2. Genesis & Overview

This is the story of how this project began:

I have known my friend Noah Hutton for ten years. We met on the first day of orientation to the seventh grade, that eve of the two-year-long nightmare called Middle School. We immediately chose to bunk together on the class trip to Cape Cod, where we each invented a code name for our respective love interests. His was "Sowcow." We both failed. In our senior year of high school, we captained our basketball team to the state championship in the Small, Unathletic Private School Division [SUPSD]. In the final game, our opponent chose to play a 2-3 zone, packing the defense into the painted area so that our center and I could not get the ball. They dared our perimeter players to fire. Noah was our fourth or fifth offensive option, but he helped shoot us to a title. He is a brilliant guy, a talented director, a quiet romantic, and a tough, active defender who occasionally stumbles in response to quick and tight change-of-direction dribble moves. Most importantly, he is a brother in the search for cosmic wisdom.

Noah majored in art history at Wesleyan University. However, about halfway through his collegiate experience, he became intensely interested in the field of neuroscience [some believe this relates to the few concussions he received on the basketball court, the last of which erased a month's worth of Chemistry knowledge, or so he claimed]. Although he graduated in May with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history, Noah took a number of neuroscience courses while at school. By graduation, his intellectual focus had finished its migration upwards and inwards, to the material brain.

I graduated from Middlebury College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literary Studies, a comparative literature program modeled after the former "great books" Humanities course at Columbia University. At the start, I was given a "comprehensive" reading list that included the major works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Vergil, Ovid, Lucretius, Dante, Boccaccio, Pirandello, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Borges, Moliere, Baudelaire, Proust, Goethe, Kafka, Mann, Wang Wei, Cáo Xuegin, Lu Xún, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Joyce, Emerson, Melville, Faulkner, Murasaki Shikibu, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Natsume Soseki. Plato, Aristotle, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, and Freud were considered "background readings." I was also supposed to read one text in its original language; I chose to read The Bible [Amos, Samuel II, and, most wondrously, The Book of Genesis] in Ancient Hebrew. Senior year included an oral examination (one hour), a comprehensive written examination [eight hours], and, as a gift for high marks, a one-semester thesis of at least thirty-five pages. Needless to say, it was quite an intense intellectual and emotional experience. As Professor Stephen Donadio, head of the program, said to our senior colloquium: "You don't read the books, the books read you." [Professor Donadio does not know this, but I consider him to be my de facto rabbi, as well as my teacher and friend. I suppose he now knows this. But one should not keep kind words secret. He truly thinks the game, is a willing passer and a staunch defender, has a great shooting touch, and is a natural coach on the floor]. By graduation, my focus was deeply into art and, specifically, literature, which in so many ways defined me. I loved it with all of my heart.

[No, I did not read every single novel, play, and poem. It is impossible, and not just for temporal reasons].

After graduation, Noah and I did some freelance video work, for contract, on the Jersey shore. The drive was two hours either way. Our active and curious minds frequently challenged each other, but there was rarely argument and never upset. We were finding our ways in the "real world." But what was real, anyway? Once, after work, Noah's car had reached a stop sign and we needed to get to the New Jersey Turnpike to go north. But initially, neither of us could retrieve from our minds the precise directions. I was sure that I could not remember; I declared that my opinion would be nothing more than a blind guess. I did not care in which direction we proceeded because at that time I believed potential adventure to be everywhere. Put simply, I wanted to be lost. Noah thought that we ought to turn left. If we turned left, he said, we would find the New Jersey Turnpike. Contrarily, I said that we would not necessarily find the New Jersey Turnpike if we turned left, even if it had always been there. Necessarily . . . that deterministic piece of language, quite a beautiful word, actually, now that I think of it [five syllables, two swiftly sibilant, and the same suffix as many a woman's name], was the wedge that split apart two old ideologies: materialism and spiritualism. I am simplifying and summarizing the essence of the debate; it was a two-hour ordeal.

There was never anything interpersonal to resolve [I did call science "boring," but I meant only most the writing, and only to me. Plus, I had read Proust, can you blame me! Apology is the panacea of friendship. And, finally, to each his own]. Then, that night, intellectual reconciliation arrived digitally. I received an email from Noah. It had no words, only a link to the Wikipedia page of some Spanish guy with too many names. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who some call "the greatest neuroscientist of all time," but some hyperbolize, especially on the World Wide Web. Cajal discovered the neuron, which rang a bell, in my memory neurons [I suppose]. He had considered them "butterflies of the soul." Very poetic, very Nabokovian. I was intrigued. Then I looked at his striking drawings, which looked like lightning striking a tree but I could not tell where was the lightning and where the tree. But a bush was burning in my brain.

I quote the impromptu local news appearance [Middlebury banned Wikipedia as a citable source and T.V. crews arrived for the scoop] by my former teammate and roommate and current friend Kyle Dudley [superhuman in the clutch, excellent long range shooter, improbable but effective right-handed floater, good dribbler, unmotivated defender, weak left hand, absent rebounder, a great sportsman, reliable free throw shooter, ideal teammate, and champion] when I say "I love Wikipedia! I use it all the time!" I indulged my referential brain and hyperlinked around the Net for a while. It seemed to me that this man, Cajal, had naturally managed to fuse Science and Art, the two disciplines within which the two old ideologies are carefully guarded. This was July, or August.

Then, one night in September, I was sitting in my office [the garage] listening to Philip Glass talk about creativity in an iTunes U feature that my father [sharp shooter, unselfish with the ball, quick and creative off the dribble, more or less uncoachable but a winner] had recommended. Something clicked, I do not know what. I was high, literally and figuratively. It was four o'clock in the morning and I called Noah and said lots of words really fast and that was that. The project was born.

In a 2003 interview with The Paris Review, printed in their 50th anniversary edition [featuring art by my friend Aurore  . . . I swear it's as though this blog fits together like a "This is Your Life" puzzle], Professor Donadio said: "Readers deeply committed to literature are likely to be rather wayward readers." In the Vermont-based magazine "Seven Days," he elaborates:

"Writers are certainly wayward readers. The way reading works--once nobody gives you a reading list--is, you're drawn to things that you need to find, somehow."

I can now say certainly that he is correct. My intuition has led me to a Spanish neuroscientist. I do not know the first thing about neuroscience [although iTunes U, which should also be known as "Free Knowledge," is an invaluable resource]. I have only just begun my research. This material is incredibly rich.

This week I received a fortune cookie that said: "You will find that you cannot enrich yourself except by enriching others." I will begin sharing some of the thoughts and questions that Cajal's writings manage to awaken in my novice mind. My next post will concern his Advice for a Young Investigator. I have also been reading his book of short-stories, Vacation Stories. I will address those in the post after next.

Thanks for reading!