In Praise of Late Bloomers

I've been working my way through the first volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, which I've been enjoying quite a bit. While describing the ups and downs of Lincoln's career (the latter at least as frequent as the former) Foote remarks of the period from age forty to forty-five when Lincoln largely withdrew from public life and focused on his law practice while doing a great deal of reading of "the greats": Lincoln, like many great men, was a late bloomer.

For whatever reason, I always find this kind of thing reassuring. I frequently feel like there's a great deal more that I want to read and understand and write and do, and thus it's encouraging to hear that there's still time. Indeed, that it is unusual, in life, for people to already have their major accomplishments behind them by their forties.

Similarly, whenever I start to let myself get too frustrated about things at work, I recall an article I read a number of years ago which said that years of highest earnings in a man's career are from ages 50 to 55.

Foote himself was something of a late bloomer as a historian, starting his Narrative in his late 30s. The first volume was published when he was 42, and the last when he was 58. And the series did not reach its peak of popularity until he was in his early 70s, when he featured in Ken Burns' Civil War documentaries. Reading a little about Foote, I was particularly amused by this anecdote:

Foote labored to maintain his objectivity in the narrative despite his Southern upbringing. He deliberately avoided Lost Cause mythologizing in his work. He gained immense respect for such disparate figures as Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, and Edwin Stanton. He grew to despise such figures as Phil Sheridan and Joe Johnston. He considered United States President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest to be two authentic geniuses of the war. He stated this opinion once in conversation with one of General Forrest's granddaughters. She replied, after a pause, "You know, we never thought much of Mr. Lincoln in my family."

What Your 18-Year-Old Needs to Know

Darwin's in a conference all day, and I just don't have anything interesting to say, so here's a rerun from 2006 that garnered lots of comments at the time. Feel free to add your own ideas.

For the record, now that my kids are of homeschooling age, I like the What your X-Grader Needs to Know series, just as a point of reference.

When my folks were getting into homeschooling back in the mid eighties, there was a really popular series of books for parents out there, each titled What Your X Grader Needs To Know. I don't know if these are still around and popular -- the monkeys are rather young yet, and MrsDarwin and I have a rather blase approach to homeschooling since we feel like we've been there before.

But for whatever reason, I was thinking this weekend about things one ought to know before being turned out into the world to college or work of basic training of wherever it is that you head off to at eighteen. This is a pretty rough list, and I'd love to see what else readers would suggest. It's not so much meant to be a sum-and-total of necessary education, but sort of a minimum required list for being civilized and functional.

By the time you leave home at 18 you should:

• Read two out of these three: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid
• Read four of Plato's dialoges including Apology and Phaedo.
• Have read all books of the Bible at least once.
• Read Augustine's Confessions.
• Read Beowulf
• Read at least one of the volumes of the Divine Comedy (Inferno or Purgatorio would be the recommended choices).
• Read Introduction To The Devout Life.
• Read The Little Flowers of St. Francis and The Little Way of St. Therese.
• Read Brideshead Revisited and Lord of the Rings.
• Read C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves.
• Read at least one novel by each of the following: Dickens, Austen, Dostoyevski
• Read/see at least four Shakespeare plays including Hamlet and Macbeth.
• Read the Constitution of the United States.
• See Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Casablanca, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge Over the River Kwai, Chinatown and at least one Hitchcock movie.
• Know how to calculate the profit and loss and balance sheets of a small business.
• Know the basics of how a relational database works (e.g. a database with order, order detail, products, and customer tables)
• Know the basics of how to use excel.
• Know how to calculate compound interest.
• Know how to replace a hard drive, add additional RAM and reinstall an operating system on a computer.
• Speak a foreign language well enough to communicate on a basic level.
• Know how to drive a manual transmission car.
• Know how to change a tire and change your oil.
• Know how to operate basic power tools safely and build simple furniture (like a bookshelf or table).
• Know how to cook at least five different meals.
• Know how to do your own laundry.
• Know how to shoot and clean a rifle and handgun.
• Be able to run mile in under nine minutes.
• Memorize the Nicene and Apostle's Creeds, the Gettysburg Address and at least one piece of poetry longer than 100 lines.

