Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (16 page)

“Well, I don’t think I am.”

“Well, yes, I’m sorry to say, you are. I’ll tell you—last time you were here, you had a little too much to drink. You were much looser about things.”

“I was?”

“Yes, and I think I like you better drunk.”

You couldn’t get mad at him because whatever he told you was honestly intended to make you a better person. And it would, if you listened to it.

We visited him again on a summer day on that porch a couple of weeks before the end. He was thin and weak, but gracious—determined to stand and greet us. He joked with us and looked with great care at the book of photographs we brought him, telling us he was going to study it after we’d left. After talking quietly with us for half an hour, he told us we’d better go; he was losing his strength. We gave him a hug and never saw him again.

He had loved music, all kinds of music. There was a gospel choir at his memorial and a performance by Yo-Yo Ma. We heard the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Honor Guard; a New York Police Department bagpiper; and, again, a soulful piece by Wynton Marsalis.

Peter had given a new tone to broadcast news, and it grew out of his own voice, out of who he was as a person. That was what I remembered about him that day.

When things go wrong on television, we get snow. When the signal can’t reach us, when mountains interfere, we get a fuzzy, chaotic blizzard of electronic noise. When the signal does reach us, of course, then the real challenge begins: to put something on the screen that’s better than snow. Peter Jennings melted the snow with warmth, intelligence, and grace.

When Peter was your friend, he cared about how you were doing. He made sure you heard about things that affected your life. And this was how tens of millions of people who never met him felt.

I think so many people responded to him the way they did because Peter was a truly authentic person. He was who he was, even though he was many things at once. He was complex and simple at the same time. Knowledgeable and inquisitive. Kind and tough. All at the same time.

He was gracious, yet he was direct, too. Once after dinner at our house, he stayed after the others had left and washed the dishes with us. We couldn’t talk him out of it. He did it naturally and without fanfare; gracefully. Then he turned to me while he was drying a dish and said, “Now that everyone’s gone, if I were you, I’d send the wine back to where you bought it. It’s a little off.” Graceful and yet direct.

He was personally courageous and self-sustaining, yet he cared about the homeless, the hungry, and the excluded as if he took it for granted that it was his responsibility to lend a hand.

He never preached. In fact, I never really knew what his political thoughts were, but he was excited about ideas and different ways of looking at things, and he was just as excited about passing those ideas on to others. I don’t think I ever left his house without his giving me a book to read.

The last book he gave me was a copy of the U.S. Constitution. A little pocket-sized book. He said he carried it with him wherever he went, and he urged
me
to carry it and to take it out and read it whenever I was waiting someplace and had a few minutes. “You’ll learn a lot,” he said.

I kept it on my bed table. But when we lost him, I began carrying it with me, as he had asked me to.

I took the small book out of my pocket and opened it.

I was reading it the other day, and my eye caught this phrase:

“Article II, Section 2, Clause 3: The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate….”

I stopped and thought about that phrase for a moment.

There is a vacancy now that no president, no one on earth, has the power to fill. Others will step in and do his job with excellence, but no one can replace the unique person who was Peter. All of us around the country who felt he was a friend we could count on—we’re left now with just a bit of snow on the screen.

If I could say one last thing to Peter, it would be to say to
him
the last thing he said to all of
us
on his final broadcast:

Dear friend, I’d say…

“Thanks. And good night.”

I held back some emotion, put the Constitution in my pocket, and moved down the aisle quickly. I missed what the other speakers said because I had only a few minutes to get to a live radio broadcast. I knew Peter would have understood.

So what do I make of all this? What was I saying to myself in these talks? Three of my friends who happened to be well known died within the same year, and I spoke about each of them in public. It’s true that who they were to the rest of the world was a part of what they were to me, but it wasn’t what I missed, what I longed for, in them.

What made their lives count to me most were very small moments. This, it seems to me, is what a life adds up to: the sight of one of them hunching over seashells with my grandchild, or roughly kidding me out of taking myself seriously, or teaching me three musical notes in appreciation of sweet-potato pie.

I can see Ossie smiling at me. We’re on the set of the movie version of
Purlie.
I can see the chunk of pie in my hand, and I can taste it. And Ossie says, “Go like this. You take a bite, and then you go unh, unh,
unh.
” Each sound is a different note on a minor scale, a thread of blue notes signifying pleasure.

I make the sound, and you know what? It makes the pie taste better. That’s the short way to say what all three of my friends meant to me. They made the pie taste better.

Chapter 14

Taking the Wider Way

“Just give it a try,” my father said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

It was spring, and the pale green of the leaves would turn soon into the saturated lushness of a summer of freedom. I didn’t want to spend it in a darkened classroom, learning something I would never use. I knew my father had wanted to be a doctor when he was young, and I was pretty sure that was why he was urging me to look into medicine. I didn’t want any part of it. I was morbidly depressed by the idea that instead of making people laugh, I might have to spend my life touching sick people and looking at blood. But he begged me to take a summer course in chemistry—a pre-med requirement—just to see if I might like it, he said.

