed real enough in class, I saw no evidence for it on the playground or after school. I kept my doubts to myself because everyone knew who the dumb kids were.

Band of Brothers and Sisters

My classmates and I formed a tight little band, moving each year from one room to the next in the nine-room school exactly as our predecessors had done for decades. By the time we reached the upper grades we knew each other like brothers and sisters.
The teachers taught the same class every year so you knew in advance that in first grade you’d have Mrs. Vail; in second grade, Miss Belcher; in third grade, Mrs. Bahoosian; in fourth grade, Miss Stetler (whose transformation intoMrs. Walker during the year was an eye-opener); and so on.
As we advanced from kindergarten to eighth grade (Mr. Van Cise), I watched as more of my classmates suffered shame and failure, and gradually reconciled themselves to their place in the academic hierarchy. As one of the survivors,I sometimes tried to help classmates with math and science. I noticed then that even when they understood something perfectly well in our private sessions this did not always translate into performance on a test.
By third grade, our relative positions had jelled. I sensed an arbitrariness in the ranking and remember encouraging several of my friends to resist their relegation. I could not then make out the obstacles that stood in their way, and tended to dismiss their explanations for their difficulties as excuses. But gradually I sensed that some invisible, implacable force was grinding them down.
By fourth grade, there was no denying that we’d been sorted into two piles—dumb kids and smart kids—the first group larger than the second. Since there were no black kids, correlations between color and aptitude never gained a foothold. There were, however, quite visible class differences, and I noticed that none of the kids from high-status families ended up in the dumb group. Their failures were laughed off and then excused as part of growing up. Their ultimate success was assured. Some of the poor kids had shown promise early on, but by the time we were in high school it was clear that most of us would follow in our parents’ footsteps.
My classmates’ successes and failures intrigued me. What was it like for Arlene in the hall? What kept Sandra from seeing that 3 x 4 = 4 x 3? How could Gordon draw cars that looked like magazine illustrations? How did Linda play the piano without a score? Why did Tom always read while he ate? What did it mean that a condom dropped out the cuff of Arthur’s pants? And how was it that Jerry, the class dunce, was the only one of us to know that another name for the Fourth of July was Independence Day?
No question held more interest for me than the distinction between “smart” and “dumb” kids. From early on, teachers made it clear to us that one group faced bright future, the other, a dim one.

I Dream of Jeannie

I rode my fat-tired bicycle the half-mile to Jeannie’s house, but walked it beside her all the way back to mine. We had invited her for supper, and my mother was waiting for us at the front door. Right off, she embarrassed me with“I’ve never seen you walk your bike for anyone before.”
I’d been anxious that Jeannie wouldn’t go through with it, and, when she did, I was nervous about the food. But if she didn’t like hamburgers, corn on the cob, tomatoes from our Victory Garden, and blueberry pie à la mode, I wouldgive up girls forever.
Jeannie Angle was my first date. We were five years old, it was the summer of 1942, and we’d just finished kindergarten. Jeannie had acquired sheets of stamps from Germany, some in denominations of billions of marks from the 1920s, and others bearing Hitler’s image from the 1930s. None of us realized that hyper-inflation had made post-World War I Deutschemarks virtually worthless. Nor did we see any connection between the bloated values on the inflation-era stamps and Hitler’s rise to power. We just knew we hated Hitler.
Jeannie ate with gusto. When she finished she stood up, lifted her dress above her panties and, beaming with satisfaction, patted her bare stomach. I felt triumphant, accepted. I think it was at that moment that I decided the wayto a woman’s heart was to feed her. I had been spared, for the time being at least, what I imagined was the ultimate indignity—rejection in love.

War in a Sandbox

For me and my friends, World War II was a game we played in the sandbox. Pearl Harbor was re-enacted hundreds of times because it justified what followed—we fought back and gradually turned the tide. Sandbox wars ended in massivebombing raids on Berlin and Tokyo—the Axis invariably lost because “America controlled the skies.”
At school there were air-raid drills, but we regarded the principal’s life-and-death exhortations as crying wolf. No “wolves” showed up; no bombs ever fell. After all, didn’t we control the skies? On Sunday evenings the family gathered around the radio—which stood on the floor, glowing with an amber-colored light, like a live piece of furniture—to hear Walter Winchell’s news bulletin to “all the ships at sea.” I loved the hushed intensity in the room as welistened. Churchill’s blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech still gives me chills.
The most powerful memories from those years are not events. Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s death, and the dropping of the atomic bomb fade when set against the palpable patriotism generated by a common cause. Even kids felt useful. My jobs were to collect old tin cans for repurposing and to help my mother in the Victory Garden and I did both without complaint. The thought of dissenting from this war did not arise. In one voice, we vowed to force our enemies to surrender unconditionally. To us, far from the front, war seemed a game and a good one at that.
World War II ended with a bang when I was nine. Later, my father told me that the Atomic Bomb was like a miniature sun. His attempts to explain its workings interested me less than something new in his voice—awe, tinged with alarm. Throughout the war, he had always sounded confident that things were under control. Now his sober tone warned that nothing would ever be the same. Not long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, newspapers proclaimed the dawn of the atomic age.