I can't claim to have done all this stuff by the time I was 18, but I never claimed to be fully civilized or fully functional. Still, I wish I had done all this stuff by 18, and it doesn't seem impossible to do so.
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MrsDarwin adding on here:

By the time you leave home at 18 you should:

• Know how to change a diaper
• Be able to bake a loaf of bread from scratch
• Hear Handel's Messiah, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
• Know the table of elements
• Be able to start and to finish a conversation politely
• Be able to compose a thank you note, a letter of sympathy, an essay, and a job application
• Know how to read music, and play at least one instrument
• Understand how the human reproductive system works (both male and female)
• Have spoken in public at least once
• Know how to lay a fire
• Know how to thread a sewing machine and sew a straight stitch, and know how to sew on a button by hand
• Have nurtured a simple vegetable or flower garden
• Know how to set a table and use a cloth napkin
• Know how to draw basic three-dimensional shapes

Update:
By popular demand:

• Know how to balance a checkbook
  

Another Update:
Opinionated Homeschooler has some good thoughts on the list.

Also, to clarify a bit -- wanting to keeping the post down to something like a vaguely reasonable length, I tried to make some decisions about scope that would make sense. For instance, I think everyone should have read Winnie The Pooh, but since most people do this by the age of eight, I left it off. Other things, I assumed were covered by higher level items. So I assumed that between calculating compound interest and being able to produce a simple balance sheet, you must therefore also know how to manage checking and savings accounts and deal with a credit car or home loan.

The list was also pretty clearly a Catholic list. If you weren't Catholic, St. Francis, St. Therese and St. Francis de Sales would drop off, though I think anyone in Western Culture would do well to read the Bible, Augustine and Dante.

Opinionated Homeschooler is dead right in adding some Aquinas plus math through calculus (sorry MrsDarwin) to the list, as well as knowing the rules to football, baseball and poker.

The great stumbling block for me was trying to think of what you ought to know about science. Some things are so basic it seemed hardly worth mentioning: Know the names and the order of the nine planet. But the tricky thing with science is that it's not based on a few basic seminal works that you to understand the field. That's what strikes me as the weak point of great books programs where science education consists of reading Origin of Species, Newton's Principia, and several of Einstein's seminal papers. Reading "great works" of science is certainly helpful, but it doesn't really get you there.

I continue to be stumped by the science angle, so I'd be eager to hear suggestions -- seeing as some of our readers know a great deal more about science than I do. The one thing I'm pretty sure at this point should go on is:

• Be able to explain and use Newton's universal laws of motion.

Mid Life

Many will doubtless consider it rather cheeky (or else simply self indulgent) for someone who is only thirty years old to write on the topic of middle age, yet the topic has been somewhat on my mind of late. As I was enjoying the cool autumn air the other day, it occurred to me that I was already more than half the age my father was when he died. This, combined with the fact that I married rather younger than my father and had children sooner often leaves me with the feeling that I am already advanced well upon life's road -- and by implication wondering if mine is shorter than most.

The above may make me sound rather morbid, but it's not really any fear of death that I'm thinking of here. Dante may have found himself, midway through life's journey, in a gloomy wood (even Dante was jumping the gun less -- he was about to turn 35 when he found himself in the gloomy wood in Lent, 1300, at the beginning of Inferno) -- by my experience is more of finding myself hurdling along at tremendous speed and wondering exactly I'm going, and how soon I shall arrive. We measure ourselves by the patterns we know, and so it seems natural to measure my life by that of my father. Yet having got married earlier, had children earlier, bought a house earlier, and settled on a single full time job earlier, I can't help an odd sort of feeling of: What happens later?

