Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
To concede this abruptness, and to try to adopt a theory to fit it more closely than a dogmatic gradualism, does not make Gould a creationist, nor did it make Lyell’s catastrophist opponents, such as Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz, any less empirical or scientific than he, and scarcely less right: “We must admit that current views represent a pretty evenly shuffled deck between attitudes held by Lyell and the catastrophists.” Gould, with a passion that approaches the lyrical, argues for a retrospective tolerance in science and against fashions which would make heroes and villains of men equally committed to the cause of truth and equally immersed in the metaphors and presumptions of their culture and time. The situation of cosmology now, as it floridly sprouts suppositions of superheavy “strings” and extra dimensions rolled into tiny tubes and violently “inflationary” or infinitely multiple universes, is perhaps analogous to that of nineteenth-century geology, where much hard evidence and sound reasoning existed intermingled with hypotheses that time would show to be, though no more fantastic than the truth, false. Gould implicitly asks that tolerance be extended to such contemporary guesses as the Alvarez hypothesis of asteroidal or cometary causation of the mass extinctions, and the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which merely proposes that speciation occurs in spurts—that evolution, like most terrain, is lumpy and uneven.
The book ends with a surprising burst of Christian art: cathedral windows and bosses, and James Hampton’s great American folk sculpture, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. With these artworks Gould is saying more than that scientific theory is beautiful; he is emphasizing the Judaeo-Christian arrow of time, which flies from Creation to Apocalypse, from Adam’s Fall to Christ’s Second Coming, from Noah’s Flood to Jesus’s Baptism. The Old and New Testaments are in a sense two cycles, which echo one another and yet register an advance; and this is also the way of the earth, which lifts up mountains and flattens them and raises them up again, and allows species to perish and others to arise and fill the same ecological niche with similar forms, and yet also has a history, an overall change from a young, violent, oxygenless planet to the oxygen-rich and relatively stable one that supports our present unique chapter in the ongoing saga of life. The universe itself, which as recently as the 1950s could be plausibly imagined to exist in a “steady state” of perpetual atom-by-atom creation, also now seems, on its colossal scale, to be arrowing from a Big Bang fifteen billion years ago to an eventual end in total entropy. The seventeenth-century cleric Thomas Burnet, though without much in the way of facts and with little notion of how truly deep time was, more accurately combined the metaphors of arrow and cycle than his successor geologists Hutton and Lyell, who both, in wishing to lift their science above the “complex contingencies” of “just history,” conceived of cycles without end or aim. Stephen Jay Gould, in his scrupulous explication of their carefully wrought half-truths, abolishes the unnecessary distinction between the humanities and science, and honors the latter as a branch of humanistic thought, fallible and poetic.
Time is tackled from a wider angle, and more pugnaciously, in Time Wars. Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, in Washington, D.C., is not the scientist or the writer that Gould is, but he has produced a brisk book that in little more than two hundred pages covers a large territory. Time Wars seems at least three books in one. First, it is a survey of how men have considered time, from the hunter-gatherers’ complete submission to the “migratory rhythms of the great herds of animals and the gestation and ripening times of wild herbs and roots,” through the early agricultural societies’ celestial reckonings and their invention of calendars, up to medieval man’s invention of the daily schedule (first perpetrated by the Benedictine monks) and industrial, bourgeois man’s exaltation of the clock and today’s increasing domination by a “computime” measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Second, Time Wars launches a cautionary jeremiad against the computer society, which compels men to interface with inhumanly rapid machines and invites them to treat reality merely in terms of proliferating information systems:
The nanosecond culture brings with it a new and more virulent form of reductionism. The clockwork universe of the industrial age is being replaced, in fast order, by the computational universe of the postindustrial age.… We are entering a new temporal world where time is segmented into nanoseconds, the future is programmed in advance, nature is reconceived as bits of coded information, and paradise is viewed as a fully simulated, artificial environment.
In both these aspects, Time Wars seems an efficient rehash of other recent works of popular sociology and anthropology; its footnotes draw preponderantly upon books written in the 1980s (Technostress, by Craig Brod; Turing’s Man, by David Bolter; The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, by Sherry Turkle; Silicon Shock: The Menace of the Computer, by Geoff Simons; The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin; The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, by Edward T. Hall; Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, by Eviatar Zerubavel; The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, by Stephen Kern; Clocks and the Cosmos, by Samuel L. Macey; The Information Society, by Yoneji Masuda) and even when an older voice is quoted (Augustine, Swift, the Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym) the notes give the source as an intermediate scholarly work.
