My name is Andreas Kluth and I am three things in life: husband/dad, correspondent for The Economist, and aspiring book author.
On this blog, I’ll be writing mostly about the book (out some time next year) and the process of writing it, as well as writing and language in general. For the next few months, I probably won’t give away too much from the plot itself, but nearer to publication, you can expect me to open up a lot more.
I’ll also take occasional detours into stuff related to The Economist. Occasionally, I may get just plain wacky.
Hopefully I’ll hear in the comments from anybody who’s interested, in the book or in other things that come up. I’ll be especially grateful for suggestions about good biographies of lives that, in your opinion, fit some of the themes in the book.
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3 Comments
November 16, 2008 at 6:51 pm
To see how stories of personal achievement are a simplistic parsation of a process which has simple contours on a grand scale but is chaotic on the scale of human lives, look at outliers who died unbelieved, or whose insights, somehow infertile, are mere footnotes to what ends up as the lineage of common knowledge. A few:
Aristarchus, the first heliocentrist - seeing the biggest picture of all, our world a spinning ball within a universe unthinkably huger than the wildest dreams of religion - alone on his Greek island, millennia before the world could hear it;
Matthews, propounding natural selection in passing in a book on Naval Timber;
Semmelweiss - the most tragic case both for himself, dying in an asylum, and for others, since his news had the power to save lives per minute starting any time (strange resonance with Day of the Triffids: soap and water enough to kill these monsters that ravage the world);
Wegener.
November 16, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Very intriguing life examples, Bruce. Thanks. Semelweiss’s story is especially tragic.
Tesla might be another case.
I’ll have a deeper look, although ideally I’d need to find some kind of reversal in their lives to fit them into one of my chapters.
Are you, by any chance, this Bruce Middleton?
November 16, 2008 at 10:28 pm
No, since you ask; I have only a tiny and fading Web presence as “the MIT-trained physicist who invented the world’s first super-pogo stick”; it takes a Wayback link to get to the Popular Science article: http://web.archive.org/web/20060623105304/http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2004/recreation/article/0,22221,768216,00.html.
Since you were moved to look, and the public record sheds no light on what lies behind my remarks, I’ll give you the nutshell explanation: which is that I have been living a Semmelweissian nightmare since 1981. Aware of an astonishing disaster which no-one else can see; an urgency of lives per minute again, unbearable pressure for the solitary seer; I even ended up, like Semmelweiss, in a mental hospital for a while - and no more insane than he was. It happens, and there’s nothing like personal experience to give history resonance.
As for your project, a point of sorrow: by the sound of it, you demand reversal within the lifetimes and even careers of your subjects - stories which fit the confines of individual biography. I am afraid that will cut you off from the real meaning of the stories to which you are drawn - a meaning which involves shifts in scale and is melancholy in a way and yet also inspiring, “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused… the still sad music of humanity… of ample power to chasten and subdue.” Puppets of destiny’s script, striving to read it, driven by forces larger than ourselves which seem to us the voices of our inmost souls.
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