Natural History magazine, December 2000–January 2001
I Have Landed
In the final essay of this twenty-seven-year series,
the author reflects on continuity—from family history
to the branching lineage of terrestrial life.
As a young child, thinking as big as big can be and getting absolutely nowhere for the effort, I would often lie awake at night, pondering the mysteries of infinity and eternity and feeling pure awe (in an inchoate, but intense, boyish way) at my utter inability to comprehend. How could time begin? For even if a God created matter at a definite moment, then who made God? An eternity of spirit seemed just as incomprehensible as a temporal sequence of matter with no beginning. And how could space end? For even if a group of intrepid astronauts encountered a brick wall at the end of the universe, what lay beyond the wall? An infinity of wall seemed just as inconceivable as a never-ending expanse of stars and galaxies.
I will not defend these naive formulations today, but I doubt that I have come one iota closer to a personal solution since these boyhood ruminations so long ago. In my philosophical moments—and not only as an excuse for personal failure, for I see no sign that others have succeeded—I rather suspect that the evolved powers of the human mind may not include the wherewithal for posing such questions in answerable ways (not that we ever would, should, or could halt our inquiries into these ultimates).
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However, I confess that in my mature years, I have embraced the Dorothean dictum: yea, though I might roam through the pleasures of eternity and the palaces of infinity (not to mention the valley of the shadow of death), when a body craves contact with the brass tacks of a potentially comprehensible reality, I guess there’s no place like home. And within the smaller, but still tolerably ample, compass of our planetary real estate, I would nominate as most worthy of pure awe—a metaphorical miracle, if you will—an aspect of life that most people have never considered but that strikes me as equal in majesty to our most spiritual projections of infinity and eternity, while falling entirely within the domain of our conceptual understanding and empirical grasp: the continuity of etz chayim, the tree of earthly life, for at least 3.5 billion years, without a single microsecond of disruption.
Consider the improbability of such continuity in the conventional terms of ordinary probability: take any phenomenon that begins with a positive value at its inception 3.5 billion years ago, and let the process regulating its existence proceed through time. A line marked zero runs along below the current value. The probability of the phenomenon’s descent to zero may be almost incalculably low, but throw the dice of the relevant process billions of times and the phenomenon just has to hit the zero line eventually.
For most processes, the prospect of such an improbable crossing bodes no permanent ill, because an unlikely crash (a year, for example, when a healthy Mark McGwire hits no home runs at all) will quickly be reversed, and ordinary residence well above the zero line reestablished. But life represents a different kind of ultimately fragile system, utterly dependent upon unbroken continuity. For life, the zero line designates a permanent end, not a temporary embarrassment. If life had ever touched that line for one fleeting moment at any time during 3.5 billion years of sustained history, neither we nor a million species of beetles would grace this planet today. A single handshake with voracious zero dooms all that might have been, forever after.
When we consider the magnitude and complexity of the circumstances required to sustain this continuity for so long—and without exception or forgiveness in each of so many components—well, I may be a rationalist at heart, but if anything in the natural world merits designation as “awesome,” I nominate the continuity of the tree of life for 3.5 billion years. Earth experienced severe ice ages but never froze completely, not for a single day. Life fluctuated through episodes of global extinction but never crossed the zero line, not for one millisecond. DNA has been working all this time,
| I would nominate as most worthy of pure awe the continuity of the tree of earthly life for 3.5 billion years, without a single microsecond of disruption. |
When Protagoras, speaking inclusively despite the standard translation, defined “man” as “the measure of all things,” he captured the ambivalence of our feelings and intellect in his implied contrast of diametrically opposite interpretations: the expansion of humanism versus the parochialism of limitation. Eternity and infinity lie too far from the unavoidable standard of our own bodies to secure our comprehension, but life’s continuity stands right at the outer border of ultimate fascination: just close enough for intelligibility by the measure of our bodily size and earthly time but sufficiently far away to inspire maximal awe.
Moreover, we can bring this largest knowable scale further into the circle of our comprehension by comparing the macrocosm of life’s tree to the microcosm of our family’s genealogy. Our affinity for evolution must originate from the same internal chords of emotion and fascination that drive so many people to trace their bloodlines with such diligence and detail. I do not pretend to know why the documentation of unbroken heredity through generations of forebears brings us so swiftly to tears and to such a secure sense of rightness, definition, membership, and meaning. I simply accept the primal emotional power we feel when we manage to embed ourselves into something so much larger.
