THE HARD PROBLEM - Lincoln Center Review by Lincoln Center Theater

FALL 2018 ISSUE NO. 72

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2018, Issue Number 72 Lincoln Center Theater Review Staff Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Executive Editor Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editor Strick&Williams, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors Eric M. Mindich, Chairman Kewsong Lee, President Marlene Hess, Leonard Tow, and William D. Zabel Vice Chairmen Jonathan Z. Cohen, Chairman, Executive Committee Jane Lisman Katz, Treasurer John W. Rowe, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Mike Kriak Allison M. Blinken Eric Kuhn James-Keith Brown Betsy Kenny Lack H. Rodgin Cohen Memrie M. Lewis Ida Cole Ninah Lynne Judy Gordon Cox Phyllis Mailman Ide Dangoor Ellen R. Marram David DiDomenico John Morning Shari Eberts Brooke Garber Neidich Curtland E. Fields Elyse Newhouse Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Rusty O'Kelley Cathy Barancik Graham Andrew J. Peck David J. Greenwald Robert Pohly J. Tomilson Hill, Stephanie Shuman Chairman Emeritus David F. Solomon Judith Hiltz Tracey Travis Linda LeRoy Janklow, David Warren Chairman Emeritus Kaily Smith Westbrook Raymond Joabar Kenneth L. Wyse Caryn Zucker John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Augustus K. Oliver, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chairman Bernard Gersten, Founding Executive Producer The Rosenthal Family Foundation— Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is supported by Andrew and Betsy Kenny Lack. Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater. To subscribe to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org. Cover: Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe; Jorge Mañes Rubio, 3D reconstruction of the Madonna di Constantinopoli, from the Buona Fortuna series, 2014. Opposite page: Brainwave On Encephalogram EEG / CanStockPhoto © 2018 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Issue 72

Point Toward What You Do Not Know AN INTERVIEW WITH CORI BARGMANN 4

A Guide to Stoppard’s Universe AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK O’BRIEN 9

Kernel of Truth DAVA SOBEL 13

The Threshold of Beauty AN INTERVIEW WITH JANE IRA BLOOM 17

Close to the Mystery ELIZABETH GILBERT 20

The New York Beautification Project ELLEN HARVEY 22

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The very first edition of the Lincoln Center Theater

Stoppard’s bedside table, which you’ll see on the

Review that I edited was dedicated to Tom

Review ’s back cover.

Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, and it is both a

A company of extraordinary writers and art-

pleasure and a privilege to travel across Mr.

ists helped us investigate the marriage of art and

Stoppard’s universe. Whether it is the Second Law

science and emotion and intellect. We interviewed

of Thermo-dynamics, Catullus, or Russian revolu-

the Grammy Award–winning saxophonist Jane Ira

tionaries in the tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, Tom

Bloom, who has drawn inspiration from her years

Stoppard’s particular alchemy involves the fusing

as part of NASA’s art initiative. The acclaimed sci-

of sprawling intellectual ideas and profoundly

ence writer Dava Sobel has crafted a portrait of the

human characters who capture our hearts. Our

Nobel-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. We

audiences will have experienced his work in many

have stunning art from Vija Celmins, Jorge Manes,

productions, including The Invention of Love and

and Ellen Harvey, whose New York Beautification

The Coast of Utopia, which were directed by Jack

project resonated with the questions about

O’Brien. Now the two are collaborating again, on

altruism that are asked in the play and in Elizabeth

Stoppard’s most recent play, The Hard Problem.

Gilbert’s novel The Signature of All Things, which

The hard problem is the challenge of explaining

is excerpted here. Why do people do good things

consciousness, although the distinguished neu-

for no certain return? There are a host of questions

robiologist Cori Bargmann, who is featured in this

that can’t be explained by evolution alone. In the

issue, told me that she considers the whole brain

play, during their very first meeting at the Krohl

to be the hard problem: “The brain is what makes

Institute for Brain Science, Leo asks Hilary, as part

us human. It is responsible for our perceptions,

of her interview, how consciousness would come

and our emotions, and our memories, and our cre-

about, and she responds, “I have no idea, and nor

ativity, and our actions. And the fact that that can

does anyone else. I thought that’s why we’re here.

happen in a biological system is just miraculous.

To crack the Hard Problem.”

Even those of us who study the brain full-time are

But rather than explain the workings of the

amazed by it.” I especially like this explanation of

brain Hilary—like Annie, Thomasina, Dr. Hapgood and

the hard problem, because it captures the way I

so many of Stoppard’s unforgettable characters—

feel about Tom Stoppard’s work—it embodies what

explains the human heart and the many ways love,

makes us human, it asks unanswerable questions,

belief, and insatiable curiosity shape our lives.

it shows us how we encounter the world, and how we understand it. This edition of the Review is not only a look at the world of a play set in a brain institute but also a glimpse into the brain of Sir Tom Stoppard (he was knighted in 1993)—from the Brigitte Lacombe portrait that graces the cover to the conversation with Jack O’Brien about navigating the universe of Stoppard’s plays and the stack of books on

Alexis Gargagliano

Point Toward What You Do Not Know

IN A BOOK-LINED OFFICE at Rockefeller

University, our editors Anne Cattaneo and Alexis Gargagliano spoke about the brain, intuition, and worms with Cori Bargmann, the renowned neurobiologist who studies the relationship between genes, neural circuits, and behavior in C. elegans (a roundworm) and is the head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. EDITORS When we began working on

The Hard Problem, we started noticing mentions of brain science everywhere. We learned that President Obama requested $3 billion from Congress in 2013 for the Brain Initiative, and we learned about Paul Allen’s organization. What is a brain institute, and what kind of work goes on there? CB Paul Allen’s Institute for Brain Science is a freestanding research institute founded by a technology businessman and philanthropist who wanted to understand more about how the brain works. But, really, most people studying the brain would not be in a special place called a brain institute. They might be neurologists in a hospital trying to understand something about patients,

or they would be experimental scientists in a laboratory trying to understand something about mice, or they would be psychologists with brain-imaging machines who would be imaging the brain under different circumstances. The brain is so complicated that there are many different kinds of people studying it. There’s increasing interest in brain science these days, so more people are trying to build groups that would link these different kinds of scientists together. EDS Why is there this growing interest in the brain? CB So the name of this play is The Hard Problem, and what that refers to is the problem of consciousness. But I would say that the whole brain is the hard problem. It is amazing. The brain is what makes us human. It is responsible for our perceptions, and our emotions, and our memories, and our creativity, and our actions. And the fact that that can happen in a biological system is just miraculous. Even those of us who study the brain full-time are amazed by it. EDS How much of the brain do we currently understand? CB Remember those phrases “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and

