Endless forms most beautiful

I am running ahead in my narration too fast, so let me take a step back and collect another thread of the story and follow it up again to the point where I now stand in time. An important point that is, the second rite of passage in the painful stages of the process of growing up. The first gateway was the first school cycle, which was more eventful for what happened outside than in the school education itself. The second gateway was the passage into the second school cycle: this one coincided with that turmoil of body and mind that is called the onset of puberty and the opening of that long period of transformation of a human being that is called adolescence. One step back is needed to look at the change more closely. There's a before and after and a threshold in between, and in stepping across that gateway some of my old favorite thoughts and occupations faded away and got replaced by new ones, some remained, in lesser intensity, some got transformed.



One other passion of my elementary school years I still haven't mentioned was a deep fascination with the evolution of the living species. For a period of time before my parents split and before my paternal grandfather died, every weekend my father would pay a visit to his parents who were at the time still living in a comfortable apartment in the city center. He would take me with him, and as a reward he would then take me to the Museum of Natural History, not far from where my grandparents lived. There I spent a great deal of time looking at fossils, from the early ammonites to the impressive skeleta of the large dinosaurs. I thought the slow motion of geological eras, during which living species slowly changed into other species, climbing slowly up the road of complexity, was the most beautiful vision of life that one could possibly envision. I was dimly aware that some religions postulated the simultaneous creation at some ridiculously recent age of all living species simultaneously, but that was clearly a lie in the face of the fossil and geological evidence one can find accumulated in huge amounts in every corner of the earth, and anyway even the religious people themselves (at least in that part of the world) seemed utterly unconvinced of their own creation myths and dismissed them readily as "metaphors". Evolution by natural selection was beautiful and fascinating, and wonderful for a child to contemplate.



I was intrigued by some obvious questions: at what stage in the evolution had intelligence first appeared. Sure enough, one needs large brains and that sets a limit in time, but what about the few hundred million years during which dinosaurs had been the most highly evolved species on the globe, they had large brains alright, sometime even a secondary brain down the spinal cortex presumably involved in that part of the neural activity the cortex takes care of in our bodies as well. Well, what about them? The big carnivores walked in upright position, another feature that was often linked to the emergence of intelligence in primates evolving into hominids. Had they developed comparable intelligence at any stage before their extinction? If they had, would anything in the fossils record remain that could be used to prove it unmistakably? In other words, would the tools fabricated by early hominids have survived for archaeologists to see if they had been not hundreds of thousands of years old but hundreds of millions of years older? Of course I did not have answers to such questions, but in the way a child's mind operates, I fantasized about it endlessly.



Seeing my growing interest in the evolution of life on earth, my mother gave me as a present the beautiful book "Life before man": the natural history book authored by the Czech palaeontologist Zdeněk Špinar and beautifully illustrated by the Czech painter Zdeněk Michael František Burian. It became one of my favorite books of that early period. I spent endless time reading it many times over, fascinated by Burian's very careful reconstructions of life scenarios in the early ages of life on earth. I especially came to appreciate the difference between a job well done, and carefully justifiable on the basis of scientific evidence, like the author and illustrator of this book had done, and the careless inaccurate things that children were normally fed in books directly aimed at them (Špinar's book was not meant as a children's book). I think it help me develop that critical sense that distinguishes what is well done from what is not, and ultimately what is science from what is not. The earlier one develops this sensitivity in life the least likely one is, later on, to fall into the lure of pseudoscience, fringe science, and all that.



My father also bought me a set of models of dinosaurs to play with. They were very nice models, the analogs of the Burian illustration as opposed to the drawings in children's books. They were not the cheap bags of dubious plastic dinosaur-like toys sold to children in street fairs and toy stores, but more accurate models based on reconstructions in museums and made of far better material. I suspect these were also not thought of as children's toys. I did play with them though, as play and thought are still indistinguishable at that age. My favorite game was to construct scenarios, three-dimensional analogs of the Burian life scenes in the prehistoric world. I set the stage on my room floor, used collected rocks and pieces of wood to create a landscape, ferns and small plants and the dinosaurs models to populate it and imagined stories to unfold it in time. There in those artificial landscapes all my thoughts and questions about the origin of intelligent life, about the rise and fall of species, became concrete tangible events acted out in a play.



