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Re: Essays!
SC ( 01/28/2004, 13:00:53 )I'm not an expert on Einstein's life, but I've heard that he did very poorly in high school math and that he got onto the path of constructing theories because he happened to get a job in a patent office. He did have an enormous brain, and his latter-born twin would have that as well, but the Einstein we know might never have come about if circumstances were a little different. I think Einstein's twin would be more likely to be aware of his potential as a mathematician than the first Einstein was, because if people knew about his genetic history, they'd tell him about it all the time. He'd be more likely to try to become a mathematician for that reason, assuming that he wasn't too intimidated by his sibling's reputation. If cloning could keep him youthful, however, he'd have a big advantage. Steven Hawking was a slacker in college and might not have become the greatest modern physicist in the time he had if he hadn't been crippled by disease and left with few other outlets for his energies other than intellectual ones. However, this shows how little time potentially great thinkers have to develop; the second Einstein, in a world in which people could be kept younger longer, would have more chances to be exposed to the trigger events that would put him on the path toward becoming a mathematician, and would have more years to spend at the peak of his intellectual powers (great discoveries in physics are typically made by relatively young men). Creative people in various fields may be motivated, to some degree, by the desire to leave a legacy that lives on after them. Writers might be one of the better examples of this. The impulse to write, and the subject matter and approach to writing, could be heavily influenced by the knowledge that an author's writings might be all that lives on after the writer's death. I don't know what Shakespeare's motives were, but there must have been some writers who took up writing more or less as a matter of self-preservation. If these people had access to technology that kept them eternally young, would they still be writers? Not for the same reasons, at least. I'm not Shakespeare, but I wouldn't be writing on this message board if I didn't think people's lives depended on it, mine included. I'd also be writing different material, since this board is a relatively unreceptive environment for humor.Shakespeare does refer to writing as a means of immortalizing someone in his sonnet that begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," and what are often presumed to be his greatest works (Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear) are violent tragedies in which the main characters immortalize themselves by bringing death to themselves and those around them, discovering their better natures only at the very end. He wrote about how fleeting and fragile life was ("All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players;" and "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing"), but he made life sound dullest and bleakest when describing it in comparison to his own artistic medium. In one of his later works, The Tempest, Prospero (often seen as a symbolic writer) gives up his magical powers, what he calls his "Art," partly by drowning his books in the sea, forgives his enemies, and goes back from his enchanted intellectual refuge to the ordinary world to live out the rest of his life.This is my interpretation, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if Shakespeare had what critic's call a "conflicted relationship" with his art, that he saw it an an empty form of immortality, and that if he had lived in a world where it was possible to stay young, he would have written more comedies and fewer tragedies as time went on. If we lived longer, we probably wouldn't consider his tragedies to be his greatest works either.If cloning were perfected, people would have more chances to find and do what they love. Shakespeare seems to have loved words, but whether writing was really what Shakespeare loved the most, and whether the type of writing he did was what he loved the most, are things that he might have more time to discover the second time around.
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