The Travel Bug

Most kids visit their grandparents by car. Not me. Mine lived on the West Coast and to see them my mother, baby brother, and I had twice ridden the train for a week--from New Jersey to Seattle. The first time, I was almost five; the second time, almost nine. We had a roomette to ourselves, but could roam the train under the watchful eyes of “porters,” all of whom belonged to The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the vanguard union for African-American labor.
As a child I was unaware that blacks were excluded from many Northern towns by gentlemen’s agreements that barred them from owning or renting property. Sleeping car porters were the first African-Americans I ever spoke to. Of course, they were not then identified as “African-American,” but as “Negroes.”
By the time these men had served us a half-dozen breakfasts (of sliced oranges and blueberry pancakes), daily made up our little room, and hovered helpfully from sea to shining sea, they seemed to me like fond uncles. The contrastbetween the prevailing racist stereotype and my personal experience of these kindly protectors could hardly have been starker. A decade after my first transcontinental journey, when I encountered African-Americans at college, mystereotype-busting experience with the porters helped me bridge what might otherwise have felt like a chasm.
I caught the travel bug early and hard, never losing my lust for exposure to new lands, cultures, foods, and people.

Apprenticeship with a Fact-finder

There aren’t many ways a few young children can wreck a house, but we found one. Shelby Leathers, age six, was our leader. She, David Ford, and I—the youngest at five—all lived on Edgewood Road. New houses were going up in our neighborhood. Most were of wood, but this one would be brick. All day we watched as workmen poured the concrete basement and foundation. When they left, Shelby tossed a brick over the edge. Plop it went as it landed below in the wetconcrete. Plop, plop, plop. It was soon raining bricks. This was the most fun we’d ever had. We didn’t tire till the bricks ran out. Then we went our separate ways.
Somehow my mother found out. She was angrier than I’d ever seen her. The question she asked was, “Why did you do it?” Even a child knows a rhetorical question when he hears one. I knew she meant, “How could you have done that!” MyNuremberg defense—Shelby made me—cut no ice with her. She gave me the choice of being spanked by her now or by my father when he got home. I decided to wait and take my chances. She sent me to my room to wait for his return. It felt like death row.
My father got home very late. He and the fathers of my two accomplices had rushed to the scene of the crime, pulled the bricks out one by one as the cement set, and done their best to fill the cavities in the slab. A few more hours and it would have taken jackhammers to remove the bricks, jutting like discolored teeth, from hardened concrete. Postponing my punishment proved to be unwise. The hours of dread made that spanking live forever.
But something unexpected came of the experience. It was my father’s line of questioning. He did not ask, “Why did you do it?” What he wanted to know was “What happened?”
I remember this because it was so startling. My mother’s questions had filled me with guilt and fear. I had wrecked a house. That was wrong. Therefore, I would be exiled (to my room), shamed, and punished.
My father’s questions had the peculiar effect of lifting me out of myself. I almost felt like an onlooker as I described what had happened: we watched the men till they left; then Shelby threw a brick over the side; then David did, and then me. The bricks gurgled as they sunk into the wet cement. When there were no more bricks, we went home. Shelby told us not to tell.
My father completed the story. He told me what he and the other fathers had done to repair the damage, and explained that Shelby, David, and I would be punished to remind us not to do anything like that again.
Both lines of questioning led to the same place—a spanking. My mother’s “questions” issued from her moral convictions. My father’s questions elicited an exploration of events and consequences—what happened and what followed. The novelty of becoming a witness to my own crime may be why I remember it as if it happened yesterday. My parents’ perspectives couldn’t have been more different.
That was always my father’s question: What happened? Then, what happened next? And after that? The facts, please, all of them. This approach to truth-seeking can be thought of as the scientist’s, though actual scientific practiceis less formulaic and entails intuitive leaps. To my scientist-father it was second nature. It makes you see yourself from outside, as if you’re someone else. It can even lull you into testifying against yourself.
In contrast to my father, my mother hardly seemed to care about the facts. What mattered to her was doing what’s right (and not doing what’s wrong).
In later life, she regarded herself as a “Blue Domer,” a personal religion without theology, priests, or ritual, where the only authority is oneself, standing under the big blue sky. She claimed that, given half a chance, she would have wrung Hitler’s neck. She was married to the same man for over sixty years, but sympathized with her sons’ divorces. A housewife who never earned a salary, she volunteered for everything, from the Red Cross to surgeon’s assistant at the local hospital, and she won a seat on the school board. She was fierce about equality for women, but paradoxically opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. I think she felt that the ERA represented an insult to the women of her generation whose work, for the most part, had centered on the home.
The point is not the substance of her opinions, but rather the moral certainty with which she held them, and her eager willingness to defend them. Had she been born a generation later, she would have been a general or a statesmanin the mold of Margaret Thatcher. In her eighties, from her retirement community in Florida, she helped organize a senior citizens lobby in the state capital. The only thing she ever acknowledged changing her mind about was that the Pope would rule America if a Catholic were elected president.
Where does personal certainty like hers come from? How could it co-exist with my father’s focus on fact-finding?
I’d have been a different person if instead of teaching me that the truth is what happened, my parents had personified the view that the truth is what others cannot disprove, or, just as problematic, that the truth is whatever youcan get away with. In later years, I watched as leaders engaged in double-talk and their spokesmen maneuvered to preserve deniability. Notions of truth like those are the stock-in-trade of con-artists and spin-doctors. Perhaps nothing we absorb from our elders is more important than their operational definition of truth.

