Ostwald also believed in using the methods of advertising to propagate scholarly work. Up until then advertising had served primary commercial interests. Ostwald argued that it could be pressed into the service of scholarship and education, helping to provide a platform for popularizing scientific findings and connecting the general public and the scholarly community. “The engineer cannot talk,” he said, advocating that schools should put a special emphasis on ensuring better communication and what today we might call presentation skills.
Paul Otlet’s contemporary Wilhelm Ostwald understood that to build a “global brain” the general public needed to understand it’s value. It needed to be made, well, popular. And he saw that advertising could be a tool to build public support.
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience-but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne, In one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Sarah Bakewell. Chapter 2 Pay Attention, pg 37.
This could be a productive writing exercise. 200 words describing the closest object near you.
One of the strengths of Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought is in the variety of intellectual examples she offers. Hitz doesn’t limit examples of the intellectual life to literature and philosophy. Instead she reminds us mathematics and science are vital intellectual disciplines.
Her two major examples include Albert Einstein and Andre Weil the French mathematician. Hitz uses their two career paths to explore how environments of failure – Einstein’s stint at a patent office, Weil’s time in prison, provided the ingredients for mathematical breakthroughs to flourish.
The ingredients being the absence of needing to comply with their profession’s expectations. Their environments of failure allowed them to pursue their ideas for the sake of curiosity.
On Einstein’s patent office stint:
But it is a cloister for Einstein, since in the office there were no hotshot professors to impress, no university administrators to placate, no students to whom he had to justify his existence. It is, then, chiefly a place where the love of learning is put to the test, where ambition is frustrated, where his work has to run on its own power without the grease of seeking out carrots and avoiding sticks. In the quiet of the patent office the beauty of the structures of nature can take hold of him and display itself with clarity.
One might think that the reasons Weil produced better mathematical work in prison are straightforward: more free time, fewer distractions of ordinary life. But Weil jokes about prison’s advantage for “pure and disinterested research” and, echoing Einstein, praises the beauty of his theorems. So he too suggests that his work was nurtured by separation from social or political agendas, competition, social hierarchy, objects of ambition, the expectations of others. The pursuit of beautiful theorems might elsewhere be crowded out by things that seemed more pressing but that ultimately mattered less.
Mostly, it seems, she spent her days drawing. She drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery. “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote. She drew when she was unsettled, regardless of the subject. “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things,” she wrote in her journal. “Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.”
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
“By the 1950s I had found I was frightened when giving public talks to large audiences, this in spite of having taught classes in college for many years. On thinking this over very seriously, I came to the conclusion I could not afford to be crippled that way and still become a great scientist; the duty of a scientist is not only to find new things, but to communicate them successfully in at least three forms:
Writing papers and books
Prepared public talks
Impromptu talks
Lacking any one of these would be a serious drag on my career. How to learn to give public talks without being so afraid was my problem. The answer was obviously by practice, and while other things might help, practice was a necessary thing to do.” – Richard W. Hammingfrom the The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
The duty of a scientist is not only to research, but to communicate.
What’s our typical image of a scientist? Someone dressed in a white lab coat, hovering over a microscope. A lab assistant near, clipboard in hand (even in 2022). Hidden in the basement of some concrete government cube.
But think of the inspiring scientists of our time: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bob Bakker, Oliver Sacks, the shark lady Eugenie Clark. They were and are scientists of the public. They shared their ideas on TV, in documentaries, podcasts, and lectures. These scientists were and are able to communicate successfully in at least the first two forms mentioned by Richard W. Hamming. Judging by interviews and their public personas I’m sure they were all capable of form #3 as well.
Mr. Richard W. Hamming’s mindset towards his fear is also worth noting. He could’ve dismissed his trepidation of speaking to large crowds as “something I’m just not wired for”. But he didn’t bury his head in the gravel. He decided practice was the necessary thing to do. Hamming would go on to give one of the preeminent talks on cultivating a scientific career titled – You and Your Research.
I crept to the end of a row and kneeled in the warm dirt. Her five brothers were singing melodious songs in Spanish. The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. I smelled mashed beans and chili. The old man growled. The brothers kept right on singing. The mother was silent. Raymond and the kids were giggling on one vase bed in the bedroom. A California home; I hid in the grapevines digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.
