Today is the birthday of Stephen Jay Gould. I almost forgot, until I went to open up my Google Calendar to make note of a future evening with my friend Kevin, and spotted the reminder I had left of this birthday.
I wanted to have had more advance notice of Dr. Gould’s birthday, so that I could write up something to honor his memory and the impact he had on me. But somehow the date had slipped away, and I’ve ignored the warnings I had set up, reminding me a week ago, and another reminder yesterday, that this day was coming.
I’ve been busy lately with lots of stuff, much of which you’ve read about here, and so didn’t set aside any time to blog about Dr. Gould, or his contributions to paleontology, or evolutionary biology, or about reconciling science and religion or panda’s thumbs or Bermudan snails, or baseball, or teaching in Springfield, or smokin’ weed for medical purposes.
But I would have known none of that, if, more than 10 years ago, as an employee of Powell’s City of Books, I hadn’t been discussing popular science with two other employees. Stacy “Freedom Rock!” Friedman, a dark-haired, musically-inclined lesbian (the woman who witnessed, and was jealous of, my encounter with Heather Locklear) mentioned how much she loved reading pop science books, which to me, at the time, seemed 180° from what I expected of her. I mentioned Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, but wasn’t sure what other authors were out there. That’s the problem with being a self-made man; there’s gaps in my knowledge that some may find hard to believe.
Clyde “Bailio” Bailey causally mentioned Stephen Jay Gould, and before the day was over, I went down to the Rose Room, found the several shelves of his books, and started in. Dr. Gould’s essays were a harder read than Dr. Sagan, but it was still fairly accessible stuff. Most of his books are collections of essays, written once a month, for Natural History magazine, in his column titled “This View of Life”, and collected into occasional books. I only got through one of those collections while employed at Powell’s, but later, on my own in Austin, Texas, I re-discovered Dr. Gould’s books at a used bookstore off of Guadalupe Street, and eventually read the bulk of his essays.
The essays, collected, represent in a concrete way the measure of Stephen Jay Gould. Dr. Gould made a deal with himself and Natural History magazine, to write a total of 300 essays, all dealing in some way with the history of science. And he kept that promise, not missing a single issue, for 27 years. In fact, his final collection is titled “I Have Landed” at least in part because of the completion of his original promise. But the title of that volume, like his final essay explains, is also a tribute to his maternal grandfather’s words, recorded in the margins of a book, upon arriving in America from the Old World:
My maternal grandparents—Irene and Joseph Rosenberg, or Grammy and Papa Joe to me—loved to read in their adopted language of English. My grandfather even bought a set of The Harvard Classics (the famous “Five Foot Shelf” of Western wisdom) to facilitate his assimilation to American life. I inherited only two of Papa Joe’s books, and nothing of a material nature could be more precious to me. The first bears a stamp of sale: “Carroll’s book store. Old, rare and curious books. Fulton and Pearl Sts. Brooklyn, N.Y.” Perhaps my grandfather obtained this volume from a Landsmann, for I can discern, through erasures on three pages of the book, the common Hungarian name “Imre.” On the front page of this 1892 edition of J. M. Greenwood’s Studies in English Grammar, my grandfather wrote in ink, in an obviously European hand, “Prop. of Joseph A. Rosenberg, New York.” To the side, in pencil, he added the presumed date of his acquisition: “1901. Oct. 25th.” Just below, also in pencil, he appended the most eloquent of all conceivable words for this context—even though he used the wrong tense, confusing the compound past of continuing action with an intended simple past to designate a definite and completed event (not bad for a barely fourteen-year-old boy just a month or two off the boat): “I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.”
“I have landed.” I can’t read that simple sentence without being filled with sadness and loss, in spite of it originally being said in hope and a sense of new beginnings, so I still have that final collection in my “to be read” pile of books. Yes, “final collection”. He, too, has landed.
Stephen Jay Gould passed away on 20 May 2002, in a loft in SoHo, surrounded by his wife, his mother, and his library.
Today would have been his 66th birthday.