Truth as Synthesis

My family name—Fuller—is one of those English trade names. As Coopers made barrels and Sawyers sawed lumber, Fullers “fulled” cloth. Using internet genealogical tools, the family can be traced back to a William Fuller who lived inRedenhall, England in 1423. Yes, there were Fullers on the Mayflower, but it seems that branch of the family died on the journey to the New World, and that our family is descended from a Thomas Fuller who arrived in 1634.
My father, Calvin Fuller, got a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1929. He worked at Bell Laboratory from 1930 until his mandatory retirement at 65 in 1967. During World War II, he served as Synthetic Rubber “czar,” travelling by train to inspect production facilities. In 1954, he and two other Bell scientists co-invented the photovoltaic (solar) cell. I remember him demonstrating an early model on our dining room table.
His father, my grandfather, Julius Quincy Fuller, had a drinking problem, which I only learned of when he came to live with us in his sixties. I liked him because he would take me on long walks and tell me about numbers. As an accountant, he was intimate with them, and he liked to play arithmetical games with me. But, in his youth, my father had had to endure his father’s drunken tirades and defend his mother from physical abuse.
Now that it’s understood that domestic violence tends to pass from one generation to the next, what truly impresses me about my father was that he consciously broke the cycle. He did not pass on to his own family the violence he had experienced as a boy. One of his firmest teachings was that, no matter the provocation, a man never strikes a woman. He’d been a victim of violence within his family, but he broke the pattern of passing indignities down the line and instead modeled non-violence for his children.
However, my parents, who both lived into their nineties, were still capable of a vehement argument—with each other, with me and my brothers, and with their peers—right up to the end. The attempt to reconcile their moral and empirical perspectives shaped my life.
Eventually, I came to understand truth as the synthesis sought by the model builder. Building models is what scientists do. They seek explanations that account for all the facts. For scientists the Holy Grail is a theory that reconciles the viewpoints and the findings of all parties.
Synthesis differs from compromise. Compromise is what everyone is willing to settle for, or more simply, what’s possible, and indeed compromise is the proper goal of partisan politics.
In contrast, a synthesis has to preserve and combine the essential positions of the parties in a single, consistent framework. The model builder’s goal is to explain all the data. To this day, I do not feel I’ve understood something until I can explain it to others.

Truth as Proof

In the third grade we studied the solar system. Our textbook had a diagram of the planets circling the sun. A table gave the distance of each planet from the sun in miles and its period of revolution in days: 365 for the earth, 225 for Venus, just 88 for Mercury, etc. And, printed alongside each planet’s orbit, was its average speed in miles per hour.
It was just then that we were learning about circles in arithmetic. The lesson for the week was that the circumference of a circle C = 2πR, where R is the circle’s radius and π = 3.14 [ad infinitum]. I decided to apply this formula to verify the speed shown in the text for the orbiting earth. The computation was simple enough—just form the product 2πR and divide by the planet’s period in hours.
But something was wrong. My result did not agree with the speed in the book. It was not even close. So I tried the same calculation for Venus and Mercury. No agreement. I did all nine planets. Not one agreed. I did them over and over again. Finally, I asked my father for help. He checked over my figures, looked at the textbook, and announced the unthinkable: the book was wrong. I had thought books couldn’t be wrong. We all had.
The next day I showed the error to Mrs. Bahoosian. It made her nervous. She drew me aside and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. I think she worried that if word got out it might cast doubt on the entire educational enterprise. But she told me that she would write the publishing company.
Months later she told me that the publisher was going to change the numbers in the next edition. She never told the class. I remember checking a year later and, sure enough, the orbits showed my numbers. What a lucky accident thebook’s figures were wrong! Catching that mistake broke the spell of the printed word, and taught me that the truth is not necessarily what some authority says it is, but rather what can be proven.
When finally found, the truth is common ground on which everyone can stand.

CHAPTER 2: LONGING TO BELONG
(1945–1950)

Volcanic Fame

In fifth grade, I got a taste of fame. Miss Burke was teaching us about volcanoes, and I decided to build one.
I’d been making gunpowder from chemicals my father brought home from Bell Labs. He’d shown me how to mix saltpeter (potassium nitrate), powdered charcoal, and sulfur into an ignitable powder that burned with a flash and released aplume of smoke. Adding powdered magnesium to the mix made the explosion sparkle.
A large flowerpot, turned upside down, gave the volcano a conical shape. Inverted, the hole in the bottom of the pot became the volcano’s mouth. Fortified with plaster and rolled in ashes, it looked just like a miniature mountain.Inside went a small stash of gunpowder.
The problem was how to ignite the powder. Reaching under the rim of the volcano with a match ruined the effect. My father suggested that I could set it off remotely by using the transformer that ran my electric train to heat a filament of toaster wire immersed in the charge. The resulting eruption sent sparks and smoke to the ceiling, and filled the classroom with a sulfurous smell.
My volcano was a sensation. I was invited to demonstrate it in every classroom in the school, from my old kindergarten room to the sanctified reaches of the upper grades, where young men and women applauded and demanded encores. The younger kids thought it was magic, the older ones thought it was cool. I discovered that people love explosions.
The recognition my volcano brought me was an eye-opener. Ever since the atomic bomb had brought an end to World War II, physics had seemed glamorous. My father’s colleagues at Bell Labs were treated like gods. Einstein was the most famous person on the planet and, for about a week, my classmates regarded me as a wizard. I felt immune to banishment by the Miss Belchers of the world. At last, my place was secure. Some of my classmates were not so fortunate.

Gerald

Gerald stands out be¬cause from our first sums in kindergarten to high school algebra the two of us competed in mathematics. For more than a decade we were like tennis rivals who improve each other’s game.
Gerald’s parents owned a chicken farm. They had left Germany before the war. Gerald hated Hitler like the rest of us, but insisted that not all Germans were bad. I would ride five miles on my bicycle to visit him on his chicken farm and sometimes his mother invited me to stay for supper. Although his parents spoke English with a German accent, like Nazis in the movies, they seemed okay to me. Their shame over their native country provided a glimpse of thepower of cultural identity.
Although we were peers in math, Gerald’s and my prospects were hardly equal. Growing up, it had always been assumed that I would go to college and graduate school, and so I did. Gerald was expected to sell the eggs produced on thefarm, and ended up driving a truck that supplied supermarkets.
At a high school reunion in our sixties, I asked Gerald whether he regretted not developing his talent for math. There were several of us gathered around and everyone present remembered our old rivalry. With an unmistakable wistfulness, Gerald explained that his parents had assumed he’d take over the farm. None of his teachers had encouraged him to pursue his talent.