While I speculated about life on the early Earth, I naturally also speculated upon life beyond Earth. That was the time, as I mentioned already, when I was also exploring my mother's science fiction collection. Again there were recurrent questions that especially attracted me: would it happen that on other world with conditions similar to the Earth, if such existed somewhere in the cosmos, life might have followed the same initial steps and then diverged, with another branch of evolution becoming the one giving rise to higher intelligence? What if only marine life were available? It was also the time when I had my great fascination for the Pacific Ocean and its life forms and its human cultures on the scattered islands.



I started looking more and more closely and carefully at seashells. The variety of forms, the patterns on the shells, that again seemed to embody in a single branch of the large evolutionary tree of life on earth the full spectrum of enormous complexity of forms that evolution is capable of generating. I read and learned about the way shells grow, the way pattern form, their algorithmic beauty. I imagined worlds on which this line had become the one that would lead to higher life forms and eventually to intelligence. What would be then the chances of contact with an alien civilization that descended from seashells?
All these thoughts and questions were played out in new landscapes were seashells and alien worlds and ancient earths were concocted.



This material way of expressing thoughts through scenarios and storytelling came gradually to an end as I approached the preadolescent stage. Thought got gradually internalized and play diverged into a different sort of entertainment. The more sophisticated the manipulation of language became, the less the need for visualization and implementation of thoughts into material objects. Writing soon took over as the main mean of expression, gradually suppressing the visual modes and the more manual forms of creativity. Artists are the people who manage to revert this process, or those for whom it never happens or to a far lesser extent. I make the shift to verbal expression very rapidly, around the time when I underwent that rite of passage at the end of elementary school and into the next cycle. The last large scenarios built in my room go back to that year: afterwards the wood and stones were dismissed, the dinosaur models and the seashell receded to a passive role of room decorations and became silent.

How I learned to love the bomb

It was 1980 when I made the transition from first to second school cycle, from elementary to junior high school, or middle school as it's called in those parts of the world. In the same year America elected Ronald Reagan and Europe braced for the inevitable Cold War escalation that would shortly follow. The feeling of impending catastrophe was palpable and real: most people in Europe at that time expected a nuclear war between the two superpowers to be a very concrete near future scenario. The Pentagon hawks seemed unstoppable. Were we supposed to look at those icy figures in the Kremlin, at the likes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, for the hero that would rescue Europe from this madness? The future looked bleak, the clouds of war seemed to be gathering with increasing strength. Every year the stockpiles of warheads in the nuclear arsenals kept growing, ready to annihilate life on Earth many times over. The strategy of deterrence that had kept the superpowers in check for so long was being undermined by the first talks of "Strategic Defense Initiative", the infamous "Star Wars" scheme. The perspective of Europe disappearing in a ball of thermonuclear fire felt suddenly very real.



It was the years of remarkable cinema productions that raised awareness in the population about the real meaning of nuclear war, beyond the silly "duck and cover" propaganda of the previous decades. When the beautiful British animation "When the wind blows" came out in movie theaters I went to several shows. I saw all the rest as well in a short span of time afterwards: from the magnificent 1960s classics like "Dr. Strangelove" to the recent productions, the somewhat cheesy American "The Day After" and the chilling British reply on the same theme, "Threads". I quickly developed a fascination for nuclear energy and the workings of peaceful and military applications of the same.



I felt for the first time quite certain of what I wanted to do as a grownup: I wanted to become a nuclear physicists. If the human mind was able to control such immense and ominous source of energy by splitting the atom, if it was capable of constructing hydrogen bombs that could recreate the sun on earth, then I wanted to be that mind. If our fate is to die in thermonuclear fire, then better be the masters of our destiny than its slaves. I was especially attracted by the long and difficult training involved in becoming a nuclear scientist, the advanced mathematics, the physics of the quantum world. I wanted to face that challenge, I wanted to start learning what school deferred far too long. I went to the only place where I knew I could get good math and physics books at a cost we could afford: the local section of the Communist Party and its Association for Cultural Exchanges with the Soviet Union. That's how I had my first encounter with the Mir international editions: scientific books published in the Soviet Union in a varieties of languages and sold in various countries at subsidized prices. I got away with about ten math and physics books, most of them too advanced for my age, but slowly conquered over the following years, and with the Collected Works of Lenin added to the bunch for less than the cost of a meal at the school cafeteria.



