Selected Essays

AROUND THE NATURALISTS

Lamarck fought sword in hand for the honor of living nature. Do you think he reconciled himself to evolution as easily as did the scientific barbarians of the nineteenth century? But I think embarrassment for nature burnt the swarthy cheeks of Lamarck. He could not forgive nature for a trifle called the variability of species.

Forward! Aux armes! Let us wash ourselves clean of the dishonor of evolution.

Reading the taxonomists (Linnaeus, Buffon, Pallas) has a soothing effect on the disposition, straightens out the eye, and communicates to the soul a mineral quartz tranquillity.

Russia as depicted by that remarkable naturalist Pallas: peasant women distill the dye “mariona” from a mixture of birchleaves and alum; the bark of the linden tree peels off on its own to become bast, to be woven into shoes and baskets; the peasants use a thick petroleum as medicinal oil; the Chuvash girls jingle with trinkets in their tresses.

Whoever does not love Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart will never understand a thing in Pallas.

He transformed the corporeal roundness and graciousness of German music to the Russian plains. With the white hands of a Konzertmeister he collects Russian mushrooms. Damp chamoisskin, decayed velvet, but when you break it open, it’s a pure, deep blue.

Let us speak of the physiology of reading. It is a rich, inexhaustible, and, it would seem, forbidden theme. Out of everything material, of all physical bodies, a book is the object that inspires man with the greatest confidence. A book established on a reading stand is like a canvas stretched on a frame.

When we are completely rapt in the activity of reading, we mainly admire our generic properties, we feel a kind of exaltation at the classification of our own various stages.

But if Linnaeus, Buffon, and Pallas colored my mature years, it is the whale I thank for having awakened in me a childish astonishment at science.

In the zoological museum: drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . Practically nothing in the way of empirical experience.

Time to turn off that tap!

Enough!

I have concluded a truce with Darwin and placed him on my imaginary bookstand next to Dickens. If they should happen to dine together, Mr. Pickwick would join them as a third. One can’t help being taken by Darwin’s good nature. He is an unintentional humorist. The humor of situation is habitual to him, accompanies him wherever he goes.

But is good nature a method of creative cognition, a worthy means of life-probing?

In Lamarck’s reversed, descending movement down the ladder of living creatures, there is a greatness worthy of Dante. The lower forms of organic existence are the hell of humanity.

The long grey antennae of this butterfly had a bristly structure and looked just like the little branches on a French academician’s collar or like the silver palm fronds placed on a coffin. The powerful thorax is shaped like a little boat. The slight head is like a kitten’s.

Its wings with their big eyes were made of the fine old silk of an admiral who had been both at Cesme and Trafalgar.

And suddenly I caught myself wildly desiring to have a look at nature through the painted eyes of that monster.

Lamarck feels the gaps between species. He hears the pauses and the syncopation in the evolutionary series.

Lamarck wept his eyes out over his magnifying glass. In natural science he is the only Shakespearean figure.

Look—that blushing, semirespectable old man goes running down the staircase of living creatures like a young man who has just been treated kindly at an audience with a government minister or made happy by his mistress.

No one, not even the most inveterate mechanist, regards the growth of an organism as resulting from the variability of the external environment. That would be entirely too presumptuous. The environment merely invites the organism to grow. Its functions are expressed in a certain benevolence which is gradually and continually canceled by the severity that holds the living body together and finally rewards it with death.

So, for the environment, the organism is probability, desire, and expectancy. For the organism, the environment is a force that invites. Not so much a surrounding cover as a challenge.

When the conductor draws a theme out of the orchestra with his baton, he is not the physical cause of the sound. The sound is already there in the score of the symphony, in the spontaneous collusion of the performers, in the crowdedness of the auditorium, and in the structure of the musical instruments.

Lamarck’s animals are out of fables. They adapt themselves to the conditions of life. In the manner of La Fontaine. The legs of the heron, the neck of the duck and the swan, the tongue of the anteater, the asymmetrical or symmetrical structure of the eyes in certain fish.

It was La Fontaine, if you wish, who prepared the way for Lamarck’s doctrine. His overly clever, moralizing, judicious beasts made splendid living material for evolution. They had already apportioned its mandates among themselves.

The artiodactylous reasoning of the mammals clothes their fingers with rounded horn.

The kangaroo moves with the leaps of his logic.

This marsupial in Lamarck’s description of weak forelimbs (i.e., limbs that have reconciled themselves to their own uselessness); strongly developed hind extremities (i.e., convinced of their own importance); and a powerful thesis called the tail.

Children have already settled down to play in the sand at the pedestal of the evolutionary theory of Grandfather Krylov, that is, so to speak, Lamarck-La Fontaine. Once having found a refuge in the Luxembourg Gardens, Lamarck’s theory grew cluttered with balls and shuttlecocks.