Learning from Failure

Burt was two years older than the rest of us and at age eleven that made a big difference. He was a man to us boys and he would demonstrate his supremacy by beating us up one at a time. With fearful regularity he’d single out a fresh victim and start a fight, which he invariably ended by administering a “pink-belly”—rapid, repetitive slapping of our bellies, like bongo drums, until they turned pink.
Fed up with this, I pulled ten of his serial victims aside and persuaded them to jump him, all together, the next time he picked on any one of us. In a film, I’d seen the classic demonstration of the collective strength of breakable sticks when enough of them are bundled together, and I fancied that the message of strength through unity would be self-evident.
Handing a slender stick to each of my friends, I told them to think of themselves as the sticks. I asked one of the boys for his stick and broke it over my knee to show them what Burt was doing to us by taking us on one at a time.Then, collecting a stick from each boy and tying them into a bundle, I passed it around the circle. Try breaking it now, I said in the confident voice I recalled from the film. The bundle had the girth of a two-by-four and the point was made, though several of the boys gave it a try. I took their grim expressions and solemn nods to mean that we’d confront Burt as one.
The next day Burt picked a fight with Tom. I shouted the agreed-upon signal and jumped on Burt’s back. As he tried to shake me off, I pictured the other boys piling on and bringing him down. A moment later Tom and I were on the ground, our faces in the dirt. Having two enemies inspired Burt to deal with us both more harshly than he would have dealt with either of us alone.
Our friends had hung back for a few fateful seconds, waiting to see how things would go. Then, humbled and ashamed, they scurried off as Burt called after them, “You’re next, chickens!”
The moral, which I grasped years later, was that an abstract strategy, albeit sound, must be practiced until it can be executed perfectly, even under stress. When strength is sought in numbers, organization and timing are everything. As the Labor Movement showed, exploited individuals can combine forces to level the playing field. Nothing new in this, of course. But like many before me, I only learned the operational complexities of E pluribus unum from failure.

The Bridge of Music

I didn’t sing with the other kids. From kindergarten on, I just stood by, embarrassed, as the teacher played the piano and my classmates raised their voices in song. I think the idea of joining in threatened what must have been aprecarious sense of individuality. While I sought belonging, I also feared too much of it. Or, it may have been that when I pictured myself in song, I felt ridiculous. (I still do.) For whatever reason, I did not sing then and only pretend to now.
The seventh grade teacher was the first to notice this and one day he offered to help me overcome what he interpreted as shyness. It was agreed that instead of joining the other kids on the playground after lunch, I would meet himin our classroom. I was secretly excited by this opportunity. I thought that if I could join my friends in song, I might cease to feel like a witness to my own life and lose myself in the group. But, as Mr. Finelli led me to thepiano, he got a call from the principal’s office and had to step out. As he left, he said we’d have our session within a few days, but, alas, my private tutorial never again reached the top of his agenda.
It was around this time that I persuaded my mother to buy an old piano. If I couldn’t sing, maybe I could make a place for myself by playing the piano, while others gathered round and did the singing. Two of my classmates, Linda Kennedy and Lucia Taylor, already played and they were both very popular. The piano seemed to offer a way out of solitary, one that didn’t require total merging. To me, it provided a solution to the quandary of achieving togetherness while maintaining separation.
Our second-hand upright player piano cost fifty dollars, and fit into a corner of the living room next to the little wall clock that governed the duration of my practices. Mrs. Smith, who played the organ in a local church, was engaged to give me weekly lessons at two dollars each. She started me out on scales and soon moved to simple hymns. When I brought sheet music of popular hits she incorporated them into the lessons. No matter how egregious my rendition of a new piece, her suggestions invariably began with the words, “Bobby, you have a slight tendency to … .” It became a family joke. I’d say to my brother, “Steve, you have a slight tendency to eat like a pig.” Or our mother would say, “Boys, your rooms are showing a slight tendency toward chaos.”
Within a few years I could play Christmas carols and popular tunes from the Hit Parade. At school dances, Linda or Lucia and I would perform duets. Our classmates greeted the announcement that we were about to perform with politeapplause, but once we’d gotten past the first few bars, the piano was drowned out by their chatter. This left me with a lifelong sympathy for musicians who perform in bars and restaurants.
The piano never delivered on its promise to subdue my witness, but it did open up a channel of communication with Linda Kennedy. I used it like an enigma machine to encrypt my first love letter.
In seventh grade I handed Linda a coded message:
ceaacbagfedce,dfbbcg.ceaacbagfedce,dfbbcc.cbagfgabbb;cbagfgaddd.
Soon, I got a line of code back:
gggggggagec,dddddddedb.ccccdeffffgabcbaged.
Racing to the nearest piano, I plunked away at the keyboard until I realized that she had responded to the notes of If I Loved You from Carousel with A Wonderful Guy from South Pacific.