My mother had a subscription to Scientific American since the year before I was born. During my three years in junior high, I voraciously read eleven years of the back issues plus every new one that arrived each month. In those days, at least in the local edition, each issue had an article about issues related to nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, perspectives for the future developments of the Cold War. The other main source of excitement in the Scientific American issues of 1979-1980 were the two Voyager missions and their encounters with the giant planets and their moons. The descriptions of the new worlds: the volcanos of Io, the Ocean of Europa, the rings of Saturn. There were other marvels: superconductors, cellular automata, the pioneering days of neuroscience, the very early steps in the miniaturization of electronics.



I suffered from a serious physical injury while playing basketball in the school team during my second year in junior high. The ligament of my left knee essentially disintegrated. It is still presently in that pitiful state, which severely limits the range of sports I can play. I was confined to a long convalescence, which I spent reading all the remaining Scientific American issues and every other book I could lay my hands on that had to do with physics or mathematics. I gradually expanded my aspirations of a future life as a physicists from the domain of nuclear energy to the wonders of planetary science, radio-astronomy, electronics, and whatever could be talked about in terms of equations and their solutions. I cultivated my ideal of the scientific hero, something along the lines of a Sergei Lvovich Sobolev, director of the Soviet Institute for the Atomic Energy with its own A-bomb project on the side of the discoveries of basic science and higher mathematics. I was a Cold War monster, and immensely proud of it.

The liquid world

During my last year of elementary school, while I was coming to terms with the new experience of living only with my mother, which was both a relief and a fright, I came to develop a strange obsession with that side of the globe that only looks blue, the Pacific Ocean. The fact that you can turn the globe around and if you look at it from the right angle you do not see any trace of dry land seemed ominous. I came to think of it as two different planets oddly glued together, one with a gaseous atmosphere and solid landmasses, inhabited by all sorts of land animals and plants, and natural living habitat where humans and their civilization evolved. On the other side a liquid world, populated by life long before our dried land had seen anything but barren rock, with strange creatures of the deep. I was especially fascinated by the liminal zone that separates these two worlds and by the human civilization that developed in this thin boundary: the sparse islands of Oceania. I spent most of that year reading all I could find about the civilizations of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, their ethnic and linguistic groups, their artifacts, their gods. I read all I could also about the oceans, about the great whales, the dolphins and the experiments that have been carried out to probe their intelligence and language, the songs of the humpback whales.

I spent those last five months of the first of many school cycles writing on the typewriter, which now only had to be shared with another user, a long text that collected all my musings and findings about the Oceanic culture and my own personal cult of the sea and of the effects on the human mind of its close proximity. I presented my text at the final examination day, much to everybody's puzzlement. There was nothing at all in the school curriculum that resembled what I had produced: if pupils were supposed to know what the Pacific Ocean is and be able to locate it on the map that was about all there was to it. I did not care, I never cared much about school and curricula, I was in the process of discovering a world, and what is it all to that?



My mother's family was made of coastal dwellers, akin to fisherfolks and sailors, but their sea was the tame Mediterranean of the Greek myths, of Sirens and Cyclops. If our narrow stretch of water that separates Europe from Africa had managed to produce so much in the minds of men, what might an ocean stretching half a planet wide have done to the inhabitants of its scattered islands? Why the ocean meant so much to me at that stage can be widely speculated upon, a collective archetype of the unconscious, a pungent metaphor of the world divided, a faraway civilization as another form of escapism into the distant worlds of science fiction? All may well be, but none will do justice entirely to the feeling of awe and marvel that Oceania inspired me. When in much more recent times I ended up taking frequent trips to Australia and visit personally the collections of Oceanic art, and see the Pacific Ocean stretching away from its shores, that early fascination lingered on in my mind, guiding me towards this or that artifact, buzzing with words and images, digging up old and half forgotten knowledge.

The sky divided

I was in my final year of elementary school when my parents finally separated. It should have happened much earlier for the sake of the common good, but the pressure of conformity in a society that had only so recently and reluctantly accepted modernity imposed a heavy burden on the choices of individual lives. Even then, at the height of the societal changes brought about by the sudden and much needed revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, the notion of family might have been dead and rotten, but it still held its grip on the population with remarkable tenacity.