Roddy Doyle is a writer who makes reading fun. Instead of telling us how great a novelist Dickens was, or how important Dickens is to the western canon, Roddy explores the idea of Charles Dickens – “great film director”.
He explains how Dickens knew the importance of great beginnings:
Great Expectations has – I keep reminding myself, it’s a book, not a film – the best start to a story I’ve ever read. There’s a small boy in a graveyard just as it’s getting dark – that’s good. He’s looking at the grave where his parents and five brothers are buried – very sad, but even better. When an escaped convict jumps out from behind a grave and grabs him – the absolute best.
Great Expectations: Abridged Edition (Puffin Classics), pg vi
Roddy shares how Dickens’s prose creates images, moving pictures, in our minds:
The main character, a boy called Pip, is walking home at night, to the house where he lives with his sister and her husband, Joe, who is a blacksmith: ‘Joe’s furnace was flinging a path of fire across the road.’ We see Pip, the road, the furnace, and we see them because, most of all, we see ‘the path of fire’ that lights the road ahead of Pip. It’s only four very simple words – ‘the path of fire’ – but, probably because it’s so simple, we can see it.
Great Expectations: Abridged Edition (Puffin Classics), pg vi
It’s easy to believe Dickens is a bore. Required high-school reading we never crack open, but Roddy reminds us, Great Expectations was written in weekly installments. 18th century streaming. Dickens knew how to grow and keep an audience.
Dickens wrote Great Expectations in weekly installments, a bit like a television series. Thousands of people waited anxiously for the next episode. They cared, because the writing was so great, the characters so huge and believable, horrible or lovely – so cinematic. Dickens was the a film director waiting for the invention of the camera. Luckily, he was too early.
Great Expectations: Abridged Edition (Puffin Classics), pg vii
Charles Dickens is a bit like Sunday School, you’re told all the great stories, but you never go back and read them for yourself.
The most important thing to understand about Smiles is that he worked for his whole life. When he wasn’t in the office, he was pursuing his education or writing articles. This doesn’t mean he was succeeding. Often he was simply reading and learning for the sake of it. The successful books he published were the eventual result of decades of accreted labour. He studied because he wanted to. For a long time, the returns were zero.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part I, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
That last sentence though, a pile driver – “For a long time, the returns were zero.” Writer Samuel Smiles was a model of persistence. He is what Henry Oliver calls an opsimath, or a late bloomer. (You know a word is good when the spellchecker redlines it). Smiles persisted with his dream project – a biography of the father of railroads George Stephenson. Smiles persevered with the book despite discouragement from Stephenson’s son, and day jobs sapping his writing time. The George Stephenson project began for Smiles in 1849. It was finally published in 1857.
Failure and rejection be damned. A side hustle is for life — and the sheer hell of it. He was a walking writer. And he began to benefit from his accumulated experiences. One trait of late bloomers is their ability to turn their experiences, however incoherent, however seemingly irrelevant, to their advantage as they persist in their interests.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part II, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
Samuel Smiles’ determined path reminds me of Brooklyn Nets guard Seth Curry, who went undrafted and didn’t sign his first guaranteed contract until age twenty five. And the “exceptional case” Athletic Bilbao striker Aritz Aduriz. An athletic polymath who found success at the top level of Spanish football during the latter stages of his career. Scoring 66% percent of his career first division goals after age thirty and then retiring at thirty nine.
Read Henry Oliver’s full profiles on Samuel Smiles here: pt.1, pt.2.
And do subscribe to The Common Reader. It’s one of the brightest lights on the internet.
after spending more than 35 seasons in the Antarctic, my shelves are now crammed with field books. Many of the entries have since been logged into endless computer spreadsheets and exist in digital pixels to be shared with colleagues instantly around the world. Nevertheless, the daily context in which the data really lived is only revealed by going back and slowly thumbing my way through the books, page after page. It’s an enjoyable process returning to what have become, essentially, my indispensable ‘friends’.
Lydia Davis returns to a sentence to better understand its meaning. Ecologist David Ainley returns to his journals, his indispensable ‘friends’, for enjoyment.
Floodlights and Goalposts 