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And so evolution has anchored this series of essays through 300 uninterrupted issues of Natural History, from January 1974 to this first offering in some people’s version of the new millennium, January 2001. (A missing month might not have entailed full extinction, but I did appreciate the practical goad and pure conceit of thinking that I needed to mirror the utterly unforgiving topology of evolutionary continuity!) I called my series “This View of Life” to honor the finale of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for the closing sentence of this founding document begins with a justifiably poetic description of evolution: “There is grandeur in this view of life.” As one major reason for evolution’s enduring popularity among scientific subjects, our minds combine the subject’s sheer intellectual fascination with an even stronger emotional affinity rooted in a legitimate comparison between the sense of belonging gained from contemplating family genealogies and the feeling of understanding achieved by locating our tiny little twig on the great tree of life. Evolution, in this sense, is “roots” writ large.
If continuity so tugs at our heartstrings and so defines our sense of being within the expanding totalities of a personal family, the full human species, and the entire tree of life—and if unbroken continuity defines both the awe of “this view of life” and the conceit of a little literary microcosm also called “This View of Life”—then how else can I end except with a paean to continuity on both scales? Of my decision to hang up the spikes of this particular monthly enterprise, I will only say that when I noted the fortuitous conjunction of my 300th entry with the auspicious date of January 2001, I felt that arbitrary calendrics and numerology must be trying to tell me something. I know that I could persevere until the angel of death makes his most unwelcome, albeit inevitable, intrusion. At least my list of potential topics has never become shorter (my personal criterion, throughout all these years, for a stopping signal that never sounded). But I never witnessed anything sadder than Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle playing far beyond their prime, and I don’t want to risk the possibility of even embarking upon a downhill slope, much less facing, however unawares, an actual entrance into professional dotage. Few old troupers have the gumption to follow what I like to call the “DiMaggio-Jordan principle”: not just to “quit while you’re still ahead” but the more upbeat #147;quit while they still want you.” I only hope that I have the gumption and that, dear readers, some of you might still want me.
I therefore offer two microcosmal stories of stubborn persistence for my swan song—two analogues or metaphors for this grandest evolutionary theme of absolutely unbroken continuity, the intellectual and emotional center of this view of life. My stories descend in range and importance from a tale about a leader in the founding generation of Darwinism to a story about my grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant who rose from poverty to solvency as a garment worker on the streets of New York City.
Our military services now use the blandishments of commercial jingles to secure their “few good men” (and women) or to entice an unfulfilled soul to “be all that you can be in the army” (emphasize the second syllable of the service, attach a catchy tune, and this enticement even rhymes). In a slight variation, another branch emphasizes external breadth over internal growth: “Join the navy and see the world.”
In days of yore, when reality trumped advertisement, this last slogan often did propel young men to growth and excitement. In particular, budding naturalists without means could
| Family genealogy is our tiny twig on the great tree of life. Evolution is “roots.” |
Huxley filled these scientific Wanderjahre with the usual minutiae of technical studies on jellyfishes and grand adventures with the aboriginal peoples of Australia and several Pacific islands. But he also trumped Darwin in one aspect of discovery, with extremely happy and lifelong consequences: he met his future wife in Australia, a brewer’s daughter named Henrietta Anne Heathorn, or Nettie to the young Hal. They met at a dance. He loved her silky hair, and she reveled in his dark eyes that “had an extraordinary way of flashing when they seemed to be burning—his manner was most fascinating,” as she stated in her diary.
Huxley wrote to his sister in February 1849: “I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition.” As Nettie’s only dubious trait, Hal mentioned her potential naïveté in leaving “her happiness in the hands of a man like myself, struggling upwards and certain of nothing.” Nettie waited five years after Hal left in 1850. Then she sailed to London, wed her dashing surgeon and vigorously budding scientist, and enjoyed, by Victorian standards, a happy and successful marriage with an unusually decent and extraordinarily talented man. (Six of their eight children lived into reasonably prosperous maturity, a rarity in these times, even among the élite.) Hal and Nettie, looking back in their old age (Hal died in 1895, Nettie in 1914), might well have epitomized their life together in the words of a later song: “We had a lot of kids, a lot of trouble and pain, but Oh, Lord, we’d do it again.”