At that time, my father had just started his new appointment as associate professor in Europe's oldest university.
Yet, when it became known that, in order to embellish his job application and increase the chances of getting the job he had appropriated work that was of my mother's and passed it off as his own, she threatened to throw all his belongings out in the street and filed for divorce. It should be mentioned that the divorce was in fact granted, not on the basis of the serious charges of misappropriation of intellectual work, which the court would not even consider, but on the ground of a silly affair my father had been having with a plump German Fräulein. Such was the mind of the time.

The long and tense years that preceded the split and the unpleasant events that surrounded it had left my mother in a despicable state. Her recurrent episodes of manic depression intensified, alternating between fits of violent rage, depths of depression, alcohol abuse and magical bouts of creative work in between. A life lived with such intensity and despair is not bound to last very long. I understood then and there that the rest of my growing up years were going to be a rush against time, to reach legal maturity and financial independence while my mother was still with me, the threatening specter of a constricted and claustrophobic life with my father looming large in the background. With all my best efforts, I only managed it by a very small margin: I left for the US on New Year's Day of 1994, at the age of 23 with the promise of a first meagre salary just after completing my studies. I had barely made it in time: two years later my mother was dead. I had succeeded in exorcising the specter of my father, the possibility of his gaining control, at least by means of financial dependence, over the course of my life. I had achieved my primary goal: the uncompromising "live free or die" call. Through all those years of tragic intensity, trying to leave childhood behind at high speed, rushing through adolescence and into maturity, I grew to despise the people who linger in childhood forever, who rely on complacent parents for financial support well into their adult life: I never asked for anything, I never got anything, except a clock ticking away, and ticking fast. Except time flying by and a feeling of urge, a need to achieve as quickly as possible my complete independence, a liberation from the quicksands of family, planning my escape like an obstacle race where I found myself over the years negotiating my way around studies, the precarious balance of family life, always on the verge of breaking apart and make my worse nightmares come true, and the historical changes of the world at large, that forced me repeatedly to make unexpected changes of plans at breathtaking speed and without having any time to think of the consequences or to look for possible alternatives. I managed it all quite well altogether, given the initial conditions, but I would not recommend to anybody this sort of "parkour" as a coming of age experience. There's enough in it to purge the most resilient romantic of the myth of idyllic childhood memories.

For all tomorrow's parties

"Fit for one who sits and cries
For all tomorrow's parties"
(Velvet Underground)



By the time I was in my second or third year in elementary school, things between my parents had definitely turned ugly. My father had a technique of his own for picking fights with other people, which he had especially fine tuned to work on my mother. He would single out a topic he knew his "opponent" held dear, a person such as a very close friend, or a deeply held belief, or anything he knew the other person would be emotionally attached to, and in a very cold and apparently detached tone of voice he would start to make increasingly offensive remarks about it, making exaggerated claims about the worthlessness of that person, the stupidity of that belief, or whatever, all of this stated as if it were an incontrovertible truth and a factual representation of reality rather than his own very twisted view. He would continue to escalate the provocation, by touching upon more and more delicate subjects, by casually mentioning having thrown away some precious personal belonging the other held especially dear because it was worthless, ugly to see, and always in the way, and so on, up until the point where the other would explode in a fit of rage. Then, claiming to be the innocent victim of a completely unprovoked verbal abuse, he would move on to accuse his opponent of being crazy, violent, and uncivilized and used this accusation as a justification for himself to behave in a manner that can precisely be described by those words. He was so pathologically scared of his own uncontrolled emotional behavior that he sought a way to project it onto others and pretend with himself that it was them and not he who were the abnormal ones. Sure enough, in the long run, the exposure to his continuous provocations was capable of drawing anyone to the brink of madness.



He was equipped with a large supply of excuses for starting fights. He had a unique capacity for despising things that did not fit into his own familiar world, from unusual (from his point of view) dietary restrictions to different philosophical and cultural habits, anything could at any time fall under his all too eager censorship. Since other people do sometime care about their own habits, culture, believes, as much as he would care to eliminate them, this would inevitably lead to continuous fights with anyone who would happen to spend a substantial amount of time in his company.