There wasn’t much chance that I’d like it. With two friends, I had just written a musical comedy in high school and played one of the leading parts. I had my sights set on show business, and I was nervous, thinking I was setting out on a path that might lead to the operating theater instead of the 46th Street Theatre.

And besides,
I thought,
I’m not interested in this stuff. I want to be an artist.
I didn’t realize it, but I was turning away from something that I would eventually wish I’d learned.

When I was a boy, I had loved science. I was an amateur inventor. I was always doing experiments; always trying to figure out how things got the way they were. I would rummage around in a neighbor’s garage looking for metal rods and little electric motors that I could use to build my inventions. But then I started high school—not long before C. P. Snow delivered his lecture at Cambridge about the two cultures: the culture of art and the culture of science. He talked about how they had moved apart and had become largely ignorant of each other.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Snow was describing me. In high school, I started to believe that if you loved art, you couldn’t love science. Soon after I decided to be an artist, I started pulling back from science. I was perfectly primed for falling in love with the Romantic poets in college. The Romantics hated getting and spending and went into ecstasies over daffodils. But they also mistrusted science. Science, they felt, chops everything up into equations; it dices up nature and kills it.

I thought so, too, and I didn’t want to spend my summer studying chemistry. But my father was humble about the way he asked me to just consider it, and I couldn’t turn him down.

One day in early summer, I stepped out of the warmth of the sun and walked into a huge amphitheater in a Gothic building on the Fordham campus in the Bronx. I entered at the back, and as I adjusted my eyes to the dim light, I saw rows of seats descending in a semicircle down to a platform where a thin professor started flinging out words I couldn’t understand. He pointed at the blackboard. “What’s the valence?” he cried out. People called out numbers, and he scribbled furiously and unintelligibly with his chalk. The only time I had ever heard the word
valence
used before had to do with curtains hanging in a window. Unless I had accidentally walked into a summer course in interior decorating, I was going to have a language problem here. I had arrived on time, but somehow they all seemed to be in the middle of something. Abstruse terms were flying at me like dive-bombers. I never had the faintest idea what the professor was talking about. I barely got it that molecules were made up of atoms that somehow were stuck together. I had no idea that electrons were involved. Afraid that this was what the rest of my life was going to be like, I decided to do my best to fail the course. Actually, I didn’t have to work all that hard at it. I failed the final exam spectacularly. My father, in his gentle way, took the news without a show of disappointment. “Well, at least you tried,” he said.

But I hadn’t.

Many times since then, I’ve wished that I had been able to bridge Snow’s cultural divide in those early days and learn the languages of chemistry and mathematics, which is probably the closest we can come to the language of nature itself. I never did. I regained my youthful curiosity and tried to know more about what those languages described, but it was a haphazard process. My eleven years interviewing scientists on
Scientific American Frontiers
brought me closer to understanding how scientists think. Still, much of the language and many of the concepts of science were foreign to me, as they are to most of us. Over the centuries, like continental drift, the landmasses of science and the humanities, once united in an Eden called Pangaea, had separated and developed their own intellectual flora and fauna, becoming home to mutually alien species of thought. Where once those interested in humanity could mix freely with those interested in the
rest
of nature, now an ocean of strangeness separated us.

I was gripped by this thought, and before long it developed into a kind of hobby. Whenever I was asked to talk before a group of scientists, I would ask them to find ways to drag those continents back together somehow. In a way, it was an odd hobby for somebody who got a score of ten in his final chemistry exam—but when you think about it, what’s a better example of the problem?

Fifty-five years after I’d hesitatingly entered the darkened amphitheater in the Bronx, I was walking up the path of the entrance to Rockefeller University on New York’s East Side, on my way to give one of those talks I had no business giving, and again, I was as excited as I was scared.

Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller, came out to meet me and give me a welcoming hug. Paul is a Nobel Prize winner in physiology/medicine and one of those rare people who know how scientists think and how the rest of us think and can speak the language of both with nuance and humor. Paul introduced me warmly to the audience, but as I got up to speak, I was a little too aware that he probably wasn’t the only Nobelist in the audience and that I was in even further over my head than usual. I had been nervously rewriting the talk until the last second and hadn’t had time to read it out loud even once. I usually slip into the men’s room before a talk and stand in one of the stalls, trying rapidly to say most of it from memory, but it was too late for that. As I spoke, I noticed I was gripped by a low-grade panic that produced a slight stutter that I hoped would be taken as charming spontaneity. It came out, of course, like a stutter. This was something like the anxiety most of us feel when we come up against science—an encounter that often has all the trappings of a blind date. Which was exactly what I was there to talk about.

Think of it—a blind date: a meeting set up between two strangers with low expectations and high anxiety.
Will I be stuck with this person the whole night?—Should I have had a friend call and tell me my grandmother’s in the emergency room?
And, at the same time, they may be thinking,
Maybe this is the person who can save my life.
All this has the same false hope, wariness, and anxiety as when a lot of the public makes a glancing, brief encounter with science.

Blind dates have a history of occasionally turning into disasters, and so do our anxious dates with science.

