Estimating the relative weights of nature – genetics especially – and nurture as driving forces of destiny involves wandering into uncharted territory. It’s good for us that a blog a reasonable place to test ideas, to speculate, to look for missing pieces of the puzzle. As Einstein said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
Our history has not been a quiet one. Books like Ron Chernow’s extensive biography, Grant, aptly demonstrate that we have slaughtered one another since inception of the United States.
Is it possible that trauma can alter genetics of both the perpetrators, the victims and their progeny? Scientists are currently exploring the possibility. What they find, may help us to break the cycle of violence.
Fifty years ago – 50! – Lona and I were married on August 24, 1969, at 2 pm in Washington DC at the Hotel America. We met for the first time on a blind date (no, we both had good vision) on the day of Super Bowl 3, when the underdog New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts 16 – 7, on January 12, 1969…. I hadn’t even seriously considered proposing until the second date a week or so later. … Coward that I can be at times, it took a couple of months to gather the courage to pop the question….
Probably you, like the rest of us, have told a white lie – a fabricated fork in the truth, such as a false excuse given to wiggle painlessly out of an invitation or request from a friend you would rather not accept. You know it isn’t quite kosher, false, a lie, whatever its color.
Two movies, The Cakemaker and The Farewell, raise the question of whether it is ever ethical to lie, and turn white lies into a complex of colors.
Imagine if Leonardo DaVinci believed he was too old to be creative. Think of the art we would not enjoy; after all, he did’t start the Mona Lisa until he was 62.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks talks about his research into the degree of happiness – satisfaction – in successful professionals as they age. Dean Keith Simonton, an expert on trajectories of creative careers, found that productivity increased the first 20 years and started declining thereafter. Started your career at 30? Prepare for decline after 50!
Oh my god, I’m in deep trouble. I continued doing science research until I was 69 and then stepped into a writing career. That wouldn’t be so bad, Brooks says, if I wasn’t too ambitious or expect to be successful anymore. Those days are gone, he says. The creative individuals do their best work in their 30s and 40s.
Does the creative spark really fizzle out?
Can dead and alive occur simultaneously? The conventional answer based on science would be no, dead and alive are mutually incompatible states. Death wouldn’t exist without life, and life would need redefinition without death. Death is the final and inevitable consequence of life.
However, stories in my upcoming book, Notes Going Underground, explore the porous barrier between life and death…