CHAPTER 3: BECOMING
(1950–1952)

Les Misérables

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1950, as our little band moved on to high school, our attention focused on the new bodies appearing in place of those we’d known since kindergarten. In my fourteenth year, I grew almost a foot. About this time I became aware ofa serious undercurrent of competitiveness. This was a natural outgrowth of childhood games, but now we ourselves were the winners and losers, not the stand-in toy soldiers we’d deployed in our sandboxes.
Though physical fights were rare, relations between us were becoming a kind of covert war. Lives were not at stake, but reputations were. Competition assumed many forms—sports, grades, clothes, popularity, and dates. In these contests, we were forging provisional identities. Lucia was a cheerleader, destined for prom queen; Tom, the class clown, destined for Harvard; and David, a three-letter varsity athlete harboring a mental illness that, in time, wouldcause him to take his own life.
Of course, competition had actually been there from the beginning. In third grade we’d all had to come up to bat as the teacher presented a problem in arithmetic: “Sandra, step up to the plate. Are you ready? Here’s the pitch: 3 times 4.” If Sandra replied with 12 she went to first base, which was a flowerpot by the windows. If she got it wrong, it was strike one. It was fun for the good “hitters,” but for those who regularly struck out it was even more humiliating than doing so on the playground.
High school sports were like medieval jousting with ladies cheering on their knights and wearing their colors. If a boy didn’t compete in sports, his best strategy for getting a girlfriend was to acquire a car. But there was nothing like playing on a varsity team when it came to social success. As boys prized looks in girls, girls valued status in boys, and this heightened the competition among us. It was an unwritten rule that only suitors of high statusshould ask the prettiest girls out.
The importance of status for males and beauty for females made many young lives miserable. Everyone took it for granted that rank and looks determined your options.
A less reliable route to recognition was grades. High grades did not equate with broad popularity, but in certain circles academic success was valued, and competition for grades was fierce. I’d study many extra hours in the hope of outscoring my classmates by even a point or two. Though my father encouraged academic excellence, he was skeptical of spending so much effort on such marginal returns. He argued that there were more important things to learn than the conjugation of a few more obscure Latin verbs. I knew he was right. I was on the cusp of realizing that without this competitive element—and the status it earned me in the eyes of a particular girl whom I hoped to impress—much of my motivation would evaporate. What kept me at it was that the Latin teacher, Mr. Lynch, returned our exams in the order of our scores: highest grade first, second highest second, and so on, down to Forrest Collier who invariably received his exam last. Winning was rewarded with public honor, losing with disgrace. My incentive was to outscore and impress Judy, who was always among the top three.
My principal adversary in this, and just about everything else, was Jim Edgar. In basketball Jim—who was taller, stronger, and a better rebounder—beat me out for starting center. I could accept losing the position to him, but hated its implications in the realm of romance. He and Judy were soon going steady. In my melancholy, I made friends with the moon.
Freshman year, we were required to read a novel of our choosing. In one of those seeming accidents that change lives, Mr. Champlin, the English teacher who doubled as baseball coach, urged me to read a book by a French writer named Victor Hugo. It was Les Misérables. The teacher was so set on this that he personally withdrew the book from the school library and placed it in my hands. Its title didn’t bode well, and its heft was daunting.
Shoveling snow had shown me that the largest tasks can be accomplished if broken up into small ones. I set myself the goal of plowing through Les Misérables, one chapter a day.
When the bishop covered for Jean Valjean by telling the police that the silver Valjean had stolen from the rectory was a gift, I was hooked. No book has ever had a more powerful impact on me.
Hugo’s title applied equally to his characters and to my classmates. Although I was passing as a somebody, I felt like a nobody, and I identified with the misérables in my class. I wanted to understand the private world of Forrest, hopeless at Latin but the architect of a basement-wide railway for his model trains; of Douglas, who was already hand-crafting his first of many pipe organs; of short, stocky Ronald—in love with Carol, the most beautiful girl inthe school—reading aloud the love letters he wrote her; of Carol herself, who reportedly gave peep shows for boys perched in trees outside her bedroom; of Chuck with whom I discovered the beauty and power of calculus as revealedin the paperback A Mathematician’s Delight; of Jim, in whom science and Christian fundamentalism cohabited harmoniously; of Donald, whom I tutored in English vocabulary ; of Noel Hinners, later a top administrator at NASA, who gave me a bird’s-eye view of New Jersey from his Piper Cub; of Fred, who shot dead his girlfriend’s father for forbidding him to date his daughter; of Pamela, initiating, in rapid succession, four of my classmates into the mysteriesof sex on the pool table in the basement of the Presbyterian Church. At graduation she famously inscribed their yearbooks, “As you go through life, try to take some of the weight on your elbows.”
Jimmy would have been in our class but he suffered from Down Syndrome and spent his days wandering forlornly around town, the target of merciless ridicule. Everyone knew him as “Jimmy the Nut.” His round, ruddy face was usually tear-stained. He fascinated me, but when I tried to talk to him, he turned and ran, only to stop and resume his plaintive vigil from a distance.
I’ve known Tom Purvis since kindergarten. In the 1940s, we began what would become a series of Christmas Eve walks that continues to this day. In high school, Tom was an Ichabod Crane-like figure, very tall and ridiculously thin,who shielded himself from ribbing by playing the clown.
While Tom Purvis found a way to survive ridicule, and went on to a career in government, his chubby neighbor Tommy suffered irreversible damage. Tommy never left his childhood home. The last time anyone saw him, shortly before hedied at fifty, he was miserable, obese, and house-bound. As the world is now coming to realize, bullying can be fatal.
The physical world interested me, but not nearly as much as my classmates and their problems. Though my questions evolved as I matured, the origins of my various adult identities can all be found in sophomoric questions that tookroot in school.

