Yesterday, we took a walk around the lake to look at Christmas lights. Thinking back, it seems like a tragedy that I cannot remember once looking up at the night sky and enjoying the stars and constellations. Contact is reminding me how much less wonder and awe I have in my life now than I used to. It is a story of a precocious scientist (Ellie) who, from her birth, exhibited an interest in science and wonder and an aptitude for electronics. She gets into radio astronomy and eventually discovers an encrypted message from extraterrestrial life (I'm assuming because I haven't gotten that far in the book yet) .
Many years ago, I watched the movie 'Entrapment'. It came out prior to the new millenium, and took place in the future, on the eve of the new year and millenium. I can remember thinking as I walked out of the theater the wonder that the events in the movie hadn't happened yet. A few weeks/months later, I don't recall how long, I can recall thinking back on the movie and realized that the time period had passed. Through no fault of its own, the entire perspective of the movie had shifted and made it into a fictional history instead of a future potentiality.
Contact was written in 1985 to take place in 1999, and I read it now in 2012. A book written in the past about a future that is now also in the past. I read it now as past history that never happened, a fiction, a tragedy of the real world coalescing into one reality that isn't represented by the story. I wish it had been true (Keep in mind, I am only ten chapters in out of twenty-four, so this opinion may be subject to change). It is true that humans need awe, and such events would have been awing. At the same time, some of the future brought about by the Message did actually occur, without the Message intervention. The book was written at the end of the cold war, and predicted a world where the Message would force the nations of the world to work together even pushing aside the bitter rivalry between the Russians and Americans. The book is written from the perspective of a scientist who cares less about the political background of her fellow scientists than their abilities, but it also reasonably accurately portrays a more modern sense of the tentative acceptance we have of the Russian place in modern society rather than a more contemporary (for that time at least) deprecation of everything that was against the US in the cold war.
Chapter ten contains a discussion about the relationship between science and religion, including a sermon by a rabble-rouser exhorting people to not believe the lies fed to the populace by scientists and an exchange between Ellie and two prominent fundamentalist preachers of slightly different flavors. Either the relationship between fundamentalist religion and science has not changed at all in the last 30 years or Sagan very accurately predicted what relations would be in the future. I suspect the former. Although the discussion is set up to be an even-handed discussion of science and religion, it turns into (was from the start) a defense of science from the religious. I feel that this is an inevitable result of a discussion between two sides where one side is sure they are always right, and the other side is sure that they are never quite right but definitely getting closer. You cannot have an open discussion when one half of the conversation is closed-minded. Mind you, there are plenty of scientists who dogmatically defend the principles of science without necessarily believing in them, or even recognizing the hypocrisy of some of their positions. Too often we have scientists who create a hypothesis then create an experiment to prove it. In this book at least we do not have deal with that right now. Ellie is the ideal scientist - open to questioning her own beliefs, even about science. It is a little bit alien to me - human nature, including mine, is to find and see patterns whether they exist or not.
Contact touches on the gendered-ness of the scientific community. As a female with a brain, Ellie has to fight to be recognized by the majority of her male colleagues, even as she is better at what she does many of them. It is not so overt now, graduating in 2010, as it was then. It is still not gone. In college I wore clothes that didn't flatter my figure, for the double reason of a) it wasn't worth the cost, bother, and annoying attention that the clothes won me for my body, and b) the people who did notice me noticed me for what I could do. At the same time, I personally am biased against my own sex. It took about the same amount of time for me to convince myself that a female professor knew what she was doing as it did for me to convince myself that a male professor didn't know what he was doing. The initial hypothesis is in a different direction, depending on the gender. In addition, in my memory, I lump all the female pre-med BME's into one non-engineering group, while I remember specific pre-med males as being non-engineers. This might be a consequence of the fact that while all the female pre-meds where memorization machines, there were at least two male pre-meds that were incredibly good engineers, and in my opinion will be truly wasted in a medical field.
On a personal note, this book is reminding me why I wanted to go into research in the first place - the awe and splendor, the serendipity of discovery. Probably fortunately, I remember also that I do not find myself particularly suited to the tedium of research with no reason to hope for success other than that what I'm looking for hasn't been disproven yet. Several years in the lab have decisively pointed to a different direction as much more suitable, and as awesome as it is to dream of the next big discovery, I think I'm much happier where I am. Maybe a few more Sagan books will get me back into a lab.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Shakespeare: King Lear
I've been on a bit of a Shakespeare kick, after buying a Complete Works edition. This is encompassed in two ways - reading the play, and watching various versions of it in movie/recordings.
To start off, if you are unfamiliar with Shakespearean English, my recommendation is to begin with a movie that will give you both the plot and the English, rather than trying to read it. I typically read first, but I have also spent a significant amount of time reading works from Beowulf/Chaucer on up, so at this point I do have enough experience with it. A lot of the language is still reminiscent of 2nd or 3rd meanings of words today, but many people I've talked to have trouble with this because we aren't exposed to those meanings nearly as much nowadays. For me, the social traditions are where I need more assistance from commentary.
I will start with King Lear, so that I don't have to end with it. It is a bleak, bleak tragedy. Don't read it unless you're in the mood to feel depressed. An aging King Lear has three daughters and no heir, and wants to test his daughters' love for him. His favorite is the youngest, Cordelia. In a scene reminiscent of the fairy tale 'Water and Salt', the youngest daughter is construed to not love her father and thrown into exile in France.The King attempts to retire and stay with his two remaining daughters, but finds that he has lost all respect and is expected to become a nobody. He starts to go mad and his two elder daughters take over the kingdom, while his youngest daughter and the French king to come rescue him from the two eldest. The armies meet, and I won't tell you precisely what happens but this is one of Shakespeare's tragedies. A bleak one.