And I love it when Lamarck deigns to be angry and smashes to smithereens all that Swiss pedagogical boredom. Into the concept of “nature” there bursts the Marseillaise!

Male ruminants butt foreheads. They have no horns as yet.

But an inner feeling, born of anger, directs “fluids” to the forehead, which aid in forming a substance of horn and bone.

I take off my hat. I let the teacher go first. May the youthful thunder of his eloquence never fade!

“Still” and “already” are the two bright points of Lamarckian thought, the throbbings of evolutionary glory and emblazoning, the signalmen and advance scouts of morphology. He was one of that breed of old piano-tuners who jingle with bony fingers in other people’s mansions. He was permitted only chromatic notes and childish arpeggios.

Napoleon allowed him to tune up nature, because he regarded it as imperial property.

In Linnaeus’ zoological descriptions, one can’t miss the successive relationship to, and a certain dependence on, the menagerie of the county fair. The proprietor of the wandering show booth or the hired barker tried to show their merchandise at its best. These barkers never dreamed they would play a certain role in the origin of the style of classical natural science. There they were, lying all out, talking rot on an empty stomach; yet at the same time they couldn’t resist being carried away by their own art. Some demon would save them, but also their professional experience, and the lasting tradition of their craft.

As a child in small-town Uppsala, Linnaeus could not have failed to visit the fair or listen with delight to the line of patter offered in the wandering menagerie. Like boys everywhere, he went numb and melted before the savvy bloke with the jackboots and whip, that doctor of fabulous zoology, who would shower praises on the puma as he brandished his huge red fists.

In linking the important accomplishments of the Swedish naturalist to the eloquence of the carnival loudmouth, I have not the least intention of belittling Linnaeus. I wish only to remind my reader that the naturalist, too, was a professional storyteller, a public demonstrator of new and interesting species.

The colorful portraits of animals in Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae might well hang beside pictures of the Seven Years’ War or an oleograph of the Prodigal Son.

Linnaeus painted his monkeys in the tenderest colonial colors. He would dip his brush in Chinese lacquers, and he would paint with brown and red pepper, with saffron, olive oil, and cherry juice. And he managed his task with dexterity and gaiety, like a barber shaving the Bürgermeister, or a Dutch housewife grinding coffee on her lap in a big-bellied coffee mill.

Delightful—the Christopher-Columbus brilliance of Linnaeus’ monkey house.

It is Adam passing out certificates of merit to the mammals, aided by a Baghdad magician and a monk from China.

The Persian miniature has a slanted, frightened, graceful almond eye.

Sensual without sin, it convinces one like nothing else that life is a precious gift, inalienable.

I love the Moslem enamels and cameos!

Pursuing my simile, I would say: the beauty’s burning, equine eye descends to the reader, gracious and aslant. The charred cabbage-stumps of the manuscripts crunch like Sukhum tobacco.

How much blood has been spilt on account of these touch-me-nots!¹⁶ How conquerors enjoyed them!

Leopards have the sly ears of punished schoolboys.

The weeping willow, having rolled itself up into a globe, flows and swims.

Adam and Eve hold counsel, dressed in the latest paradisial fashion.

The horizon has been abolished. There is no perspective. A charming slowness of wit. The vixen’s noble ascent of the stairs, and the feeling that the gardener is leaning against the landscape and the architecture.

Yesterday I was reading Firdousi and it seemed to me that a bumblebee was sitting on the book sucking it.

In Persian poetry ambassadorial winds blow out of China bearing gifts.

It scoops up longevity with a silver ladle and endows whoever might desire it with millennia by threes and fives. That is why the rulers of the Djemdjid dynasty are as long-lived as parrots.

After having been good for an incredibly long time, Firdousi’s favorites suddenly for no reason at all become scoundrels, solely in obedience to the author’s luxuriously arbitrary fancy.

The earth and the sky in the book of Shahnama are afflicted with goiter—they are delightfully exophthalmic.

I got the Firdousi from the State Librarian of Armenia, Mamikon Artemevich Gevorkian. I was brought a whole stack of little blue volumes—eight, I think. The words of the noble prose translation—it was the French version of Von Mohl—breathed a fragrance of attar of roses. Chewing his drooping gubernatorial lip, with the unpleasant voice of a camel, Mamikon sang me a few lines in Persian.

Gevorkian is eloquent, clever, and courteous, but his erudition is altogether loud and pushy, and his speech fat, like a lawyer’s.

Readers are forced to satisfy their curiosity right there in the director’s office, under his personal supervision, and books that are placed on that satrap’s table take on a taste of pink pheasant’s meat, bitter quails, musky venison, and cunning hare.