The Power of Lists

My father taught me how to make money, how to save it, and how to invest. He even gave me my first paying job: mowing our lawn, once a week during the growing season, for two dollars a pop. Within a month, I was pushing our old hand mower over the lawns of a half-dozen neighbors. During my second summer, I put all my savings into the purchase of a Toro power mower and took on another half-dozen lawns. With the Toro I had to take special care to avoid stones and fresh dog poop, which the mower expelled, respectively, as deadly projectiles and noxious mists.
By my fourth and final year in the business, I had two power mowers, and guided them simultaneously, one with each hand, over the twenty lawns in my grassy empire. Most noteworthy of my clients was Walter Brattain, my father’s colleague at Bell Labs, who won the Nobel Prize for having co-invented the transistor. Getting to know “Mr. Brattain” as a teenager was one reason that, when later in life I met other Nobel Laureates, I didn’t regard the prize as obligating me to treat them as deities. Though Brattain was not immune to vainglory, he knew that, in spite of his success, he was an ordinary person, and he let me in on the secret.
My father’s mentoring included not just the mechanics of mowing lawns, but, significantly, the maintenance of the tools of the trade and, still more important, the records of work done.
I kept lists of all my customers, the dates when I mowed their lawns, whether or not my agreement included trimming (something I tried to avoid because it took a disproportionate amount of time and cut into hourly earnings), and,finally, a record of payments received. I kept track of finances to the penny and totaled up my net worth at least once a week. Though my total wealth rarely exceeded a few hundred dollars, it seemed like a fortune.
One day while mowing the Rothenburger’s lawn, I was pondering the things I wanted to see happen in my life—get an A in English, ask Judy for a date, win the piano competition for high school orchestra, and be a starter on the junior varsity basketball team. When the items reached six in number, I felt I was losing track and that if I didn’t put my full attention on each goal, some would never be realized. In that moment, it occurred to me to put the tasksswirling in my head onto a single list and work the list, checking daily on each one, until they were all accomplished.
I can’t explain why such a simple idea felt so revelatory. I went home and made the first of what would be a lifetime of To Do Lists. By the time I left high school the following year I’d checked off all my original entries and had a new list. Later, at my various jobs, I kept lists of the balls I had in the air. As a writer, working lists of agents, editors, publishers, and blurbers makes rejections easier to handle. When one turns you down, you simply cross the name off your list and add another.

A Speck in the Cosmos

At thirteen, I put all my lawn-mowing profits into a roundtrip train ticket to visit Billy Dickinson—my former classmate and teammate—who, upon graduating from eighth grade, had moved with his parents to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Traveling with my mother across America in a private compartment was no preparation for sitting up for three nights in coach on my own.
A soldier in uniform, who had the seat beside me, befriended me with the offer of a Coke, and then, when the lights dimmed for the night, attempted to parlay his offering into permission to molest me. As I felt his hand creeping across my leg, I excused myself, and locked myself in a men’s room for the night, returning only as the train arrived at its destination where I figured I could safely disembark in the company of the other passengers. The memory that endures is less of my initial shock than the stink of the men’s room and the anguished look on the young soldier’s face as he whispered an apology and begged me not to tell. I didn’t tell, but I didn’t forget either.
Billy and I spent a month swimming, riding horses, and shooting his BB gun at anything that moved on the desert floor. On the train, I’d begun making an outline of the history of the ancient world based on a library book I’d borrowed for the summer. When Billy badgered me to come out and play, I’d insist on first completing a summary of the day’s readings of the life of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Persians, or (my favorite) the Phoenicians.
Billy’s parents were evangelical Christians and they never gave up hope of recruiting me into their church. While the Golden Rule and Sermon on the Mount intrigued me, Mildred and Clarence were upset that I gave equal time to studying the heathens in my book of ancient history. From my first exposure, the history of the ancients and the archeology of our hominid ancestors has done for me what religious faith does for people like the Dickinsons: provided access to feelings of humility and wonder. Paradoxically, an occasional glimpse of oneself as a speck in the cosmos helps to surmount the inhibitions that prevent us from taking a stand. After all, what’s there to lose?




Teen Epiphany—Beyond Belief

Know you what it is to be a child? … it is to believe in belief….
– Francis Thompson, British poet

We don’t forget our first epiphany any more than we forget our first kiss. The difference is we know what a kiss is, but don’t know what to make of a stroke of illumination. The experience lingers in memory as something special, but since we can’t place it, we keep it to ourselves.
Only years later did I realize that an Ah-ha experience I’d had in my teens was the philosophical counterpart of that first kiss. One day it struck me that there were no final truths, no ultimate explanations. I shared my experience of unbelief with no one at the time, knowing that I couldn’t explain myself and fearing others’ mockery.
In science courses I’d noticed that the chain of assumptions upon which theories rested always ended in other assumptions. I accepted grounding scientific theories in hypotheses—it didn’t seem to undercut their usefulness. But I still wanted to believe there were absolute, unimpeachable moral truths. My mother certainly acted as if there were.
But not long after my realization about scientific theories, I had the premonition that this same principle applied to beliefs of every sort—scientific, political, moral, or personal. How, exactly, could beliefs be demonstrated with absolute certainty, I wondered. It seemed to me that any belief could be challenged and might need qualification in certain circumstances.
It was like the feeling, when consulting a dictionary, that there are no final definitions, only cross-references. I remember standing alone in my bedroom when this hit me. It was sobering, yet at the same time, strangely liberating. Until then I’d believed that final explanations and ultimate truths existed and it behooved us to know what they were and to conform.
With this revelation, my hopes for unambiguous solutions to life’s problems dimmed. From that moment on, I would be on my own.
I decided that to function in society I would have to pretend to go along with the prevailing consensus that certain beliefs were self-evident—at least until I could come up with something better. For decades afterwards, without understanding why, I was drawn to people and ideas that expanded my foretaste of a world built not on absolute, infallible beliefs, but on falsifiable, provisional assumptions.