“unknown unknowns”? (Laughter) I would say that the question of how much of the brain we understand is still one of the known unknowns. There are fields of biology that we understand a lot about. In the past fifty years we’ve learned a huge amount about DNA, the genetic material, and we’re learning more and more about it all the time. And if you asked people, How much do we really understand about genetics?, you would have a debate, but people would come up with numbers. “Oh, maybe thirty percent.” But if you ask people how much we understand about the brain, we don’t even know what we know. It could be 0.1 percent, it could be one percent. It’s probably not ten percent, and it’s definitely not fifty percent. We have a huge universe of things to understand. EDS Do you think that neuroscience is the science of the twenty-first century as physics was of the twentieth? CB I think that for the next period in our scientific development neuroscience is going to be a very important area. Whether it’s the whole twenty-first century I don’t know. Maybe by the end of the twenty-first century the focus

will be climate science or environmental science. But I think that there’s a sense that we have enough tools and enough understanding that we can at least work on these problems in a big way. There are many ways of thinking about the brain. One, what does the brain do? We’re only dimly aware of what our brain is doing, in terms of mental processes, cognition, memory formation. We have this illusion that we know everything that’s going on in there, and it is not so. We’ve kind of known that since Freud, but it’s so much bigger than that. Two, how does the brain do it? The people asking this question are trying to understand molecules, nerve cells, and collections of nerve cells. For example, molecules that you might have heard of, like oxytocin or dopamine, their effects on nerve cells in different parts of the brain, and the way that information is integrated by many brain regions to generate perceptions or actions. That’s a very large area that includes people in biochemistry, molecular biology, neurobiology, and, ultimately, systems neuroscience. Even something as simple as recognizing your sister’s voice on the telephone probably involves a hundred million brain cells firing within a second. EDS Wow.

But if you ask people how much we understand about the brain, we don’t even know what we know. . . . We have a huge universe of things to understand. CB It’s dramatic. But then there’s a third

question, which is why does the brain do these things? Which merges into questions in philosophy and teleology.

AN INTERVIEW WITH CORI BARGMANN

Perhaps those questions are the most interesting to a layperson, but I would say that, when we understand the what and the how of the brain, they will be at least as amazing. EDS Is there a particular question that fascinated you early on, something that sparked your curiosity? CB My mother read me Konrad Lorenz’s books about neuroethology and the nature of instinct, books like King Solomon’s Ring, and I was completely fascinated. I’ve gone back and read them as an adult, and as someone who studies behavior I’m still struck by how deeply and correctly he thought about these problems. What the ethologists showed was that there were behaviors that were innate to all members of a species, like the waggle dance of honeybees. The ethologists didn’t have a vocabulary to describe how that worked, but now we would say that means that somehow, one way or another, genes that are being passed on through the generations make these behaviors possible. But how? What kinds of genes? How do they prepare a brain to carry out these complicated tasks—like translating your experience with flowers into a dance and then interpreting the dances of your companions—with no previous experience? That’s the background of my interest in behavior. But, really, I think everyone is interested in behavior. After all, how does my brain work? How does my husband’s brain work? (Laughter) How does my child’s brain work? How can this not be an interesting question? EDS As everyone was explaining the heavens with theories about crystal spheres in the 1500s, it took the combined discoveries of Copernicus and, later, Galileo to literally reorder the universe, as Einstein later reordered time and space in the 1900s and Crick and Watson and Rosalind Franklin opened the field of modern genetics, building on the work of Mendel and Darwin. Are we

Scientists are excited when they can share what they know with other people.... It is really a social process. Cori Bargmann

in a similar place now, with the investigation of the brain, where these new discoveries will radically change our understanding of the paradigm of the mind? CB I’m actually not a big fan of paradigm shifts. To me, it just ends up being a stick that people use to beat each other with. It’s, like, “Well, you’re thinking about things the old way. I have a paradigm shift.” (Laughter) I think science is at an incredibly exciting time. We have so many more people working on scientific problems. We have so many more tools to solve these problems. We have ways of communicating information rapidly with each other. The speed at which science is advancing, and the things it can do, are just astonishing. This past year scientists saw that two neutron stars in a distant part of

Photograph by Marius Bugge

the galaxy had collided and given rise to a new neutron star. I’m proud of our species that we figured that out. Our tiny little animal species on this planet learned how to do that! To me, science is a cooperative venture where you build on the discoveries of other people. The LIGO Project, which made the neutron-star discovery possible, was an immense project lasting decades. It took years to be able to build the detectors and then interpret what came out of them. That is something to celebrate. I think of science as a process, like the way that the great European cathedrals were built so that they might be finished hundreds of years after they were originally designed. The architect had been

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dead for centuries by the time the last spire went up. And so many different people contribute at different stages. There are things that are landmarks: the structure of DNA is beautiful. It might be likened to a stained-glass window in Notre Dame. But as beautiful as that window is, every brick of the cathedral is important. Every contribution is important. My attitude toward science is that we should celebrate what we are able to accomplish together. EDS Has science always been so collaborative? CB You know, there are different models of science, but I would say that scientists are excited when they can share what they know with other people. That

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Web 1), 2001. Mezzotint on Hahnemühle Copperplate paper. Image: 7 x 7 3/4 inches; 18 x 20 cm. Sheet: 23 x 18 1/4 inches; 58 x 46 cm. ©Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

moment of discovery doesn’t feel right until you can tell someone else about it. And so it is really a social process. There are narratives of the lone genius in every human endeavor. Gregor Mendel figured out many of the laws of heredity, but his work wasn’t translated from the German for thirty years—and nobody else figured it out in the intervening thirty years. That is a perfect example of one person who made a unique, genius discovery. Einstein is another example, of course. But there are also big collaborative projects, like the Manhattan Project or the genome project, where bodies of work emerge. The field of molecular biology has been tremendously fertile and creative,

because so many people were involved and shared their knowledge so freely. I want to emphasize the collaborative nature of science. Science has always been international. The first relationships that grew up between Germany and the State of Israel after World War II were scientific relationships. This idea of collaboration is part of the system. We are collectively building understanding. EDS How are things changing for women in science? CB Things are better for women in science than they used to be and they’re not as good as they will be, and we can’t lose hope. We can’t despair and we can’t give up. EDS What is the hard problem? CB Tom Stoppard’s hard problem is the problem of consciousness, of the mind, and its generation by the brain. I think understanding the brain itself is a hard problem, so I would broaden that. EDS Working on the play, we’ve encountered all sorts of new words, like qualia. Could you explain that? CB You’re describing exactly the level at which the study of the brain becomes the study of the mind. The languages become different, and the questions become different. The study of the mind has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. The study of the brain is a relatively recent process. They interact with each other and they talk to each other, but they’re not the same thing. So when a philosopher like John Searle talks about qualia that’s something very different from when a molecular biologist talks about ion channels, but they are unified in that both of them are associated with the same organ in our body, which is the brain. EDS Isn’t there a famous joke in scientific circles about a policeman coming across a man searching for his lost house keys under a street lamp? “Why are you looking there?” “I’m looking here because that’s where the light is.” So scientists are looking for