At some point, one of the favorite targets became my mother's innocent habit of occasionally reading science fiction. Up to that point I had not cared much about parental reading preferences, but when I repeatedly witnessed exceedingly abusive tirades during which my father threatened to throw away the meager collection of my mother's science fiction novels, I got interested in finding out what was going on. Having grown accustomed by then to being surrounded by books and having developed myself a strong emotional attachments to many of my early readings (like Klee's island of the magic squares I once mentioned before, which to this day still follows my many relocations around the world), I was horrified by the idea of somebody even conceiving to destroy another person's books. Being also by then well acquainted with my father's techniques of picking fights with my mother, I also understood that, if he said that it meant that those books meant something to my mother, so I decided I wanted to know more.



I didn't know what science fiction was until then, but immediately the idea of entertaining visions of the future of science was tremendously appealing to my imagination. Making educated guesses about new technologies that may exist in the future and setting them up inside scenarios of contacts with other worlds and travels across space and time, building worlds that were both alien and believable, combining flights of fancy with (at least an appearance of) scientific rigor: it all seemed marvelous. The fact that my literary taste was not developed enough at that age to notice the serious shortcomings of the genre in that respect certainly greatly enhanced this perception. What mostly contributed to my appreciation of science fiction, however, was probably primarily the fact of keeping a door open to a range of possible futures: escapism one may rightly call it, but when the conditions of your daily life do not look in the least desirable, isn't it better to court evasion into a scientifically and technologically advanced vision of humanity's future in space rather than falling in the grip of dubious dreams of improbable middle ages and princesses, or in the gutters of pitiful sugary romances? I defend my vision of the radiant future: even though the future depicted in science fiction is marred by catastrophes, postnuclear apocalypses, technologies run amok, nature destructive or destroyed, it still stretches the vision of humanity and its role in the world beyond the boundaries of our present time and civilization, towards broader horizons of diversity of life forms and environments. Even in its darkest forms, it is a constructive hope, one that speaks of human minds engaged in the struggle to understand the universe, which is what science is all about. It does not matter, or at least it did not matter to me at that age, that the science in science fiction stories is often defective (with laudable exceptions) or implausible to say the least. What matters is the image of the act of doing science as it is inevitably portrayed in a good part of the genre: its entanglement with the future of humanities, the dangers of its technological and human consequences, the thrill of pushing the boundaries of knowledge beyond its present limits. It has a Faustian appeal, no doubt, one that I would come to rationalize and appreciate much later, but it is certainly not surprising that it got me hooked at that early age and for several years afterwards, until my literary taste started to become too demanding, at least. I began through these early readings of science fiction, hidden away from the inquisitive and censorial paternal looks, to associate science with empowerment and freedom: an association that deeply influenced the later course of my life.



I began to appreciate the British school of eco-catastrophic futures, Ballard and his four-elements cycle; the dark humor of Douglas Adams and his "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"; Asimov's robotic futures and Foundation cycle, miniature voyages inside the human body; Clarke's contact stories suspended between Gaugin-like southern seas and the depths of space; Lem's impossible otherness of alien life. I dreamt of buried monolithic stones signaling to the stars, of sentient oceans reading our deepest selves, of immense computers, cryogenic voyages, and amoeba-like creatures swallowing midwest American villages. I was simply dreaming the collective dreams of the age: nuclear fires, flying saucers; Cold War monsters agitated by a very real and nearby intramural war superimposed over the visions of the world at large, caught like I was in a precarious equilibrium of ominous and brutal forces, genies of destruction ready to be release without warning. Duck and cover, or else escape into the consoling fantasy of the existence of not one but many futures, of science as a way to control the dark forces of nature, to overcome the evil djinns. It was not the escape into dissociation, so common to the children caught up in impossible fights they're unable to endure or to escape, but more a sense of struggle to build one of those many futures, one where the logic and intuition of discovery would be dominating over the obscurantist intransigence of certainties that surrounded me.

Secret labs

By the end of my second year in elementary school, my Scottish friend and I had become an ebullient, mischief inclined pair. As a result, my English improved from the primitive pidgin state to a recognizable, if still tentative, language. We got into the habit of waiting for the morning break at school and then take advantage of the short lapse of freedom to set off together and explore those rooms in the upper floors of the school building to which access to pupils was strictly prohibited. Not that we ever found any hidden treasure in any of them, but the very sound of the words "strictly prohibited" would make it an irresistible call to adventure. We were often caught and punished, but being among the school best pupils, the punishment handed out to us was usually much more lenient than what others received for lesser misdemeanors.