To add to the effect, outside the small splinter culture in which we live in our private lives, the people I know professionally have moved in the opposite direction, with most of them having first children in their mid thirties. The picture of the four kids on my desk marks me (depending on how people choose to analyze it) as being either a very young looking 38-40 or else quite dangerously insane. (For my part, I try to provide supporting evidence for both alternatives.)

In a world in which most people seem to expect to have college age children when in their 50s and being "father of the bride" in their sixties -- there seems little precedent for someone whose children will range form 27 to 20 when he turns 50 is supposed to do with the rest of his life. In a sense, it's rather exhilarating. Uncharted territory. Age-ward ho! Yet because it's uncharted, one can't shake the odd feeling that pretty soon all the path will be covered, and one will be left standing around saying, "Well. Here we are. Where are we anyway?"

The One Percent Delusion

Last week a co-worker was explaining to me, in veiled terms, his exciting new business plan. "In five years, this will be a $40 billion dollar industry," he told me. "If I could get just one percent of that, I would be a rich man."

The one percent delusion is a common one for the drafter of a business plan -- it's one that I myself suffered from some years back when I was writing a business plan. People fall into it because it sounds so modest. "Only one percent." And yet if the reason one wants to achieve this goal is because capturing one percent of an industry means running a business with annual gross revenues of $400 million, it doesn't make it any easier to get to that $400 million figure that that represents "only one percent" of the industry. One still has to build a $400 million business, and that's very hard.

It occured to me the other night that there's also a personal version of this, which I think might be called the thirty minute delusion. I gazing at my bookshelf and noting all the books which I really ought to read or reread one of these days, I formed in an instant a vision of a system by which I would put together a list of great books that I would read over the year, and devote thirty minutes a day to working through these. Surely I waste thirty minutes in any given day, and yet this is three hours a week (taking Sundays off) and thus 156 hours a year. Think of all the great reading I could do in those 156 hours!

The problem, of course, is that although thirty minutes is a short period of time, and one does indeed waste thirty minutes several times over in any given day, that does not mean that it is actually easy to successfully schedule a thirty minute block in six days a week. The fact that thirty minutes is only 2% of a day does not mean that it comes free.

Certainly, you can pick a couple of activities which you'll fit into a spare thirty minutes here and a spare sixty minutes there. For me, clearly, one of these major ways I spend that time is writing. Bits also go to reading, studying Russian, walking, cycling, etc. But unless you're already massively uncerscheduled you really don't have thirty extra minutes every day to devote to some new project without deprioritizing something else.

Because the period of time (Just thirty minutes!) sounds so short, and because most of us don't actually have a very precise understanding of our schedules, we almost always feel confident that we must have that extra bit of time available somewhere. Sure two or three virtuous thirty-minute-a-day commitments could be added! But it's not so. Just because thirty minutes is only 2% of a day (assuming you never sleep) does not mean that you can simply grab those thirty minutes without cost.

The Sound of Silence

It's struck me on a few occasions lately how little used I am to not having anything to do.

Earlier this today I arrived in a conference room three minutes after the start time for the meeting I was rushing to, and found myself alone. Knowing who else was supposed to attend, I was pretty sure that they would show up eventually, but I had nothing in hand but my cup of coffee -- my laptop and notebook having been left behind at my desk since I didn't think I would need them at the meeting. It was oddly disconcerting to sit there with nothing to do, to read, to listen to for five minutes until people showed up.

I think this effect must especially kick in when one is in a man made environment -- a white walled corporate conference room being a prime example. My car radio died a while back, and since my normal commute (when I use my car -- which due to laziness and tight scheduling is unfortunately most of the time) is under ten minutes, I haven't bothered to get it replaced. But when I have to drive in to Austin or otherwise drive more than ten minutes, I run into exactly the same sort of phenomenon -- with an urge to either call someone or put in one earbud from my iPod or otherwise do something to relieve the silence.