In 1991 in Texas, they started digging a tunnel that would be twelve feet wide and run in a circle fifty-four miles long. They were going to install in this tunnel a series of very high-powered magnets, each weighing tons. The magnets would pull along protons faster and faster until they came very close to the speed of light. Then the protons would smash into each other, momentarily creating particles, many of which had never been observed before. This was going to be the biggest, most sophisticated particle accelerator ever built, and we were going to make real progress in discovering the origin of matter. We were going to understand reality in a way we never had before. Congress thought about it, and of course they
already
understand reality in a way no one ever has. After they’d spent almost two billion dollars on the accelerator, they canceled it—because it might cost as much as eleven billion, and that was too much, they felt, to spend on knowledge that had no practical application. Senator Dale Bumpers said, “It would be nice to know the origin of matter. It would be even nicer to have a balanced budget.”

One way or another, pure basic research almost
always
leads to practical results, but at first, new knowledge often appears trivial; a luxury.

We haven’t progressed much beyond where we were in 1745 when Pieter van Musschenbroek in the town of Leyden figured out the Leyden jar and stored large amounts of electric charge in it. It was a novelty to most people. And a few years later, Benjamin Franklin called lightning down a wire on a silk kite during a thunderstorm and stored it in a Leyden jar. Everyone was startled by this amazing phenomenon of electricity, but still they felt it was essentially just a parlor trick. They didn’t know then that the great parlor trick to come would be the little box in the parlor that brought the farthest reaches of the world to the other end of the carpet, and that the leaders of the world would rise and fall based on their performance in that little box, no bigger than a Leyden jar.

Here’s an update on the fate of the superconducting supercollider. The site has been vacant since the project was canceled. But there is still a tunnel underground. This August, a Dallas firm, called the Collider Data Center, started renting out the tunnel as a place to store computer data.

The giant circle in the ground will house magnetic disks with old bookkeeping records sitting on them, instead of giant magnets hurtling protons at nearly the speed of light and slamming them together to produce bursts of new knowledge. The death of the possible at the hands of the practical.

There are plenty of examples of missed opportunities and even actual disasters caused by the lack of good communication of science. At Rockefeller, I mentioned the devastation caused in 2004 by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. People on the coasts of the Indian Ocean had not been trained by newspaper articles or radio shows to understand the danger of tsunamis. They weren’t aware of the significance of an early warning sign like a beach draining rapidly. There were even people who stood and watched the tidal wave rolling in, completely unaware that it was a wall of death. Over two hundred thousand people were lost, and most of them could have been saved if an early warning system had been in place.

But the greatest disaster in the communication of science, I guess, could turn out to be global warming; and the problem is not just people’s understanding of it, but their very
ability
to understand it. We still have a poor grasp of how science works. When research contradicts a previous finding, it sounds as though scientists can’t make up their minds. Peer review sounds like bickering. We don’t really get it that weighing evidence is different from taking on a belief. Someone told me once that he
believed
in chaos theory. I didn’t really know what he meant, but apparently he felt that you could accept it or not, based on how it struck you; how it
felt.

As long as most of us don’t understand how scientists think, then self-serving politicians can label the work of respected researchers “junk science.” How can we help people know the difference between junk science and junk politics?

Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe global warming
won’t
turn out to be a disaster unlike any we’ve faced since we’ve been on the planet. We’ve lived through a small ice age; maybe we can live through another of the great extinctions.

But even if it turns out to be nowhere near that bad—if all we had to face was the world’s oceans moving inland a little, chasing people out of their homes—the economic impact would be huge.

Ten percent of the world’s population lives near the ocean at an elevation of less than thirty-three feet above sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it’s estimated the oceans would rise twenty-one feet. Even a three-foot rise would swamp cities all along the eastern seaboard. A six-foot rise would put most of Florida underwater. This all sounds so catastrophic that it’s almost impossible to hear it without a voice in our head saying,
This can’t be. Somebody has to check these figures.
That’s exactly what I wish we could get the public to do: check the figures. We’re shooting craps in a game where we’ve bet our house and home and have no idea what the odds are.

We’ve got to move on from this blind date. We can’t excommunicate ourselves from science—we need, not just to make people aware of natural disasters, but to avoid the greater catastrophe of the death of knowledge itself.

At the same time that science is approaching the very peaks of the Himalayas of scientific understanding, down in the valleys, we live among the greatest number of people ever alive who believe in magic. As one astronomer has pointed out, there is a daily column in almost every newspaper on astrology and barely an occasional
article
on astronomy.

Critical thinking and a respect for evidence seem to be dwindling.

You may remember a year or so ago when Nicholas Kristof reported in
The New York Times
that a Gallup poll had shown that forty-eight percent of Americans believe in creationism, and only twenty-eight percent in evolution (most of the rest aren’t sure or lean toward creationism)…. He said that Americans are more than twice as likely to believe in the devil as in evolution. Sixty-eight percent believe in the devil and twenty-eight percent in evolution.

How about
this:
If you go to
www.afterlifetelegrams.com,
you’ll read this exciting offer:

“For a donation of five dollars per word ( five-word minimum), we can have telegrams delivered to people who have passed away.” This is done with the help of terminally ill volunteers who memorize the telegrams
before
passing away, and then they deliver the telegrams
after
they have passed away.

We have a lot of work to do.