AN INTERVIEW WITH CORI BARGMANN

consciousness in neurons, but could it be found in bacteria or in some completely different thing? Is the focus of research—I’m talking now about the qualia—on higher consciousness, or are scientists simply not dealing with consciousness? CB You’re going to need to talk to someone who’s better at the philosophy than me, because I am an auto mechanic. (Laughter) We’re looking at a car. My kind of science is about what the transmission does. You’re asking questions about the driver. The physicians, and the philosophers, and the psychologists, and the biologists, and the geneticists—we all have an incomplete understanding of each other’s work on the brain. So a layperson isn’t really at a disadvantage. EDS Do you make a point of reading in other fields? Are you interested in what the mind people are doing? CB One of the great things about being a neuroscientist is that I can read almost anything I feel like reading and declare it to be work. (Laughter) I love to read. I love theater. Stoppard’s play Arcadia has one of the most brilliant expositions of the process of being a scientist that I have ever read anywhere. When I saw it a few years ago I was so moved during the intermission, and couldn’t understand how anyone who is not a scientist could understand what this play was about. Then I saw a landscape architect that I know, and she said, “The things he’s talking about are so profound, but I don’t see how anyone who isn’t in landscape architecture could really understand what he’s talking about.” EDS I’m obsessed with Barbara McClintock and the role of intuition in science. I’m also interested in the discovery of the shape of the carbon atom, of Einstein’s faith in his, at the time, unprovable equations. People think of science as completely rational, which, of course, it is, and it’s subject to the standard scientific protocols, but at the same

time there are other powerful forces at play: call it intuition, feeling, or faith. CB Yes. Intuition is a very important element of science, because you can gather facts and facts and facts and facts. And you can gather more facts, and you can gather them with more and more precision. But the question is which facts to gather. Which new facts are pointing you toward what you don’t know?

Intuition in science usually grows out of deep knowledge. Intuition in science usually grows out of deep knowledge. In that way, it’s similar to many other human activities. After you’ve spent a long time doing something and you’ve seen some of these and some of those, you’ve built in your own mind what we call a representation, an understanding of the way things are. I think you build that understanding before you can actually describe it in a set of equations or words. Often, you can’t quite say what it is that makes you think that this is a promising direction, but that hunch will be built out of this deep knowledge. And that was Barbara McClintock’s sense, the feeling for the organism. She had a deep knowledge of the corn plants and many, many observations that had given her a sense of the corn that other people did not have. And this is what we humans do extremely well. We’re really good at recognizing patterns that come from many different subtle cues. It’s what our friends the computers are not so good at yet. They’re very good at solving a well-defined problem, over and over. In my opinion, our best hope in the future will be to use humans and machines each for what they’re really good at. The other thing about intuition is that it can come from unexpected

directions. Right next door to this office is Torsten Wiesel, a great neuroscientist who, together with David Hubel, made the first descriptions of how the brain sees. For example, they discovered that the visual brain follows lines and angles and sharp contrasts, and especially moving lines and edges. That’s the foundation of visual neuroscience. Go back forty years earlier, and look at films by Man Ray or Viking Eggeling in the 1920s. They had it. I could teach an entire course on visual neuroscience using their art. And they, in turn, were influenced by the Gestalt psychologists. There was a dialogue between intuition in art and intuition in brain science. EDS Is there a place for religion in a scientist’s mind? CB I think the conflict between science and religion is overrated. One thing you learn when you do science is that there are a lot of things you don’t know. And I think the conclusion of the book of Job is that we really shouldn’t assume that we understand God’s actions very well. Science and religion both leave open the possibility of discovery and of the unknown. The Big Bang theory was first voiced by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest. At that time gradualism, the theory of small changes, was the way of thinking about the universe, and when he first proposed the Big Bang people were, like, “Well, that’s exactly what you would expect a priest to say. There was some one, huge event that gave rise to the universe.” EDS Will the hard problem ever be solved? Will there be a time in future centuries when we will understand how all of these aspects of the brain work together? CB Francis Crick wrote an essay many years ago about how we would know when genetics was solved. I don’t think we can write that piece yet about the brain, how we will know when the brain is solved. Whether that solves the

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philosophical problems is open to discussion and debate. EDS Do you debate the philosophical problems? Like, what about free will? Are we biologically determined? CB Actually, I did an interview with a Norwegian journalist that was published in Norwegian junior-high-school textbooks, titled Even Worms Have Free Will. Their actions are unpredictable. EDS What is your favorite thing about worms? (Laughter) CB Let’s see. My favorite thing about worms is that one of their strongest motivations is social motivation. What other worms are around, and what are they doing, and what food have they had recently, and how old are they? And they communicate this to each other using this incredibly complex chemical language. So social motivation goes all the way. EDS All the way down the food chain. CB We live in a culture that’s dominated by Judeo-Christian ideas and the idea that human consciousness is a very special thing. Maybe if some of these scientific questions were being discussed in a context like Buddhism, where there’s a continuum with no clear break between one form of life and the next, we would be phrasing the questions in a different way. I’m philosophically not very sophisticated, but I wonder whether changing perspectives would change our questions.

A Guide to Stoppard’s Universe

Illustration © Grafilu Hand lettering © Tom Stoppard

OUR CO-EXECUTIVE EDITOR, Anne Cattaneo, and André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, spoke with Jack O’Brien about his decades-long relationship with one of the greatest playwrights of our time, Tom Stoppard. O’Brien has directed Hapgood, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, and The Hard Problem for LCT. ANNE CATTANEO When did you first hear

the name Tom Stoppard? JACK O’BRIEN I thought Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the single most remarkable title for a play of my generation, and I longed to see it. But I didn’t see the damn thing until Tom himself made a movie of it. AC When did you meet Tom? JO In 1981-82, while I was at the Old Globe in San Diego as artistic director, I got a call from Manny Azenberg, the Broadway producer who was producing all of Neil Simon’s shows. He was interested in doing a play called Hapgood, by Tom Stoppard, at a regional theater, and asked if Tom Hall, my business partner, and I would be interested? We said, “Yes, of course.” So I went to New York and had breakfast with Manny Azenberg and Tom Stoppard at an outdoor café, where Tom was, literally, smoking constantly. At one point, Tom looked at me and he said, “I need to get cigarettes. Come with me.” So we left Manny at the table and walked to a kiosk. We were talking about trout fishing, something he liked to do, and at which my late father was brilliant. And as a child I was taught to be able to put a dry fly into a teacup as far away as you can think, although I never caught a fish.