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The young and intellectually restless Huxley, having mastered German, decided to learn Italian during his long hours of boredom at sea. (He read Dante’s Inferno in the original terza rima during a year’s jaunt centered about New Guinea.) Thus, as Huxley prepared to part from his fiancée in April 1849 (he would return for a spell in 1850, before the long five-year drought that preceded Nettie’s antipodal journey to their wedding), Nettie decided to give him a parting gift of remembrance and utility: a five-volume edition, in the original Italian, of course, of Gerusalemme liberata, by the great Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso. (This epic, largely describing the conquest of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099, might not be deemed politically correct today, but the power of verse and narrative remains undiminished.)
Nettie presented her gift to Hal as a joint offering from herself, her half sister Oriana, and Oriana’s husband, her brother-in-law William Fanning. She inscribed the first volume in a young woman’s hand: “T. H. Huxley. A birthday and parting gift in remembrance of three dear friends. May 4th 1849.” For some reason that I have never fathomed but will not question, this set of books sold (to lucky me) for a pittance at a recent auction. (Tasso isn’t big these days, and folks may have missed the catalog entry describing the provenance and context.)
So Nettie Heathorn came to England, married her Hal, raised a large family, and lived out her long and fulfilling life well into the twentieth century. As she had been blessed with accomplished children, she also enjoyed, in later life, the promise of two even more brilliant grandchildren: the writer Aldous Huxley and the biologist Julian Huxley. And now we come to the point of this tale. In 1911, more than sixty years after she had presented the five volumes of Tasso to Hal, Nettie Heathorn, then Henrietta Anne Huxley, and now Granmoo to her grandson Julian, removed the books from such long residence on her shelf and passed them on to the young man who would later carry the family’s intellectual torch with such distinction. In the clear but shaky hand of an old woman, she wrote below her original inscription the missing who and where of the original gift: “Holmwood, Sydney, N.S. Wales. Nettie Heathorn, Oriana Fanning, William Fanning.”
Above her original words, penned in the flower of youth, she then wrote, in a simple statement that needs no explication and that surely lies too deep for tears in its eloquent invocation of life’s persistence: “Julian Sorel Huxley, from his grandmother Henrietta Anne Huxley née Heathorn ‘Granmoo.’” She then emphasized the sacred theme of continuity by closing her rededication with the same words she had written to Hal so many years before: “‘In remembrance.’ 28th July 1911, Hodeslea, Eastbourne.”
If this tale of three generations watched over by a great woman as she follows life’s passages from dashing bride to doting grandmother doesn’t epitomize the best of humanity, as symbolized by our continuity, then what greater love or beauty can sustain our lives in this vale of tears and fascination? Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage
| “I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition.” — Thomas H. Huxley, on first meeting Henrietta Heathorn in Australia, 1849 |
My maternal grandparents—Irene and Joseph Rosenberg, or Grammy and Papa Joe to me—loved to read in their adopted language of English. My grandfather even bought a set of The Harvard Classics (the famous “Five Foot Shelf” of Western wisdom) to facilitate his assimilation to American life. I inherited only two of Papa Joe’s books, and nothing of a material nature could be more precious to me. The first bears a stamp of sale: “Carroll’s book store. Old, rare and curious books. Fulton and Pearl Sts. Brooklyn, N.Y.” Perhaps my grandfather obtained this volume from a Landsmann, for I can discern, through erasures on three pages of the book, the common Hungarian name “Imre.” On the front page of this 1892 edition of J. M. Greenwood’s Studies in English Grammar, my grandfather wrote in ink, in an obviously European hand, “Prop. of Joseph A. Rosenberg, New York.” To the side, in pencil, he added the presumed date of his acquisition: “1901. Oct. 25th.” Just below, also in pencil, he appended the most eloquent of all conceivable words for this context—even though he used the wrong tense, confusing the compound past of continuing action with an intended simple past to designate a definite and completed event (not bad for a barely fourteen-year-old boy just a month or two off the boat): “I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.”
