Essentially the Only    One

Edward and Allan have just contributed two splendid posts about the role of art and other factors in their lives.

Considering how much one is exposed to over a life of 50 years, the choices seem limitless. But there are certain specific elements that stand out.

Although I do not read it regularly, poetry has left a powerful impact. Yeat's The Municipal Gallery Revisited contains perhaps my favorite lines of all:

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

I like this poem and that sentiment particularly because to emphasizes how much of one's journey through life is shaped and guided by the people you know. This is certainly true in my case, even though most of my friendships have been episodic and confined to certain phases in my life. I have lost touch with people who were extremely important to me at various times, and regard that loss with a tinge of regret yet feel thankful that they played their part when they did.

When I was about 22 I lived for a while in Chiswick, London. I was unemployed for almost all this time, and spent much of my time in the Tate Gallery, frequently gazing at this painting by John William Waterhouse:


The Lady of Shalott

I like the painting more than Tennyson's poem, not least, I would say, because I was romantically involved with a number of young women who shared something of the state of mind expressed here. Needless to say, that did not last. What do you know when you are 22?

Perhaps the most significant book I read in my early days (apart from the ubiquitous The Lord Of The Rings) was Dicken's Great Expectations, a story, that in Miss Haversham, takes the Romantic ideal expressed in Waterson's painting to almost post-modern extremes of caricature. Concurrent with that, I developed an interest in Expressionist painting and music, particularly that of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Marc and Kandinsky


Schoenberg, pictured here, did both of course, but is better known as the bête-noir of 20th century music. I lapped all of it up, finding in those atonal and 12-tone works a musical idiom that greatly appealed to me.

It still does, even though I have allowed the tonal world to repopulate. Currently my favorite composer is Franz Joseph Haydn. I find in his works the ultimate balance of invention and craft that epitomizes the Enlightenment, the moral, religious and philosophical period that set the stage for modern society and sometimes seems in danger of being overturned these days.

As far a pop music goes, my earlier entry still holds up.

As I grew older, three books have become important to me. They are Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. These are three of the very few books I cannot read all at once. Instead, I dip into them and focus on some individual episode, almost as if they were the Bible. It's striking that all three books were written at about the same time, and all introduce deep philosophical concepts that require a lot of digestion. I come away from reading these books feeling as if something is a little clearer in my life, even if it is not altogether apparent at the time exactly what it is

Perhaps I will have some further thoughts on this later, but this will do very nicely for now.

A very wet Friday here in St. Louis.

I sent my son off on his bike to school about 10 minutes before a downpour struck the house - I hope he did not get drenched (but I suspect he did). My wife, who was adjudicating an exam early this morning, left the house on her bike before the rain but left her keys in the door so she may return both soaked and unable to get into the house (I hope she remembers our neighbor has a spare).

Meanwhile, I arrive at work to find a big notice on the blackboard - "Richard, construction begins on May 14". The wall just to my left (as I type) is going to be knocked out and a door inserted. So I have to move all of my stuff out of the way, and that's going to be a pain. However, unless the construction sets off a sprinkler system, I should be dry. My assistant, pregnant and allergic, is moving right out. With neither condition applying to me, I shall have to weather the storm.

Still, it is Friday.

100 things that may be true about me...

(Inspired by Sanshan)

Read more...

A very quiet Friday afternoon. All essential work already done, I sit back with a cup of tea, headphones and Beck's masterful 'Sea Change' CD. Nothing much to say, just killing time.

Killing time - that is a harsh expression. It implies that certain times are worthless, spent without aim or purpose. Just because there is no immediate task at hand, does this work time deserve such an appelation?

It does not. Hands-off time is time to think. To reconsider what I have done, what I need to do. Right now, I am engaged in trying to find out why a certain biochemical reaction is not working for us. A very well-characterized reaction that fails only occasionally. When it does, it is usually because one of the component chemicals has degraded or become contaminated. So, methodically, I replace each component with fresh material and see if this solves the problem.

Right now, I am at the final stage of this process. Final, because I had to specifically order and receive freshly synthesized short fragments of DNA - the primers for this polymerase chain reaction (PCR) - and they did not arrive until yesterday. In the meantime, I was able to substitute for all the other ingredients. No success there.

Nor did I really expect there to be. The DNA primers for this reaction are the most likely component to fail, degrading with time. How effectively the primers will resist this process largely depends on how well cleaned they have been after synthesis - a variable I cannot control, unless I select an expensive and not cost-effective purification process before they are shipped to me.

So now the new primers are here. Redissolved in distilled water and added to a fresh reaction. Behind me, the thermal cycling machine works through a series of repeated heatings and coolings, with each step of the cycle hopefully generating more and more of the short sequence of DNA that we wish to locate and identify. One short sequence out of millions of connected nucleotides that make up the DNA of the mouse we are probing. If the sequence is absent, the reaction will generate no newly synthesized DNA. If it is present, enough new DNA will be manufactured to be spotted under ultra-violet light by electophoresis separation on an agarose gel containing a DNA-binding UV-fluorescing dye, ethidium bromide.

The absence or presence of these freshly-generated DNA sequences will tell me if the mouse contains a gene. In some cases, I want the gene. In others I do not. As each mouse's genetic make-up is ascertained, I will make the decision on which animal to breed with another to give me more mice with the gene I want. The breeders will be the lucky ones - those animals lacking what I need will be sacrificed.

In such ways, I directing an entire population of living animals. No natural selection here; I am the force that drives the destiny of these mice.

It is not a comfortable position. Even though every animal I select helps me move further to an understanding of muscular dystrophy, the sense of life lost never leaves me. More personal than the lives lost by farm animals to put meat on my plate, both in my knowledge of the mice and the life and death decisions I make and carry out every day.

I balance the reward with the loss, but life is precious. My heavy hand in its generation and destruction always weighs on me.

Sometimes the most mudane situations allow the most free thinking. I love waiting for public transport. You are in limbo, completely at the whim of the conveyor's schedule, and it's an extremely liberating feeling. Unreachable, untouchable, not even quite sure of what will happen next but with reasonable and almost always fulfilled expectations. It's not far from what I imagine the afterlife to be.