It's not exactly silence that I find difficult. I'd be perfectly happy in a silent conference room with a book to read or an internet connection so I could browse or write. But after a time one becomes used to always having some sort of mental or sensory input. Reading or listening to music or writing or talking or experiencing all the little sights and sounds of the natural outdoors -- all of these provide grist for the mental mill. But that unnatural silence of a blank white room -- or even the instinctual sights, sounds and reflexes of long distance driving -- leave someone used to the constant interaction of the modern world feeling curiously restless.

Mad as Hell

I hate roaches. Everyone knows that. If there's even the remote possibility that I might see one, I prefer it to be in the evening, when Darwin is home and will come deal with it after rolling his eyes at my initial shriek. So this morning I was infuriated when the four-year-old yelled, "Mommy! A big bug just crawled under the piano!"

In dealing with a roach I'm torn between, on the one hand, calling Darwin home from work, and on the other, not wanting to look like a big wuss in front of my daughters. If I'm gonna kill the thing, I have to get mad. I need the force of anger to kill an inch-long thing that flies and can survive a nuclear explosion.

Here's my Wimp Kills Roach formula: Work up a good head of steam over the fact that the disgusting creature dares to tresspass in my house, wait until it crawls out into the clear (angry mutterings of "Don't you dare go in that closet, or I'll kill you!"), whap it hard with a fly swatter or anything that allows me to stand way back, spray it with cleaning spray until it folds up, and then run the vacuum over it.

Then yell (silently, so the girls won't repeat it later): "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Story Arc

When I was reading and reviewing Eifelheim a few months back, I ran across a critical review on Amazon which essentially said (of the modern section of the plot): "Oh come on. What are the chances that a historian and physicist would both happen to come on such oddly relevant problems at the same time, and happen to be a couple so they could run into each other and figure it out? That's not realistic."

As I thought about it, it struck me that in a sense this underlines how stories are like life, and how they are not like life.

In traditional form, a story begins with some sort of inciting incident, and tracks a character or cast of characters through a set of unfolding events which result in conflict and change. While the inciting incident, conflict, change, resolution arc is in some ways stylized (and all good writers break the rules sometimes in some ways) it actually allows us to see something more clearly in books which actually is at work in life as well. Often things we do, or things that happen to us, have far reaching consequences that continue have effects over a period of time until the conflict results in change and/or resolution.

Some years ago, there was a time when I went out to a bar after work with a bunch of "the boys" for a happy hour. I found myself down at one end of the bar with a guy (we'll call him "Tom") whose second wife had just left him. Tom was drinking fast, and I hadn't had much to eat all day, so between the two of us we were unknowingly headed towards an in Shiner veritas situation. (For those not living in Texas, Shiner Bock is the local beer of choice -- and rather better than the national mass-market brews.)

On his second beer, Tom started talking about his marriage that had just ended. His second wife had been ten years younger than him, which made her my age, though I didn't point that out. Things done, things not done, paths taken and not. Tales could, I'm sure, be told of any marriage. These, however, were now told from the standpoint of its ending, all seen in light of that fact.

After a while he paused, and there was silence for a while. Then he started again.

"You know, but thought I was always making it easy on her, giving her everything she wanted. Back when we were engaged she got pregnant. That seemed like it would make everything harder, so we had an abortion. We never did have any kids." A moment of silence. "I'd really hoped we'd have kids, but we were never ready."

He finished his third beer. "Yeah, a lot of things could have been different."

Tom was facing the end of a story, and trying to figure out how it had started. Trying to figure out where the complications had been, where people had changed, and why. Not because there was much that he could do about it at this point, but because human minds want to know, want to come to some sort of understanding of why the world works the way it does.

That's why we write stories -- in an attempt to distill reality down to a dram that makes some sort of sense. And by making sense of it, to understand and say something about what the world is and how it works.

Very often, stories only make sense in retrospect -- if then. Only after the conflict and change have occurred do we see what the inciting incident was, and even then we seldom know at what point the die was cast, at which point we moved from complication to falling action.

Which is why two thousand years ago (and again on every mass altar) God made man stretched out his hands between heaven and earth -- and between past and future -- and cried out, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."