Of all that I shall miss in closing these columns, I shall feel most keenly the loss of fellowship and interaction with readers. Have we not shared 300 episodes of mutual learning? Early in the series, I began—more as a rhetorical device to highlight a spirit of interaction than as a practical tactic for gaining information—to pose
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As the series proceeded, I developed complete faith—not from hope, but from the solid pleasure of invariant success—that any posted question would elicit a host of interesting responses, including the desired factual resolution. How did the Italian word segue pass from the rarefied world of classical music into common speech as a synonym for “transition” (resolved by personal testimony of several early radio men, who informed me that in the 1920s they had transferred this term from their musical training to their new gigs as disk jockeys and producers of radio plays). Why did seventeenth-century engravers of scientific illustrations usually fail to draw snail shells in reverse on their plates—so that the final product, when printed on paper, would depict the snail’s actual direction of coiling—when they obviously understood the principle of inversion and always etched their verbal texts “backward” to ensure printed readability? Who were Mary Roberts, Isabella Duncan, and several other “invisible” women of Victorian science-writing who didn’t even win a line in such standard sources as the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Dictionary of National Biography?
Thus, after citing my grandfather’s text en passant in an earlier essay, I may have wept for joy but could not feign complete surprise when I received the most wonderful of all letters from a reader:
For years now I have been reading your books, and I think I should really thank you for the pleasure and intellectual stimulation I have received from you. But how to make even a small return for your essays? The answer came to me this week. I am a genealogist who specializes in passenger-list work. Last Sunday I was rereading that touching essay that features your grandfather, Joseph A. Rosenberg, who wrote “I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.” It occurred to me that you might like to see his name on the passenger list of the ship on which he came.
I think I always knew that I might be able to find the manifest of Papa Joe’s arrival at Ellis Island. I even half intended to make the effort “someday.” But in honest moments of obeisance to the Socratic dictum “Know thyself,” I’m pretty sure that, absent this greatest of all gifts from a reader, I never would have found the time or made the move. (Moreover, I certainly hadn’t cited Papa Joe’s inscription in a lazy and intentional “fishing expedition” for concrete information. I therefore received the letter of resolution with pure exhilaration—as a precious item beyond price, freely given in fellowship, and so gratefully received without any conscious anticipation on my part.)
My grandfather traveled with his mother and two younger sisters on the SS Kensington, an American Line ship (launched in 1894 and scrapped in 1910) that could carry sixty passengers in first class and a thousand more in steerage—a good indication of the economics of travel and transport in these days of easy
| I loved my grandparents fiercely and reveled in their unconditional blessing and unvarying support—not always deserved, for I really did throw that rock at Harvey. |
I had not previously known that my great-grandfather, Farkas Rosenberg (accented on the first syllable, pronounced “farkash,” and meaning “wolf” in Hungarian), had preceded the rest of his family and now appeared on the manifest as their sponsor, “Wolf Rosenberg, 644 East 6th Street.” I do not remember Farkas, who died during my third year of life, but I greatly value the touching tidbit of information that, for whatever reason, in his initial flurry of assimilation, Farkas had learned and begun to use the English translation of a name that strikes many Americans as curious or even amusing in sound—for he later reverted to Farkas, and no one in my family knew him by any other name.
My kind and diligent reader then bestowed an additional gift upon me by locating Farkas’s manifest as well. He had arrived, along with 800 other passengers in steerage, aboard the Kensington’s sister ship SS Southwark on June 13, 1900, listed as Farkas Rosenberg, illiterate at age thirty-four (although I am fairly sure he could at least read and probably write Hebrew) and sponsored by a cousin named Jos. Weiss (unknown to my family and perhaps an enabling fiction). Farkas, a carpenter by trade, arrived alone, with one dollar in his pocket.
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Papa Joe’s later story mirrors the tale of several million poor immigrants to a great land that did not welcome them with open arms (despite Lady Liberty’s famous words) but also did not foreclose the possibility of success if they could prevail by their own wits and unrelenting hard work. And who could, or should, have asked for more in those times? Papa Joe received no further schooling in America, save what experience provided and internal drive secured. As a young man, he went west for a time, working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and on a ranch somewhere in the Midwest (not, as I later found out, as the cowboy of my dreams but as an accountant in the front office). His mother, Leni, died young (my mother, Eleanor, bears her name in remembrance), as my second book of his legacy testifies. Papa Joe ended up, along with so many Jewish immigrants, in the garment district of New York City, where, after severing his middle finger in an accident as a cloth cutter, he eventually figured out how to parlay his remarkable, albeit entirely untrained, artistic talents into a better job that provided eventual access to middle-class life (and afforded much titillation to his grandchildren)—as a designer of brassieres and corsets.
