'The Quiet Intent of a Conscious Artist'

For the observant – those who revere good prose and other accomplishments of civilization -- February 12 is doubly a holy day. In 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Hodgenville, Ky. Across the Atlantic, on the same day, Charles Darwin was born in a Georgian-style mansion in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. (Yes, a Shropshire lad.) 

Dr. Amit Majmudar is a poet and novelist who works as a diagnostic radiologist near Columbus, Ohio, and is a one-man repudiation of C.P. Snow’s tired old notion of the “two cultures.” In his essay “Voyaging with Charles Darwin on the Beagle," Majmudar mingles autobiography, comparative religion, history and literary criticism. As a medical student he read The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Darwin’s account of his five-year voyage (1831-36) around the world, including exploration of the Galapagos Islands. At the same time, Majmudar was doing research into a receptor protein associated with multiple sclerosis (while also reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, another artist-scientist). He contrasts his work and the great biologist’s:

 

“Darwin’s research happened in an environment nothing like the stainless steel basins and glass panes and microscope-slide-nudging quiet of the modern laboratory. We have to imagine the father of evolutionary science clambering over volcanic landscapes, reeking of sweat, covered in dirt and beetles, like some kind of animistic shaman communing with the wilderness. Darwin got to evolutionary theory by traveling very far indeed—deep into the stubbornly prehistoric, pre-human rockscapes of these islands off the coast of nowhere.”

 

Majmudar is an observant Hindu and acknowledges the revolution Darwin’s theories triggered among the faithful:

 

“I thought about modern-day Darwinists—the slick academics and symposium atheists, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and all the self-certain undergraduate ramen-slurpers who scoff at traditional religion in his name. Darwin’s Darwinism feels earned in a way these campus Darwinisms don’t.”

 

You will notice Majmudar has a sense of humor, unlike so many strident followers of Darwin, who wave his theories like the battle flags of a conquering army. He observes that Darwin possessed “an intellectual fearlessness that mirrored the physical fearlessness involved in boarding the Beagle.”

 

[Out of sheer intellectual decency, let’s remember Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist who, in a wonderful act of synchronicity, arrived at the theory of evolution through natural selection at the same time as Darwin. I suggest you read Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (1869), another gem of travel and science writing.]

 

Majmudar notes that only the “Abrahamic monotheisms” display “truly bitter resistance to evolutionary theory . . . (Every Hindu I know, for example, seems quite at ease with the idea).” Non-scientists, believers and nonbelievers can read Darwin’s major books – The Voyage, The Origin of the Species (1895) and The Descent of Man (1871) -- without cognitive dissonance. He is a writer of vigorous prose, apart from his obvious accomplishments as a scientist. I see him as one of those ambitious, larger-than-life, hyper-energetic Victorians – think of John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot – with the temerity to conquer worlds and who by doing so create new worlds of their own. Here’s a sample of Darwin’s prose (not cited by Majmudar) chosen from Chapter V, “Bahia Blanca,” of The Voyage. Darwin has been cataloging the fauna of Argentina:

 

“The Trigonocephalus has, therefore, in some respects the structure of a viper, with the habits of a rattlesnake: the noise, however, being produced by a simpler device. The expression on this snake’s face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw any thing more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness.”

 

Read this with Abraham Lincoln’s prose in mind. Each man, in his respective field, displays a certain forcefulness, clarity and gravitas, an absence of clutter. Here’s how Jacques Barzun describes the writing of the sixteenth president in his 1960 monograph “Lincoln the Literary Genius”:

 

“[H]is style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer’s and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did – hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”

 

Lincoln is conventionally read as a politician and Darwin as a scientist, but both can be read as literary artists, as can Majmudar, who writes in the voice of civilized discourse:

 

“I chose radiology because I wanted to be a writer and I didn’t want my day job to bleed into my time outside the hospital. It’s hard to take the CT appearance of Stage IV cancer home with you; it’s natural to remember the face of the 36-year-old woman who got the news from you. I chose radiology to insulate myself from the realities of medicine—from life and death and human suffering, basically—so that I could create art about . . . life and death and human suffering. It’s paradoxical, I know. I chose detachment over compassion, sterile lab work (office work, technically) over the messy surgical ‘field.’ I preferred to be Siddhartha in the climate-controlled palace, not Buddha in the mosquito-ridden forest. Much less Darwin on Tierra del Fuego."

 

[Majmudar’s essay is collected in The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), which also includes the best thing I have ever read about the poet Kay Ryan.]