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Hall and I saw an announcement that Hapgood was being done in Los Angeles. Nothing was ever said to us. Now, look, I’m a modest person. We didn’t get it, and that was the end. I never thought anything about it. Then, a few years later, I wanted to do a production of Tom’s play Rough Crossing at the Old Globe. But I found out that somebody else had the rights, and I also found out that Tom Stoppard was humiliated because he felt he had deeply offended me and the Globe by not contacting us to say that they were going in another direction with Hapgood. Fade out. Fade in. Stockard Channing is doing a Neil Simon play called Jake’s Women at the Globe Theatre. It’s about to come to New York, where I was vaguely involved, until it was announced in the papers that the play was not going to New York, after all, and my company, including Stockard, read this in the New York Times instead of hearing the news personally from anybody. She was furious. But, on that same day, the phone rings in her apartment on the West Coast, where she was racked by sobs and, lo and behold, it was Lincoln Center Theater. They were doing a play called Six Degrees of Separation, by John Guare, with Blythe Danner. Apparently, Miss Danner had left the production in rehearsal, and so Stockard came to New York and had the success of her life in this wonderful play. Then she went to London to do it in the West End, and who comes calling at the theater but Tom Stoppard. And under his arm he has a copy of Hapgood. And he says to her, “It’s my loose-tooth play. I think it’s really very good, but it’s never worked and I think you’d be splendid in

For a moment Tom was a real person and not this austere, extraordinary man. For a moment Tom was a real person and not this austere, extraordinary man. Fade out. Fade in later. Tom

it.” “Thank you,” she said. “Whom shall we get to direct?” he asks. “What about Jack O’Brien?” she suggests. And he

says, “Oh, my God, I’m humiliated. I’ve offended this man in so many ways. He wanted to do one play, but I couldn’t give it to him. He wanted to do another play, but I couldn’t give him that. But, yes, I’ll do anything to make up for this.” So André Bishop offered me Hapgood, with Stockard Channing in the leading role. AC André, how did you meet Tom? ANDRÉ BISHOP I met Tom in London, because I went to see Arcadia. I loved it, and I wanted to do it here. Manny Azenberg said to me, “You really should take Tom Stoppard on at Lincoln Center, because the Broadway climate is changing and serious work is not as welcome as it once was, and the commercial life of a play is much more complicated than it was ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. He needs a home, and I don’t know if the commercial theater is his home anymore.” So I met Tom and he was very smart, very Tom, because he said, “Yes, I will let Lincoln Center Theater do Arcadia if you do Hapgood.” JO Really? AB Yes. AC While you were rehearsing Hapgood, I was having a very difficult time with a young author in the Directors Lab; she didn’t like anything and wasn’t helpful to the actors. And she would become very upset when the actors asked her questions. Down the hall you were rehearsing Hapgood, and one day Tom swept into the room, as only Tom Stoppard can, and he addressed the actors of a play that he’d written over a decade before and that had been done many times. He said, “I am here for you, and if there’s anything that you need from me or that you need me to change, please tell me, because we’re working on this together and I am at your disposal.” I thought, If only I had brought my young writer down the hall she would have learned something. That is always his attitude, even on a play that isn’t a recent creation.

INTERVIEW WITH JACK O’BRIEN

I don’t think directors ever have any idea of what they’re doing except, in my case, serving a writer. That, I do think is my job. Jack O’Brien

So, Jack, after Hapgood you directed The Invention of Love for Lincoln Center Theater. JO Yes. I sat down with Bob Crowley, the extraordinary designer, who has worked with me on all the Stoppard plays I’ve done. And we had such difficulty trying to figure out this extremely complicated play. Tom’s plays are never about one thing. They’re centered on an energy or a subject, but that just gives him an excuse to layer various aspects of philosophy, science, emotional connections. You can’t say what the plays are about, because they’re not really one thing. They’re a sort of Stoppardian universe that he shines a light into briefly and you go as a guest, almost on a tour, to figure it out. I recently saw the Broadway revival of Travesties. And I thought to myself, I’ve done all this work of Tom’s—wouldn’t you think I could understand this play? I watched it unfold, and I thought, I’ve no

Photo by Eric Ryan Anderson/for The Washington Post via Getty Images.

idea what’s going on, and yet it was like being caught in this astonishing blizzard of intellectual stimulation that was so much fun, so enthusiastic, so theatrical, so incredibly articulate, that later I sort of did understand it. But if you’d stopped the tape at any moment and said, “What’s going on?,” I would have been hard-pressed to come up with a declarative sentence. AC But you have always found the beating heart that carries an audience through the performance in the wishes, desires, and hopes of the characters. JO So they tell me. I don’t think directors ever have any idea of what they’re doing except, in my case, serving a writer. That, I do think is my job. But, in terms of the beating heart, I don’t ever try to call Tom to account for what he writes. I wouldn’t even presume to know how. I think that his peers in England do try to do that. I think the Oxbridge group of men, who see him as some

appalling autodidact because he’s not a college graduate, want very much to measure up. I usually look at what surrounds Tom’s work and try to understand from a humanistic point of view who these people are. The one guiding force in doing The Invention of Love was my memory of myself at the university, when, frankly, the nerds were beautiful. Young men and women in their twenties couldn’t be more exciting, more beautiful, fresher, just let away from their homes for the first time on their own, flexing their muscles, spreading their wings, showing their plumage to each other. AC And that was a very visible part of that production. JO I was determined to make it sexy. Bob Crowley and I sat in my apartment on Central Park West and read the play aloud to each other. At the end of each scene we would say, “Oh, that’s a romantic scene. Oh, that’s satire.” We had a label and we had colored Post-its, and we stuck colors onto the scenes after we’d identified the tone of them. And in doing so we realized what a kaleidoscope of intellectual ideas the play was, all of which were really beautifully blended only if they were kept separate. So in an odd way we gave every scene its head and came up with a production scheme that, to this day, I think is one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced in the theater and may be the best thing we ever did. And I include our triumph with The Coast of Utopia, which owes a great deal to our experience with The Invention of Love. In other words, we really did sit back and do what he wanted us to do. We suspended our own egos, our own directives, our own determinations to hand-wrestle it to some sort of control, and we just went where it wanted to go. And it wanted to go in the most astonishingly beautiful ways. And we had a great company. I don’t think anyone was more surprised by the success of The Invention of Love than you and I.

AB Right.