He met Irene, also a garment worker, when he lived as a boarder at the home of Irene’s aunt—for she had emigrated alone in 1910 at age fourteen, under her aunt’s sponsorship, after a falling-out with her father. What else can one say for the objective record (and what richness and depth could one not expose, at least in principle and for all people, at the subjective level of human life, passion, and pure perseverance)? Grammy and Papa Joe married young, and their only early portrait together radiates both hope and uncertainty. They raised three sons and a daughter; my mother alone survives. Two of their children finished college.
Somehow I always knew, although no one ever pressured me directly, that the third generation, with me as the first member thereof, would fulfill the deferred dream of a century, obtain an advanced education, and enter professional life. (My grandmother spoke Hungarian, Yiddish, German, and English but could only write her adopted language phonetically. I will never forget her embarrassment when I inadvertently read a shopping list she had written and realized that she could not spell. I also remember her joy when, invoking her infallible memory and recalling some old information acquired in her study for citizenship, she won $10 on a Yiddish radio quiz for correctly identifying William Howard Taft as our fattest president.)
I loved Grammy and Papa Joe separately. Divorce, however legal and religiously acceptable, did not represent an option in their world. Unlike Hal and Nettie Huxley, I’m not at all sure they would
| I can say goodbye to this particular forum because I know that I will never run out of unkept promises or miles to walk. |
The tree of all life and the genealogy of each family share the same topology and the same secret of success in blending two apparently contradictory themes of continuity without a single hair’s breadth of breakage, and change without even a moment’s loss of a potential that need not be exploited in all episodes but must remain forever at the ready. These properties may seem minimal, even derisory, in a universe of such stunning complexity (whatever its inexplicable eternity or infinity). But this very complexity exalts pure staying power (and the lability that facilitates such continuity). Showy statues of Ozymandias quickly become lifeless legs in the desert; bacteria have scuttled around all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for 3.5 billion years and counting.
I believe in the grandeur of this view of life, the continuity of family lines, and the poignancy of our stories—of Nettie Heathorn, grown old as Granmoo and passing Tasso’s torch two generations after her initial lighting; of Papa Joe’s ungrammatical landing as a stranger in a strange land, and my prayer that, in some sense, he might see my work as a worthy continuation, also two generations later, of a hope that he fulfilled in a different way during his own lifetime. I suspect we feel the poignancy in such continuity because we know that our small realization of an unstated family promise somehow mirrors the larger way of all life and, by this affirmation of totality, becomes “right” in a sense too deep for either words or tears. I can therefore say goodbye to this particular forum because I know that I will never run out of unkept promises or miles to walk and that I may even continue to sprinkle the journey remaining before sleep with a new idea or two. This view of life continues, flowing ever forward, while the current patriarch of one tiny and insignificant twig pauses to honor the twig’s centennial in a new land by commemorating the first recorded words of a fourteen-year-old forebear.
Dear Papa Joe, I have been faithful to your dream of persistence and attentive to a hope that the increments of each worthy generation may buttress the continuity of evolution. You could write those wondrous words right at the beginning of your journey, amidst all the joy and terror of inception. I dared not repeat them until I could fulfill my own childhood dream—something that once seemed so mysteriously beyond any hope of realization to an insecure little boy in a garden apartment in Queens—to become a scientist and to make, by my own effort, even the tiniest addition to human knowledge of evolution and the history of life. But now, with my 300, so fortuitously coincident with the world’s new 1,000 and your own 100, perhaps I have finally won the right to restate your noble words and to tell you that their inspiration still lights my journey: I have landed. But I also can’t help wondering what comes next!
Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould contributes the last in a series of 300 essays that began in January 1974. Most have addressed evolutionary theory and the history of science, but Gould’s topics have ranged from the contingencies of life’s history and geologists’ perception of time to biology, social science, and baseball. According to Michael Shermer, of the Skeptics Society, the shortest essay (“Darwin’s Dilemma,” June 1974) ran 1,475 words, and the longest (“The Piltdown Conspiracy,” August 1980) ran 9,290 words. Many contain new discoveries, such as Gould’s original interpretations of the works of biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, geologist Charles Lyell, and Leonardo da Vinci. During the same period, Gould has also managed to publish 22 books, 101 reviews, and 479 scientific and scholarly papers. His latest book, Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet, “coauthored with photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell, has just been published by Three Rivers Press. A thousand-page technical tome,” The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Readers of Natural History can still look forward to occasional contributions by Gould in these pages.
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