Experiment with Identity

About the middle of my sophomore year in high school, my mother saw a story in the paper about an experimental early-admissions program to college. To find out if the last year or two of high school were superfluous, the Ford Foundation was offering college scholarships to qualified sophomores and juniors willing to serve as guinea pigs. You had to take an SAT-like aptitude test and submit your high school record.
I told my mother I wasn’t interested. I’d lived all my fifteen years in the same little town, loved my friends, and was satisfied with my life. My mother said, “Just take the test. It’ll be good practice for later. If you get in,you can always turn them down.”
Months after taking the test, during which I’d not thought once about college, a fat envelope arrived from Oberlin offering admission. I put the packet on the mantel and circled it warily for about a month, struggling with the decision of what to do. I could have said no. Neither parent pressured me to accept Oberlin’s offer. Leaving high school would mean giving up a safe, familiar game for an uncertain one. It would not mean giving up sports glory, because there was no glory for second-stringers like me anyway. But it would mean giving up the position of pianist in the high school orchestra and the ceremonial role of president of the junior class, to which I had been elected by my classmates.

SpongeBob

There’s not much the winner of an election can say about why he won that doesn’t come across as a brag. But, with your indulgence, and because this event illuminates others of which I will tell, I’m going to pause long enough in the narrative to suggest an explanation.
My opponent was none other than Jim Edgar, basketball star, “A” student, Judy’s boyfriend, your quintessential BMOC (Big Man On Campus).
I’d never have chosen to run against him, but somehow I was nominated. There was no campaigning, and, as everyone admired Jim, I resigned myself to losing in a landslide. I felt obliged to vote for him myself as he’d beaten me inthe two things I cared most about—basketball and love. When the votes were counted, Jim had about twenty and I had over one hundred.
Although I was initially astonished by the outcome, it did not take long to understand what had happened. While everyone greeted Jim in the halls between classes, and felt thrilled if he reciprocated, I had a different kind of relationship with my classmates. I knew many of them intimately. I’d been in their homes, met their families, helped some with math, and spent hours inquiring into their lives. I knew their hobbies, their sorrows, and their secret loves.
Lest you get the impression that I was only interested in the lives of nobodies, I should add that I knew Jim and most of the other somebodies in this same way.
So why the win? Because there are a lot more nobodies than somebodies and Jim mostly hung out with the somebodies. What I had stumbled upon in winning the election was the power of recognition. Getting to know how my classmates ticked filled a hole in my soul. That listening to them might lead to a leadership role had never crossed my mind.
Delving into others’ lives taught me that although most of my classmates were not regarded as somebodies, they were hardly the nobodies they were taken for. On the contrary, their private lives were as rich as those of the class celebrities. You could say that this was the other side of the discovery that my Nobel-prize winning neighbor, Walter Brattain, was not just a somebody, he was also an approachable, fascinating person quite apart from his celebrity.
Later in life, my interest in others led one critic to dub me an “ontological vampire.” A bit harsh perhaps, if blood-sucker is what comes to mind, but I could not deny that all my life I have found nourishment in absorbing the lives of others. Call me “SpongeBob.”

Taking the Leap

Leap and a net will appear.
– John Burroughs

I may have decided to accept Oberlin’s offer because boredom was a greater threat to me than failure. Or, it may have been that I was beginning to realize that I would not find answers to my questions where I was, and that I mightelsewhere. Slowly, but ineluctably, he idea of being a guinea pig at Oberlin had begin to grow on me. A rising inner voice said, you can’t say no to this.
My decision to go also fit a pattern of diving in over my head and surviving. When I was about three, my parents took me out in a rowboat on Chesapeake Bay and the waves made me seasick. My mother told me either to stop whining orget out. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that boat, so I climbed over the side. She grabbed my hand and trailed me along in the water, but wouldn’t help me back into the boat until I promised to behave. When I finally agreed to her terms and she hauled me in, the seasickness was gone.
So it happened that in the Fall of 1952, with my bicycle tied to the roof of our Chevy, my parents drove me to Ohio. As my father left, he presented me a little notebook he had titled Pointers. Inside, in his own hand, were sections on manners, morals, learning, love—everything a boy should know. My mother gave me a tin of homemade cookies. I was on my own with only my bicycle for companion—and within a few weeks, it had been stolen.

CHAPTER 4: BELONGING
(1952–1955)

Surfacing

By the end of my first month at Oberlin, I realized that I’d leapt into an abyss. For the next two months I was in free fall. The identity I’d brought with me from high school didn’t work in college. My roommate argued that my scientific perspective was mechanistic, reductive, and anti-humanistic. A dormitory mate, who saw himself as a literary lion, treated me with condescension verging on disdain. I tried modeling myself after a cool older student whom Iadmired, but the identity transplant didn’t take.
The French professor said I spoke the language as though my mouth were full of potatoes. Even I could sense that my English composition was adolescent. The biology professor lectured for an hour on the enzymes in the frog and on the next exam, expected us to name them all. The only reassurance I got that semester was that two days of private tutorial by Professor Fuzzy Vance were enough to close the math gap left by skipping junior and senior year.
The expectations of my college professors rudely ended the delusions of competence I’d acquired in high school. By Thanksgiving I had begun to suspect that I would drown. As Christmas break approached, I decided to do everything conceivable to prepare for a biology test and see if that made a difference. If memorization was what was required, then I’d memorize everything that might possibly be asked. In high school I’d usually been able to tell how I’d done on a test the minute it was over, but this time I wasn’t so sure.
I awaited the verdict with resignation. I had the unfamiliar feeling that my fate was out of my hands. But no matter how things turned out it would be okay, because if doing everything I could think of wasn’t enough, then this game was not for me.
In going to Oberlin I’d unwittingly jettisoned an identity in which my dignity was secure. Now I wondered if I would ever feel that I belonged anywhere. The answer came to me at home over Christmas break in the self-addressed envelope I’d left with the biology professor. I’d given him what he wanted, and he’d given me an “A.” But the experience of taking exams that required rote memorization had sown seeds of discontent that would grow until they changed the direction of my life.