AC When you and Bob first flew over

to London to see The Coast of Utopia, you came back and told me, “We didn’t understand one thing about the play.” JO Let me say something about that. I have gone to school on every play. Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, and Nick Hytner—I’ve seen some of the finest directors of our time take on Tom’s work at the top. And when Trevor Nunn was doing The Coast of Utopia he was directing the first play while Tom was still writing the third play. I contend that neither Trevor nor Tom knew what

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

the cliff. It had a very emotionally transparent and compelling engine. So does The Hard Problem—though in this play it’s that ancient Aristotelian resolution of recognizing your blood relatives. That’s the engine that pulls you through all the science. Tom’s plays are fundamentally very tuned in to the essence of drama. JO This brings us to The Hard Problem. A summer ago—now two summers ago— André, you called me and said, “If we’re going to do The Hard Problem we need to make a decision now.” I had seen Nick’s production with the designs of Bob

But, in terms of the beating heart, I don’t ever try to call Tom to account for what he writes. I wouldn’t even presume to know how. he had or what it was until years later. And, in my case, I’ve had the advantage of seeing what they did, how they were puzzling through it, and the route they took, and then I chose to go in another direction. So I cannot say that the work those distinguished gentlemen have done on his plays did not, in fact, influence and enlighten what I did. It did. AB I remember, before we did Utopia, Trevor, whom I knew a little bit through Arcadia, called me up and said, “André, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. Are you sure you want to take this on?” JO You never told me that. AC It was a mammoth undertaking, but at the end of it all I had the realization that the structure of The Coast of Utopia was identical to The Guns of Navarone. Do you remember that old movie? JO Yes, I do, but how the hell did you make that connection? AC Because there was the muscle. There was the explosive guy. There was the guy who could write. There was the guy with money. Six friends set out to climb

Crowley at the National. Although it was a good evening, I didn’t understand it. So, at your request, André, I sat in the back yard and read the play aloud. I was equally baffled when it was over. I called you up and I said, “André, I can’t make much sense of this. It isn’t speaking to me.”And you said, “Read it again.” And I hung up and read it again out loud to myself. And the second time I thought, Oh, wait a minute. And then I read it a third time, and I wept. AB I remember vividly you coming up to me in the middle of Utopia rehearsals about the third play. You were about to go into rehearsal with it. And I remember you saying to me, “I don’t know what the heck this is about. I don’t know where anyone’s going to be. I don’t even know what it’s going to look like.” And I thought, Oh, great. But that third play turned out in many ways to have been the most popular of the three. JO Well, there was a reason. It was because we had taken our audience along with us. And so what we hadn’t counted on was the fact that Tom’s

magic had stuck with the audience and they were hooked. AC I was sitting with Tom in the tech rehearsal of the third play, Salvage. We were watching the opening scene, which is very mysterious—a sort of English pantomime. And, Jack, you had the actors in a line and you were onstage saying, “I don’t know what to do here.” The rest of the play seemed pretty easy for you, but that opening was a bear. Tom said to me, “He’s not trusting the material deeply enough. If he trusted it, it would be revealed to him.” And I said, “Well, what would be revealed?” (Laughs) Thinking I could run down and tell you, but he didn’t say. JO There’s no one like him, and maybe there has never been anyone like him. AC Once, I was about to interview Tom and I said, “Just tell me what you want me to ask you and I’ll ask you. I always say that before I interview anyone. And he said, “Please do not ask me what I’m doing next, because my brain is completely empty.” JO He worries about this, because he doesn’t write prolifically. AC Well, I just made a list of his plays and, I have to say, he’s pretty damned prolific. JO Yes, but not compared to David Hare or his compatriots, who really can spin them out. Tom takes a long time. He writes in longhand on yellow pads. He does not use a computer. He writes by hand. It’s arduous work. The playwriting process in the classical sense of the word. Boatwright. Cobbling together something to make it real. And that’s what he does. He is the author of his own oeuvre, in that respect, and no one sounds like that. I’ve been auditioning actors this week and you look at it on the page and it’s one thing, and suddenly you hear actors say it and it’s a completely different experience. And you think, Boy, that is alchemy.

Kernel of Truth

I don’t feel I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all the way along. Barbara McClintock

I USED TO CURSE THE SILKEN THREADS that swathed

shaped what she memorably called her “feeling for

they clung to the kernels, how they littered the

their individuality, their place in nature. “I don’t feel

the ears of corn I husked on summer evenings—how kitchen, multiplying like beach sand. But that was

before Barbara McClintock taught me to see corn as a higher-order life-form, and to appreciate the corn silk’s role in the plant’s life cycle: each individual

strand provides a pathway that leads a lone grain of

the organism.” She saw the plants in their entirety, I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all

the way along,” she told an interviewer. “So I know

every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a real pleasure to know them.”

As the first person to master successful

pollen, fallen from the tassel at the top of the stalk,

techniques for staining and visualizing the genetic

sac, which, when fertilized, develops into a kernel.

discoveries that forged tangible links between a

inside a newly forming ear to a single embryonic

One strand of silk, one kernel of corn—a mantra for

changing a chore into a meditation on complexity. McClintock, who counted a Nobel Prize, a

MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and a

National Medal of Science among her many awards, personally raised all the corn she studied in her

research. She began tending fields of the colorful maize called Zea mays in the 1920s, as a student

botanist at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York,

material of maize, McClintock made fundamental

cell’s internal machinery and the traits of succeeding generations. Her friend and fellow researcher Marcus Rhoades once complimented her on her

marvelous ability to look at a maize cell under the microscope and see so much in it—so much more

than other investigators noticed. “When I look at a cell,” she assured him, “I get down in that cell and look around.”

McClintock’s focused concentration distin-

and continued the practice everywhere she worked

guished her long before she chose a life in science.

research subjects from seedlings to mature adults

she was content to lie by herself on a pillow,

throughout her long life (1902–92). Nurturing her

At just a few months of age, her parents recalled,

Photograph of Barbara McClintock's ears of corn and a microscope.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

absorbed in a single toy, without crying for atten-

form no one could tell. Nor could anyone explain

thinking, into an adolescent who was curious about

or a maize plant developed tissues for specialized

tion. She grew from a child who liked to sit alone, many subjects and delighted in problem-solving.

As the third daughter in the family, Barbara sensed her father’s disappointment in her sex. She said

that he treated her like the son he’d wanted—buying her boxing gloves at age four, for example,

and teaching her to play baseball—even after her

younger brother came along. Nevertheless, it was

her father who respected her determination to go

to college, and who overruled her mother’s objection that a university degree would make Barbara “unmarriageable.”

At Cornell she dabbled in the course catalog,

trying out any subject that intrigued her, until the fateful semester that she sampled genetics, got

her first good look through a microscope at maize

cells, and excelled so markedly that her professors

pushed her into graduate-level courses before she’d even finished the requirements for a bachelor’s

degree. The substance of heredity was only vaguely known when McClintock found her calling. Geneticists of the 1920s spoke of genes the way today’s

astronomers speak of dark matter and dark energy: as entities that must surely exist, though in what

how a complex organism such as a human being

functions—a lung, say, or a leaf, a spine or a stalk— when all the cells in its body carried the same

genetic material. Herein lay mystery sufficient to sweep McClintock away.