A personal and original note sounds only in Time Wars’s third aspect, that of a sermon urging us to return to biological time and to dwell empathetically in the global ecosystem. There is on all fronts, we are assured, a surge in this direction; there are “the environmental movement, the animal-rights movement, the Judaeo-Christian stewardship movement, the eco-feministic movement, the holistic health movement, the alternative agriculture movement, the appropriate technology movement, the bio-regionalism movement, the self-sufficiency movement, the economic democracy movement, the alternative education movement, and the disarmament movement.” Without denying that every little movement has a praiseworthy meaning all its own, I find it hard to grasp how all this New Age pietism relates to the concept of time that the computer has allegedly drilled into our heads. I use a word processor, and the appearance on the screen of the letter I just tapped seems no more or less miraculous and sinister than its old-fashioned appearance, after a similar action, upon a sheet of white paper in my typewriter. Has the fact that this electronic machine is designed in terms of nanoseconds affected my consciousness any more deeply than the minute calculations involved in the design of the carburetor that, when I simple-mindedly ask my automobile to go, mixes fuel and air so judiciously that the mixture explodes and the car does go? The capacity of human beings to absorb what they wish to and to ignore the rest seems to me almost limitless. The telephone, for instance, is a still-evolving technological marvel, and more pervasive than the computer: has it changed what people talk about? Not according to the television commercials urging us to reach out to sweetheart and mother. Television itself came heralded as the reshaper of global culture, and yet its staple content remains the primitive stuff of sporting events, shoot-’em-ups, car chases, and comedies as homely and inane as the plays we used to watch in high-school assemblies in the hoary days of Harry Truman.
Rifkin cites instances of professional “technostress” when computers replace older hardware, and quotes some “computer compulsives” and M.I.T. students who have acquired rather people-unfriendly attitudes, and discusses the spread of the “information” metaphor in such sciences as biology, psychology, and even astronomy. He did not prove, to me, that the computer as a culture-altering device is yet in the same league as the clock, the wheel, or the plow, or that its theorists will have the cultural impact of Newton, Darwin, Einstein, or Freud. A fever of overstatement vitiates many a sentence:
It [the spiral] is the new symbol of creation captured in both the double helix and in the cybernetic vision where feedback loops simulate new worlds pulsing in the crevices of millions of silicon chips.
Rifkin’s leaps into the cosmic sometimes leave us
The new universe resembles a giant computerlike mind, ever expanding, creating new information and new knowledge, filling the cosmos with higher and higher levels of consciousness.… Human beings reach out to this new informational deity by interfacing with the evolving mind of the universe. Communion is the experience of gaining access to larger and larger stores of information, of simulating more complex programs, each reaching ever closer to the ultimate computerbank storage facility, the mind force of the cosmos.
Even on the more solid ground of the past, his prose overreaches:
In just a few short centuries, the bourgeois class had managed to hoist the mechanical clock to the top of the town tower and then succeed in lifting its spirit up into the heavens where, like the angel Gabriel, it proclaimed the coming of the kingdom. The promised land, however, bore a strikingly secular imprint. God’s countenance, which once shone brightly, now cast only a pale shadow. The sounds of divine rapture could no longer be heard. They were subsumed by the relentless ticking of the giant cosmic clock. Underneath its watchful gaze, the faithful scurried to and fro, frantic to keep up with the tempo of the times, anxious not to miss a single beat for fear that they might be forever condemned to that netherworld where no clocks existed and mayhem and confusion reigned supreme.
The torments of Hell, we learn, include the annoyance of not knowing what time it is.
That the clock was needed to regulate the factories and appointment books of industrialism, and that the calendar, with its religious and state holidays, is a prime enforcer of the prevailing culture, I do not doubt, and Rifkin’s details on these matters (and on the remarkable biological clocks of insects and animals) repay the reading of Time Wars. But the computer, unlike the calendar and the clock, does not mark (or “keep”) time; it and its programmers seek to minimize time. It is a time-saving device, meant to save clerical labor as its predecessor mechanisms saved physical labor, and as such it is the friend, not the enemy, of the biology-attuned slow-down Rifkin prescribes. He hymns “the new empathetic movements” that are “committed to the establishment of a social time order that is compatible with and complementary to the natural time order” without asking what the natural time order has entailed for most human beings. No workday is longer or harder than that of the agricultural worker, and any who think the hunter-gatherer led the life of Riley should read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s brilliant neolithic novel Reindeer Moon. The most ringing quotation in Time Wars comes from John Locke: “The negation of Nature is the way toward happiness.” Selective and tactful negation, let’s hope, but there is no turning back, against time’s arrow.
* The word comes from the Latin penicillum, a diminutive form designating a little brush, made of hairs from animal tails, the Latin word for “tail” being, surprisingly, penis.
Remarks at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer Science, in Cambridge, on October 26, 1988.
† “Many great arguments in the history of human thought have a kind of relentless, intrinsic logic that grants them a universality transcending time or subject” perhaps contains such a touch.