One of the themes this play explores is family ties and the effect of age. In that day and age, when you became too old to be productive you had no choice but to hope that someone of your kin would be kind enough to support you, knowing full well that they would be in the same position some day and hope that their own children would support them. Lear had a high enough opinion of his position that he felt it would be degrading to downsize his court, and his elder daughters thought him a fool of no worth and would not support his court. Once they had their inheritance, they cared nothing for the man who gave it to them. In this case, it is interesting also that Lear's retirement woes come about from the way he decided to retire. It is his own fault that he finds himself in that situation, which heightens the tragedy.
It is worth noting that this piece was written in England, a decisively western culture. In modern times, there appears to be a huge dichotomy between Eastern and Western cultures as regards aging and support. Western tradition views it as the government's responsibility to ensure that the aging parents are taken care of, through Welfare, Social Security, or whichever program is in place in any given country. Culturally, children are not required to take care of their parents, and it is viewed as a failure of the aging if they do not have enough money to live on without being parasites. In Tussian culture, there is [was?] no such expectation of government, in that the children know they will take care of their parents when the time comes. Lenora Greenbaum Ucko: Perceptions of Aging East and West: Soviet Refugees see two worlds. http://www.storieswork.org/aging_east_and_west.pdf. Something to add to my reading list is "Aging in East and West: Families, States, and the Elderly" by Bengtson, Kim, Myers, Eun.
There are two movie versions of this that I have seen. The first portrays Laurence Olivier as King Lear; the second James Earl Jones. Laurence Olivier is a master. There is nothing to say beyond that. I was incredibly depressed by his performance, which means that he carried it off and had precisely the desired effect. To see King Lear as a doddering old man, running mad from misuse and memories of past grandeur, abused and finally dying in delusion, serve to strip away any remaining gloss from the perception of human character. He is a tragedy by himself, a frail old man who is dying but refuses to see it. The second, with James Earl Jones, is less bleak than stark. Where Olivier's version has a gritty reality, Jones' version has more contrasting sets, with lighting/black/white contrast serve to show how desolate this madness really is. Olivier's Lear is more subtle, Jones' more overtly emtional. It's still a depressing play.
To start off, if you are unfamiliar with Shakespearean English, my recommendation is to begin with a movie that will give you both the plot and the English, rather than trying to read it. I typically read first, but I have also spent a significant amount of time reading works from Beowulf/Chaucer on up, so at this point I do have enough experience with it. A lot of the language is still reminiscent of 2nd or 3rd meanings of words today, but many people I've talked to have trouble with this because we aren't exposed to those meanings nearly as much nowadays. For me, the social traditions are where I need more assistance from commentary.
I will start with King Lear, so that I don't have to end with it. It is a bleak, bleak tragedy. Don't read it unless you're in the mood to feel depressed. An aging King Lear has three daughters and no heir, and wants to test his daughters' love for him. His favorite is the youngest, Cordelia. In a scene reminiscent of the fairy tale 'Water and Salt', the youngest daughter is construed to not love her father and thrown into exile in France.The King attempts to retire and stay with his two remaining daughters, but finds that he has lost all respect and is expected to become a nobody. He starts to go mad and his two elder daughters take over the kingdom, while his youngest daughter and the French king to come rescue him from the two eldest. The armies meet, and I won't tell you precisely what happens but this is one of Shakespeare's tragedies. A bleak one.
One of the themes this play explores is family ties and the effect of age. In that day and age, when you became too old to be productive you had no choice but to hope that someone of your kin would be kind enough to support you, knowing full well that they would be in the same position some day and hope that their own children would support them. Lear had a high enough opinion of his position that he felt it would be degrading to downsize his court, and his elder daughters thought him a fool of no worth and would not support his court. Once they had their inheritance, they cared nothing for the man who gave it to them. In this case, it is interesting also that Lear's retirement woes come about from the way he decided to retire. It is his own fault that he finds himself in that situation, which heightens the tragedy.
It is worth noting that this piece was written in England, a decisively western culture. In modern times, there appears to be a huge dichotomy between Eastern and Western cultures as regards aging and support. Western tradition views it as the government's responsibility to ensure that the aging parents are taken care of, through Welfare, Social Security, or whichever program is in place in any given country. Culturally, children are not required to take care of their parents, and it is viewed as a failure of the aging if they do not have enough money to live on without being parasites. In Tussian culture, there is [was?] no such expectation of government, in that the children know they will take care of their parents when the time comes. Lenora Greenbaum Ucko: Perceptions of Aging East and West: Soviet Refugees see two worlds. http://www.storieswork.org/aging_east_and_west.pdf. Something to add to my reading list is "Aging in East and West: Families, States, and the Elderly" by Bengtson, Kim, Myers, Eun.
There are two movie versions of this that I have seen. The first portrays Laurence Olivier as King Lear; the second James Earl Jones. Laurence Olivier is a master. There is nothing to say beyond that. I was incredibly depressed by his performance, which means that he carried it off and had precisely the desired effect. To see King Lear as a doddering old man, running mad from misuse and memories of past grandeur, abused and finally dying in delusion, serve to strip away any remaining gloss from the perception of human character. He is a tragedy by himself, a frail old man who is dying but refuses to see it. The second, with James Earl Jones, is less bleak than stark. Where Olivier's version has a gritty reality, Jones' version has more contrasting sets, with lighting/black/white contrast serve to show how desolate this madness really is. Olivier's Lear is more subtle, Jones' more overtly emtional. It's still a depressing play.
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