Despite her youth, despite being female in a predominantly male sphere, she was credited with initiating a “golden age” of maize genetics. McClintock’s doctoral dissertation described

her successful effort to count and map the chro-

mosomes (the carriers of genetic material) in the maize cell—a feat that others had tried but failed to accomplish. Then, following the avenue thus opened, she proceeded to tie specific traits to

specific chromosomes. Despite her youth, despite being female in a predominantly male sphere, she

was credited with initiating a “golden age” of maize genetics. Only later would she encounter and decry the “general anti-female sentiment” in science.

And, even then, her admiring peers would induct her into the National Academy of Sciences (only

the third woman to be so honored), and also elect her (the first female) president of the Genetics Society of America.

After completing her Ph.D. in 1927, and with no

professional aspirations other than to continue as

she had begun, McClintock pursued her research in corn hollows and laboratories from Cornell to the University of Missouri, the California Institute of

Technology, Stanford University, and, ultimately, the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Genetics at

Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. She filled

her niche at Cold Spring Harbor in 1941, and remained there well past reaching retirement age in 1967. She considered it “the only place I have been where the

anti-female bias did not face me much of the time.” Through her experiments, McClintock demon-

strated that genes could be alternately bolstered or suppressed by “controlling elements” that worked

Courtesy of the Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society.

among them. She also showed that genes were

not locked in place like beads threaded on a string,

but could—and did—change their positions readily. Like many scientists, she practiced no organized

religion, but neither did she harbor any prejudice.

When she learned, as a coed, that the sorority she’d been invited to join excluded her new roommates

and friends because they were Jewish, she broke her pledge. Over the course of her life she expressed interest in Taoism and Buddhism, but ESP and

UFOs also interested her, as did almost any deeply

DAVA SOBEL

McClintock’s science became her life partner. . . . “I could never understand marriage,” she told the biographer Evelyn Fox Keller. “I never went through the experience of requiring it.” McClintock’s science became her life partner.

puzzling phenomenon. She seems to have drawn

Although she had dated several men in college,

find in religious faith, perhaps even the ecstasy of

colleagues, she maintained no known intimate rela-

from her scientific endeavors the solace that others

and formed numerous close and lasting bonds with

certain devotional practices.

tionships. “I could never understand marriage,” she

Barbara McClintock. Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

told the biographer Evelyn Fox Keller. “I never went

Like a chain of biblical begats, these records docu-

Another McClintock biographer, Nathaniel

disappeared in maize kernels over time. In autumn,

through the experience of requiring it.”

Comfort, observed, “Her intelligence was of that

startling sort that when you spoke to her, regardless of the topic, she seemed to rise above your

train of thought and point out features of the landscape beyond your horizon.”

By her own assessment, McClintock’s intellec-

tual skill lay in her ability to integrate disparate

facts and observations with hunches about hidden processes. When she didn’t have an answer to a

research question, she had “the joy of going at it”—

sometimes for years at a stretch. Some non-scientists struggle to imagine what scientists do when they

are “doing research.” In McClintock’s case, activities varied with the seasons. From May to October she spent part of every day in her cornfield, watering,

watching, waiting for the opportunity to intervene

mented the genealogies of traits that appeared and McClintock summarized all that she had observed, macroscopically and microscopically, in her har-

vested corn. She analyzed her data, pondered the

results, and devised new experiments, new plantings, new crossings for next year. She also jotted down

extensive notes in which she assessed the current

state of knowledge in genetics, considered the big questions that needed to be answered, and culti-

vated her own theories. She shared these ideas in lengthy letters (of twenty, thirty, even sixty pages,

plus diagrams) to other geneticists. Sometimes she enclosed a few exemplary kernels for illustration. She also read, or, rather, studied, the work pub-

lished in genetics journals, using a straightedge and

a variety of colors to neatly underline key passages. Over the winter she picked out kernels of

in the plants’ reproduction. She kept the number

interest and grew them into seedlings in the green-

aspect of their care. She kept the plants small, too,

claimed that this made for good exercise when she

of plants small, the better to handle alone every

because she herself stood barely five feet tall, and could not have reached the pollen-bearing tassels

of typical cornstalks in a farmer’s field. Her shorter stalks sprouted extra side branches, called tillers, which yielded plenty of extra-large ears, with an

abundance of multi-colored and multi-patterned kernels for her studies.

As soon as ears began to form, she covered

each one with a glassine bag—a kind of birth con-

trol, in that it barred any free-floating pollen from

entering. In the same cautious spirit, she top-hatted each tasseled stalk with a brown bag, and cinched the opening shut with a paper clip to keep pollen

from escaping. Her exacting experiments demanded specific mating combinations, whether a crosspollination of two selected individuals or a self-

fertilization involving the male and female parts of a

single plant. Nothing could be left to chance. When she saw silk protruding from the end of an ear, she

slipped off the see-through bag and dusted the silks with pollen that she had collected earlier—but

not too much earlier, since pollen retains its potency for only a few hours.

She gave every plant a number, and every

crossing a code that she cataloged on index cards.

Image © Photographer Name

house. Winter also found her shoveling snow. She couldn’t play tennis. Since she spent most of her

time outdoors or in her lab, she never bothered to install a telephone in her nearby living quarters. As

a result, she did not receive word of her 1983 Nobel Prize via the usual early-morning call from Sweden

but heard it on a radio news broadcast. It seemed strange to her, even “a little unfair,” she said later that day, to win such recognition for doing what

she most loved to do. She had already been amply

rewarded by the freedom, granted to her across six decades, to follow her curiosity through generations of maize.

DAVA SOBEL is the author of several nonfiction titles in the history of science: Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, and, most recently, The Glass Universe. A former science reporter for the New York Times, she has written for numerous magazines, including Aeon, Audubon, Harvard Magazine, Life, The New Yorker, and Smithsonian. Her two-act play about Copernicus, And the Sun Stood Still, was commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation initiative, and was also supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

THIS SUMMER OUR EDITOR, Alexis

Gargagliano, met with the soprano saxophonist and composer Jane Ira Bloom, who is not only a Grammy Award– winning musician but also the first musician ever to be commissioned by the NASA Art Program. (An asteroid has even been named in her honor.) In her Upper West Side apartment, Bloom spoke to Gargagliano about the intersection of art and science, and about the unknown.

