Concord's Writing Tradition Continues: Alan Lightman & Samantha Power

BY SAM COPELAND

Concord’s great tradition of writing lives on today. Here we highlight just two of the books published recently by Concordians: Alan Lightman’s Ada and the Galaxies, and Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist.

On a clear summer night Alan Lightman pushed a little boat out into the ocean from his summer home in Maine. The physicist, whose research covered topics like plasma and accretion disks, looked up into the night sky and, as he put it “fell into infinity.” The experience convinced him that the world of his academic work - of mathematics, observation, and physical laws - was not necessarily in conflict with the world of beauty and spirituality. On the contrary, it appeared that the vastness of the cosmos and the interconnectivity of matter, laid bare by science, was itself a path to the numinous.

Alan Lightman

Photo by Michael Lionstar

Despite the singular impact of this experience, it came to Lightman amid a long career of bridging the world of science with that of our inner lives. Lightman is perhaps best known for his book Einstein’s Dreams, which blended a fictionalized biography of the great physicist with the fantastical literary techniques of Borges and Calvino. Lightman’s current academic post is in comparative media studies at MIT. In both his writing and his teaching, Lightman has settled neither in the sciences nor in the humanities, but in the lines of connection between them.

It seems only natural then that Lightman would move into the domain of children’s science literature, as he has with Ada and the Galaxies. The book was written with Olga Pastuchiv and illustrated by Susanna Chapman, whose lush paintings are intermixed with photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. The idea for the book came to Lightman when he saw his granddaughter Ada looking at pictures of galaxies. “Ada was mesmerized,” says Lightman, “I’d never seen her react to pictures that strongly. So I thought that if Ada was reacting that way then maybe other children would as well.”

Ada and the Galaxies tells the story of Ada and her grandfather – or, as she says, “Poobah” – who is clearly modeled off Lightman. Ada visits Poobah from the city, where light pollution blocks out the stars. She wants to look at the stars with Poobah, but when night comes so do clouds covering the sky. To soothe Ada’s disappointment Poobah brings out pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. The clouds last long enough for Poobah to teach Ada some lessons about the nature of the cosmos, and leave in time for Ada to finally go out and look at the stars with her own eyes.

MIT Press chose Ada and the Galaxies as the first book to be published in their new imprint, MIT Kids Press. Lightman plans to write more books for them. “Ada was thrilled to have a book named after her,” says Lightman, “But now I have to write three more books since I have three more grandchildren.” Lightman says the next grandchild will get her book “in the next ten months or so.”

Ada and the Galaxies takes place at the same summer house in Maine where Lightman had his vision of infinity, and the two share a strong connection. “The underlying message of Ada is that all things in nature are made out of the same stuff and are all connected,” says Lightman. In the book Ada asks Poobah if there are seashells in other galaxies. Poobah answers yes, saying, “Everything in the universe is made out of the same stuff. It’s all part of nature. Even things that we can’t see.”

Some scientists conclude from that idea that the meaning and beauty in our lives reduces to brute matter doing nothing but realizing mathematical necessities. Lightman, however, seems to draw the opposite conclusion - that our inner lives are somehow reflected in the cosmos from which they emerge. In Ada and the Galaxies Lightman communicates this optimistic philosophy to the next generation of scientists – and artists.

Like Alan Lightman’s work, that of Samantha Power traverses disparate worlds. But whereas Lightman occupies the connecting lines between worlds, Power jumps back and forth between them – between immigrant and citizen, social critic and social official, mother and public servant. Her recent book, The Education of an Idealist documents the complexities of jumping between these worlds.

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Power rose to prominence with the publication of her first book, A Problem from Hell. The book criticizes the United States for not intervening in the many genocides of the 20th century, and argues that the United States should be more active in the use of its military and diplomatic might. The book came out of Power’s time covering the Yugoslav Wars of the 90s, during which she witnessed ethnic cleansings and despaired that developed countries were not doing enough to stop them. This experience prompted her to become an advocate for the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, of which A Problem from Hell is a founding document.

Six years after the publication of A Problem from Hell, Barack Obama appointed Power to the National Security Council, and then, for his next term, made her the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Suddenly, after years of criticizing U.S. foreign policy, Power was in a position to make it. The Education of an Idealist is in large part about Power’s difficulty in translating the ideals of her advocacy days into realities as a state official. However, Power insists that, although “some may interpret this book’s title as suggesting that I began with lofty dreams about how one person could make a difference, only to be ‘educated’ by the brutish forces that I encountered, that is not the story that follows.”

The Education of an Idealist does, however, show the challenges posed to Power’s “idealism” in her new role. On one side, there were the complexities of diplomacy, the intractability of foreign leaders, and the unforeseeable consequences of military intervention. On the other, there was Barack Obama himself, who had run on an antiinterventionist platform to a war-weary American public. But Power did not give up on her beliefs. In the face of harsh criticism she supported military intervention to oust Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria, only the former of which was carried out.

Yet much of The Education of an Idealist is about family rather than foreign policy. Power tells the story of her parents’ meeting, of her mother’s fight to receive an education, and of her family’s emmigration from Ireland. The book covers the difficulties of balancing work and family life – how, for instance, Power’s plans to read bedtime stories were thwarted by sudden international crises. Power is someone with a deep passion for her political work, but there is a palpable sense of relief when the end of Obama’s terms relieves her of her post. She then turns her attention to things like teaching her son piano, and muses that his playing sounds like that of her late father.

But duty has once again called Power away. This year President Biden appointed her as Administrator of the United States Agency of International Development. She has once again jumped from one world to another, this time from the calm, quiet beauty of Concord to the high-stakes, frenetic energy of Washington DC. But Power is, if nothing else, a veteran of such jumps – between family and work, criticism and implementation, and, the greatest gulf of all, between ideals and reality.

Sam Copeland is a Concord native and a writer based in New York.