The 1950s—my college years—were those of the Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts. Oberlin students crowded around the one tiny television in the snack bar. My class showed its collective contempt for McCarthy by electing Boris Oblesov, a Russian immigrant, class president.
One of my closest friends was a math student named Judd Fermi. A rumor circulated in the dorm that Judd’s father had built the atom bomb. Indeed, Enrico Fermi had built the first nuclear reactor, he was a key player in the wartimeManhattan Project to build the Bomb, and he remains one of the most important figures in twentieth century physics. Judd claimed that as a child he’d believed his father’s story that the goal of the secret work in Los Alamos wasto design windshield wipers for submarines.
Judd had his father’s talent for mathematics and physics. His way of sizing up math problems was a revelation to me: abstract, from outside the problem’s particulars; mine was computational, formulaic, pedestrian. Gradually, by hanging out with him, I absorbed some of his mathematical sophistication. My relationship with Judd was one of many apprenticeships through which I would acquire my real education.
Another classmate was an African from a place few of us had heard of—the Portuguese colony of Mozambique in Southeast Africa. Drinking coffee in the snack bar with Judd and me, Eduardo Mondlane described his plans to drive the Portuguese rulers out of his country and build an independent nation. That sounded dangerous to me and I recall warning Eduardo (as if he didn’t know!) that he might get himself killed.
After graduating from Oberlin and marrying a classmate, Mondlane founded FRELIMO, the leading party in his country’s revolution. He was assassinated during the struggle, but today is regarded as the George Washington of Mozambique. Despite Mozambique’s colonial and racist history, Eduardo had nothing against white people. Indeed, his wife was white. His colorblind vision of justice anticipated Nelson Mandela’s. His nation-building vision showed me that it’s okay to think big.
Oberlin College was proud of its admissions policy. Since its founding in 1833, the College had taken all qualified applicants regardless of sex, race, class, religion, or national origin. Oberlin’s was the classic liberal political philosophy, and one consequence was that until the 1960s, nearly half of all blacks who graduated from predominately white American colleges came from that one school.
It was at Oberlin that I first got to know an African-American. Bill Cline could beat anyone in the state in the quarter-mile sprint. I never missed his races. It didn’t seem to affect him that the stands were empty at track meets. Cline was not beguiled by glamour. His speed dazzled, but what intrigued me most was that he did not need an audience; he ran for himself. Twenty years later, I would emulate him and discover the sheer exhilaration of running with speed and power. When your fellow humans are withholding recognition, there can be reassurance and solace in training your body to do something well.

Life in a Test Tube?

A question Judd and I shared was whether life could be produced in a test tube. A few of us would-be scientists debated this with the religious humanists, a group led by my roommate David Thomas. Is life a potential property of matter or does it require something more? Why shouldn’t the rules of physics and chemistry apply to the molecular constituents of living things?
Judd and I argued that all you had to do was get the right combination of chemicals together in the right environment and presto, Life would begin, evolution would take over, and a few billion years later people would be walking around, even college students—like us!
Dave and his allies held that there could be no Life without a divine spark. We tried to depict them as rearguing the Scopes monkey trial, and fancied ourselves Clarence Darrow. They dismissed us, with condescension that rivaled our own, as callous mechanists, profaning the sacred. I wonder how it would have affected our discussions if we’d been aware that, while we were arguing, Francis Crick and James Watson had deciphered the genetic code.
Judd subsequently made a career in Cambridge, England studying the molecular structure of life-supporting compounds like hemoglobin. My stake in the debate grew out of a personal quandary which could be traced to my foundation-wrecking escapade. In my view, producing life in a test tube was a challenge that science would eventually have to meet if it were to claim to have a final, convincing theory of everything, an understanding so comprehensive and persuasive that it could settle all arguments (even those between my parents and me). Something inclusive that would close the apparent gap between the evidence-based causal laws of science and the faith-based laws of morality, that is, the epistemological gap between my father and my mother. It seemed to me that for such a program to have a chance, there could be no unbridgeable difference between animate and inanimate matter. In other words, it should be possible to make life in the laboratory. I spent my sophomore and junior years concentrating on math and physics courses, hoping someday to advance this agenda.
It never occurred to me then that even if life were created in the laboratory, the God question would not thereby be settled—not in the minds of true believers anyway. They could always argue that God had been hovering over the biochemists and, just as they combined all the necessary ingredients, had waved His wand to bring inert matter to life. Or, with greater sophistication, they could argue that God was not an external agent, necessary to spark life, but rather that life is a self-emergent property arising in complex molecules, and preserve a role for God as the author of the natural laws governing the process.
Granted, this would not be the personal God whom believers petition in their prayers, but it would avoid jettisoning God completely. Many scientists make no distinction between God and the underlying physical principles—some understood, some not—that account for natural phenomena. Einstein, for one, said that he believed in “Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actionsof human beings.”

Accidental Education

…accidental education, whatever its economical return… was prodigiously successful as an object in itself.
– Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
up.that made the difference.ing.

Déjà Vu, Exit Two
d.

CHAPTER 5: BANISHMENT