One of the things that artists and scientists have in common is our patience with an ambiguous moment. We can stay in a place that we “don’t know” for long periods of time. Jane Ira Bloom

Photograph by Johnny Moreno.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO How did you begin your collaboration with NASA? JANE IRA BLOOM In the early eighties, my husband and I were having dinner with a friend of ours, the actor Brian Dennehy. Things weren’t going great with my career and I was kind of down, so Brian asked me, “What are you interested in?” And I said, “I’ve always been interested in space exploration. I’ve watched every launch since the beginning of the space program.” And Brian says to me, “Well, why don’t you write them a letter?” I thought he was crazy, but then I thought about it. I was really interested in any research NASA might have done on the future of the arts in space. And I’m particularly interested in zero gravity and how that might affect how people listen in a new dimensional way. So I essentially wrote a letter in a bottle to NASA. Six months later, I got an envelope back with the NASA logo

on it from Robert Schulman, who was the head of something that I didn’t even know existed, the NASA Art Program. It’s been in existence since the very beginning of the space program. It’s commissioned visual artists to observe firsthand what goes on at various NASA facilities, from launches and landings to deep-space exploration, and, based on that experience, to contribute a work of art to the agency’s space-art collection. After corresponding for many years, Bob and I came up with the idea of commissioning the first musician for NASA. AG What drew you to the launches to begin with? JIB I think it’s a frame of mind. I was always fascinated by unknowable things, things unknown. From the time I was very little, I can remember being interested in space exploration and space. I had the same sense of awe that you often hear astronauts talk about when they describe the overview effect of looking back at the earth, or at the vastness of the universe. AG Was there something in their awe that you recognized from your own moments of creative discovery? JIB In 2016, I attended a conference called “Arts & Mars,” which brought together NASA scientists in charge of the Mars exploration program and artists from many different disciplines. The place where we intersected turned

out to be in the moment of a creative thought. Our processes are very different, but I think the inspirational moment—that nexus where you go, “Ah!”— is very similar. AG You draw inspiration from many different grooves in the world. JIB Yes, I’ve always been a lateral thinker—always been interested in the world of ideas and, I suppose, what you would call science for laymen. I’m not a scientist myself. I’m interested in exploration. Because I’m an improviser I’m interested in choices that are made spontaneously, what feels intuitively right in the moment, and that, I think, gives me a certain way of looking at the world. My interests have been varied, space exploration being a long-standing one, but they really range from Abstract Expressionist art to neuroscience and Emily Dickinson. AG And how do you translate these ideas into art? JIB I always find that incredibly difficult to talk about. But I think one of the things that artists and scientists have in common is our patience with an ambiguous moment. We can stay in a place that we “don’t know” for long periods of time. I attended another conference a few years ago that was organized by DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] called “Art in Science,” which was really special. Here were people who were on the very cutting edge of science choosing to converse with artists from different disciplines. Everyone was invited to talk about their work and how they approach it, and what we found, as the day went on, was that the scientists were keen to be around the artists and their creative process. They kept telling us that they envied the amount of time they thought artists could stay in a place of not knowing. The scientists described their work as more goal-oriented, and they often felt ushered much too quickly from the moment of creative discovery.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

AG Is there a particular moment of inspiration that you can describe? JIB Sure. I’ll tell you the story behind a piece I wrote called “Most Distant Galaxy.” I developed a correspondence with the people at NASA while I was working on my commission and I’d often get press releases. At the time, the Hubble Space Telescope had just seen imagery of what was then the most distant galaxy ever observed. And so this big press release came out, with amazing pictures. I had just been to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, and got a close-up look at the place where all that telemetry—all the satellite imagery— comes in from the deep-space program. Not that I understand even half of it, but if you just show me the pictures I get excited by the concept of it. So that press release was like a springboard for my imagination. It got me thinking about the distances that we were talking about and what that meant. My mind goes to music because that’s my primary language, but it’s the ideas themselves that spark the imaginative leap. AG I was interested, too, in the way you are so fascinated by movement and how the sound comes out of your saxophone, and I wondered whether you’ve ever looked at that from a scientific point of view, or whether it was always experiential—the way you hear the sound? JIB Well, it started off very experiential. I just happen to move a lot when I play, and it was only when I started working with choreographers that I became more aware of it. Eventually, I wound up expanding this personal sound vocabulary into an orchestration technique for other instruments. But I’ve never spent any time talking with scientists about the Doppler effect, which is really what I’m playing around with, or the analog electronic effects that I merge with my acoustic saxophone sound when I’m making these Doppler-like swoops. AG Do you think this deeply in many

fields, or are you particularly drawn to science? JIB It’s not just science. When I decide that I’m interested in something I tend to go down the rabbit hole, wherever that might be. I played some interesting concerts a few weeks ago, performing live via the Internet with improvising musicians all over the world in real time. I was playing with an ensemble of Korean world-music instrumentalists in Seoul, jazz new-music improvisers in San Diego, along with a quartet here in New York City. We were all hooked up visually and sonically. AG That’s magical. JIB It was. I got so excited when I started playing an improvised duet with a Korean flute player. How could I do that? The rhythmic precision of the linkup is not completely there. There is still a slight delay in the sound, but the idea of it—that we were making expressive music together in real time, halfway around the world. Pretty amazing. AG Have you sent your music into space? JIB No. I don’t think it’s ever been up there, but I have read about some composers whose music has gone into space. It’s an exciting idea. And I have an asteroid named after me (Asteroid 6083janeirabloom), discovered by the astronomer Brian Skiff at Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona. I’m told it has a very eccentric orbit. . . . I’ve also read a lot about space habitation and astronauts’ descriptions of life in zero-gravity environments. AG How does that change sound in music? JIB Well, it’s more of a conceptual question, because there is no sound in the vacuum of space. But at the International Space Station it occurred to me that if you’re in an environment where there is no “up and down,” then the whole concept of a proscenium stage and a stationary audience might be out the door. Maybe it’s sound

surround. Maybe it’s circular. Maybe it’s music that you have to fly through in order to hear. I don’t know. These are the kinds of things that I think about. AG Who are some of the scientists you’re especially interested in? JIB The neuroscientist Dr. Charles Limb has been putting jazz musicians in MRIs at Johns Hopkins to study what goes on in the brain when jazz musicians improvise. He used a plastic keyboard so that the musicians could actually play while they were in the MRIs. He wanted to see what was going on in the brain when they were improvising in different ways—both simply and in more complex ways. Basically, he showed that, when jazz musicians improvise, two very significant things happen in their brains. One is that there is a deactivation in the frontal part of the brain that’s responsible for conscious self-monitoring. And there’s an activation in another

AUTHOR AN INTERVIEW NAMEWITH JANE IRA BLOOM

part of the brain that’s responsible for autobiographical self-expression. So you’re not judging when you’re playing, and you’re also in a state of mind where you’re saying something about yourself. AG You seem very interested in interdisciplinary conversations, and listening is at the core of what you do. Could you talk about how you see the world, in that respect—how we communicate through art and ideas? JIB If there was ever a time when it was important to connect emotionally and spiritually with others, it is now. I felt it when I was playing that Internet concert. The news in the media was all about relations with Korea, and there we were actually talking and making music together. There is a profound connection that happens on a musical level. It’s not verbal; it’s something else. So those interdisciplinary experiences feel especially meaningful to me right now.

Jorge Mañes Rubio. The Moon Temple (Earth Oculus), from the Peak of Eternal Light series, 2017.