APPENDIX
Literarily Personal
LITERARILY PERSONAL
AN ARTICLE, entitled “Writers as Progenitors and Offspring,” written at the request of Poets & Writers Magazine; it appeared in the January–February 1987 issue, with a typically benign and evocative account by my son David of his own impressions, which do not contradict mine. I especially treasured this kindly glimpse from our shared past: “And at night, as he [I] sat reading books for review, or going over proofs with the same stubby golf pencil that had recorded his score that afternoon, he gave off an impression of leisure and repose, of doing exactly what he wanted to do.”
As both the son and father of a writer, I feel doubly qualified for this topic. My mother wrote in the front bedroom, beside a window curtained in dotted swiss. With a small child’s eyes I see her desk, her little Remington with its elite face, and the brown envelopes that carried her patiently tapped-out manuscripts to New York City and then back to Shillington, Pennsylvania. I smell the fresh paper, the damp ink on the ribbon as it jerkily unfurls from spool to spool, the rubber flecks of eraser buried within the slanted bank of springy keys—an alphabet in the wrong order. We used to travel together to Hintz’s stationery store in Reading, and there was beauty and power and opulence in the ceiling-high shelves of fresh reams, of tinted labels and yellow octagonal pencils in numbered degrees of hardness and softness, of tablets and moisteners and even little scales to weigh letters upon. Three cents an ounce it took in those days to send a story to a Manhattan magazine, or to The Saturday Evening Post in nearby Philadelphia, and what a wealth of expectation hovered in the air until Mr. Miller, our plodding, joking mailman, hurled the return envelope through the front-door letter slot! There was a novel, too, that slept in a ream box that had been emptied of blankness, and like a strange baby in the house, a difficult papery sibling, the manuscript was now and then roused out of its little rectangular crib and rewritten and freshly swaddled in hope. My mother’s silence, at her desk, was among the mysteries—her faint aroma of mental sweat, of concentration as if in prayer.
I knew she was trying to reach beyond the street outside, where cars and people moved toward their local destinies as if underwater, toward a world we couldn’t see, where magazines and books came from. That these magazines, with their covers by Norman Rockwell and John Falter, and the books of the world, some of them old and faded like pieces of nature and others shiny new and protected in an extra cellophane wrapper at the drugstore rental library, were written by our kind of people seemed unlikely to me; but now and then she got an encouraging pencilled note scrawled on the rejection slip, and in her fifties, I am happy to say, began to receive acceptances—enough to form her single published book, Enchantment.* Though there was much about her enterprise I didn’t understand, I liked the smell of it, the silence, the modest equipment required, and the sly postal traffic with a world beyond; at an early age I enlisted in the enterprise myself.
My son David—what did he see? I wrote, when he was small, in a little upstairs room that, like my mother’s room a generation before, overlooked a small-town street. The room had a door I could close, and he and his siblings used to scratch at the door, and have quarrels outside it. I moved to an office downtown, a half-mile away, and there they would come visit the confusion of papers, the faded Oriental rug, the bulletin board where jotted ideas and urgent requests slowly curled up and turned yellow, the pervasive stink of too many cigarettes and, after I gave those up, of nickel cigarillos. Dirty windows, without curtains of dotted swiss, overlooked the Ipswich River, and the chief wall decoration was a framed drawing that the great James Thurber had been kind enough to send me from Connecticut when I was a boy in Shillington.
I spent mornings and little more in the office. They were, David and his brother and two sisters, pleasantly aware, I assumed, that I had more free time than most fathers. (Though was I, when with them, entirely with them? A writer’s working day is a strange diffuse thing that never really ends, and gives him a double focus much of the time.) My children enjoyed, I imagined, the little mild gusts of fame—the visiting photographer and interviewer, the sudden box of new books in the front hall—that my profession brought into our domestic world. And they said little, tactfully, of the odd versions of themselves and their home that appeared now and then in print. They never spoke to me of being writers themselves. So I was taken unawares when all showed distinct artistic bents and the older son, at an age earlier than his father, became published in The New Yorker. At the time I gave his Harvard girlfriend, who herself wrote, and Ann Beattie, who had accepted him into her writing course, more credit than any example I had inadvertently set. The writing enterprise seemed to me self-evidently a desperate one, and though my mother and I—both only children—had been desperate enough to undert
IN ANSWER to a question, in 1985, from the French magazine Libération: “Pourquoi écrivez-vous?”
From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly thirty years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines, is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another. This blithe extension of the usual limitations of space is compounded by a possible defiance of the limitations of time as well—a hope of being read, of being heard and enjoyed, after death. Writing is surely a delicious craft, and the writer is correctly envied by others, who must slave longer hours and see their labor vanish as they work, in the churning of human needs.