Courtesy of Barakat Contemporary.

Who knows? There might come a time when we can’t travel internationally to perform. How are we going to come together to make beauty in the world? You know? And I don’t mean beauty like pretty. I mean just beauty. Communication. Edgard Varèse was an innovative orchestral composer in the 1900s who was one of the first composers to use electronic instruments and to think of music in more scientific ways. He said, “On the threshold of beauty, science and art collaborate.”

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

must. The Hortus will protect you! We could pub-

lish it ourselves! We even could publish it under my name, if you dread censure.”

But Alma was hesitating not from fear of the

church, but from a deep conviction that her theory was not quite yet scientifically incontrovertible.

A small hole existed in her logic, she felt sure, and she could not deduce how to close it. Alma was a

perfectionist and more than a little bit of a pedant, and she certainly was not going to be caught pub-

lishing a theory with a hole in it, even a small hole. She was not afraid of offending religion, as she fre-

quently told her uncle; she was afraid of offending something far more sacred to her: reason.

For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she

could not, for the life of her, understand the evolu-

tionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice. If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral

and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the

key to dominance, adaptation, and endurance—then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of An excerpt from

The Signature of All Things DURING THOSE YEARS, Alma also spent a consider-

able amount of time working over her theory of

competitive alteration. Uncle Dees had been urging

someone like her sister Prudence?

Whenever Alma mentioned her sister’s name,

with respect to her theory of competitive alteration, her uncle groaned. “Not again!” he would say, pulling

at his beard. “No one has heard of Prudence, Alma! No one cares!”

her to publish the paper since he’d read it upon her arrival in 1854, but Alma had resisted then, and

she continued to resist. Moreover, she refused to allow him to discuss her theory with anyone else.

Her reluctance brought nothing but frustration to her good uncle, who believed Alma’s theory both

important and very probably correct. He accused her

For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.

of being overly timid, of holding back. Specifically,

he accused her of fearing religious condemnation, should she make public her notions of continuous creation and species transmutation.

“You simply do not have the courage to be a

God-killer,” said this good Dutch Protestant, who had attended church quite devoutly every Sabbath

of his life. “Come now, Alma—what are you afraid of? Show a little of your father’s audacity, child!

Go forth and be a terror in the world! Wake up the whole barking dog-kennel of controversy, if you

But Alma cared, and the “Prudence Problem,”

as she came to call it, troubled her mind considerably, for it threatened to undo her entire theory. It especially troubled her because it was all so personal.

Alma had been the intended beneficiary, after all, of an act of great generosity and self-sacrifice on

Prudence’s part almost forty years earlier, and she had never forgotten it. Prudence had silently given up her one true love—with the hope that George

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Hawkes would marry Alma instead, and that Alma

(as another example of extraordinary goodness)

Prudence’s act of sacrifice had been utterly futile

another might live, and would just as unhesitat-

would benefit from that marriage. The fact that did not in any way diminish its sincerity.

Why would a person do such a thing?

Alma could answer that question from a moral

would unhesitatingly deny themselves food that ingly risk injury or death to save a stranger’s baby, or even a stranger’s house cat.

Furthermore, there was nothing analogous

standpoint (Because Prudence is kind and selfless),

to such extreme examples of human self-sacrifice

(Why do kindness and selflessness exist?). Alma

she could see. Yes, within a hive of bees, or a pack

but she could not answer it from a biological one

entirely understood why her uncle tore at his beard whenever she mentioned the name Prudence.

She recognized that—in the vast scope of human and natural history—this tragic triangle between

Prudence, George, and herself was so tiny and so

insignificant that it was almost farcical to raise the subject at all (and within a scientific discussion,

no less). But still—the question would not go away. Why would a person do such a thing?

Every time Alma thought about Prudence, she

was forced to ask herself this question again, and

then watch helplessly as her theory of competitive alteration fell apart before her eyes. For Prudence Whittaker Dixon, after all, was scarcely a unique

example. Why did anyone ever act beyond the scope of base self-interest? Alma could make a fairly per-

in the rest of the natural world—not so far as

of wolves, or a flock of birds, or even a colony of

mosses, individuals sometimes died for the greater good of the group. But one never saw a wolf saving

the life of a bee. One never saw an individual strand of moss choose to die, by giving over its precious

water supply to an ant, out of simple beneficence!

The fact that Prudence’s act of sacrifice had been utterly futile did not in any way diminish its sincerity. Why would a person do such a thing?

suasive argument as to why mothers, for instance,

made sacrifices on behalf of their children (because it was advantageous to continue the family line),

but she could not explain why a soldier would run

straight into a line of bayonets to protect an injured comrade. How did that action bolster or benefit the

brave soldier or his family? It simply did not: through self-sacrifice, the now-dead soldier had negated

not only his own future, but the continuation of his bloodline, as well.

Nor could Alma explain why a starving prisoner

would give food to a cellmate.

Nor could she explain why a lady would leap

into a canal to save another woman’s baby, only to drown in the process—which tragic event had just

occurred, not long ago, right down the street from the Hortus.

Alma did not know whether, if so confronted,

she herself would ever behave in such a noble

manner, but others inarguably did so—and fairly

routinely, all things considered. Alma had no doubt in her mind that her sister and the Reverend Welles

These were the sorts of arguments that

exasperated her uncle, as Alma and Dees sat up

together late into the night, year after year, debating the question. Now it was the early spring of 1858, and they were debating it still.

ELIZABETH GILBERT is the author of Eat Pray Love and several other internationally best-selling books of nonfiction and fiction, including The Signature of All Things, which was named a Best Book of 2013 by the New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker.

New York Beautification Project, Ellen Harvey, 1999–2001. Close-up and distance views of 6 of 40 paintings in oil on graffiti sites in New York City, each painting approx. 5” x 7”. Photography: Ellen Harvey Studio.

THE NEW YORK BEAUTIFICATION PROJECT ELLEN HARVEY

On a concrete pylon in Washington Heights, Ellen Harvey unwittingly began her New York Beautification Project. In June of 1999, in the midst of Mayor Giuliani's crackdown on graffiti artists, Harvey had been invited to participate in an art event that was part of the cleanup and renovation of Highbridge Park. Harvey decided to paint all the lampposts gold, and when she finished early she found herself painting some graffiti. Alongside spray-painted tags, she created a postcard-sized classical landscape, and found herself asking questions about who is allowed to make art in public and what kinds of graffiti are “acceptable”.

During the next two years, Harvey dotted New

York City with forty of these gems of tranquillity—coast-

lines, mountains, rivers, trees, and country estates. The paintings appeared on dumpsters, tucked into unpainted sections of murals, corners of tagged-up buildings,

abandoned cars, even a tugboat. Harvey’s anonymous act of beauty joined the city’s graffitied landscape.

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