I tried repeatedly to convince her of the beauty of molecules and chemistry. When I once mentioned that with knowledge of chemistry one can produce things that explode, she finally started to pay attention. I invited her over to my place and showed her the thing I was most proud of: my chemistry lab.

My mother, who saw that my interest in chemistry had taken a very theoretical side, with molecular models, atomic orbitals and all that, had in fact decided that I needed a wet lab to make it all more concrete. In those days, there was a toy that was sold for children age 11 and older, which went under the name "The little chemical scientist" and consisted of a collection of glass tubes and various chemical substances with which to make experiments. There were solutions that changed color, things that produced big colorful flames, and my all time favorite: crystals that grew to considerable size. Despite the fact that I was a mere 7 years old, well below the age limit for this toy, my mother bought it for me and I set up my nicely equipped lab.



I doubt it that, nowadays, it would still be possible to buy such toys for children, with a supply of inflammable, toxic substances, and reactions that generate stinking fumes and bursts of flames. People don't trust their children anymore these days it seems.

My lab grew considerably in size the following year, when my mother took on a new job. She began teaching in a school that trained the specialist of the fashion design industry, which already back then constituted that part of the nation's main export.
When one says fashion design, people instinctively think of anorexic models on the catwalk and queer fashion designers dressed in black silk. Well, that's right, but there's a lot more going on behind the scene. There is the large industry of textile, especially silk, production, with the chemical labs that produce the dyes and pigments, the art historians that provide the themes and sources of inspiration for the "collections" that are produced every year, the highly specialized training of the people who learn how to make those drawings. Most of the people working in the field had passed through a specific school, where they were taught the secrets of the trade. I suspect my mother's decision to take on that job was as much motivated by her interest in art history and creative drawing as by the fact that the school had a large and lavishly equipped chemistry lab, with which it made consulting for all the firms in the trade on the production of textile dyes.

The school was closer to the place where we lived, so my mother no longer had a long train commute to get back home in the evening, but she quickly befriended the head of the chemistry labs at her new workplace and given free access to them. So she often stayed extra hours after her classes were over, to enjoy herself with chemistry research. Mostly the lab over there was equipped to investigate the bonds of various new brands of synthetic dye to fabric, especially silk and cotton. A very applied kind of research, driven by the immediate needs of the local industry, but I suppose still interesting enough on the theoretical side to give satisfaction to my mother's scientific curiosity.



So she was still coming home very late, but she sometime brought me spare glasses from their lab for me to use in my small scale home made experiments. Having real glasses from a real chemistry lab made me feel like I was doing real science. It felt great. I even got a lab coat and some extra substances for my experiments when I ran out of the ones contained in the original package.

I managed to impress my Scottish friend with my enhanced lab, but when she tried asking her parents for a box of the same "little chemical scientist" package, they adamantly refused on the ground that the toy box specifically said it was meant only for children at least eleven years of age and to be used only with adult supervision, while we were only seven years old and clearly intended to play with it on our own. That wasn't the end of the story though. She saved pocket money for quite a while until there was enough to get the box. We went to the toy store and with a cleverly improvised story about a present for a non-existent older brother she convinced the clerk to sell us the chemistry box. Out on the sidewalk we carefully inspected our catch. The next question was a more difficult one to solve: how do you hide a fully equipped chemistry lab with burners, flasks, stinking and colorful fumes, from the eyes and nose of inquisitive parents. After debating for a while we came out with a perfect solution: the storage room down in the basement of her apartment building. That lasted for a while, until neighbors became suspicious and alerted her parents. I was banned from their house and forbidden to see her outside of school. At the end of elementary school we went off to different school and lost track of each other. Out of curiosity, now that I am writing up this story in this blog, I looked up her name on Google and found her PhD thesis, in Chemistry, at a respectable American university. It is such a pleasure to see that parents sometime are unable to screw up their children's future, hard as they may try!

Objects trouvés

There were a number of objects around the house that caught my attention since early childhood, objects that belonged to the world of adults, shrouded in mystery, exerting
an aura of necessity about them - objects whose presence was needed, essential, whose services were sought for aims I was eagerly trying to envision.



There was the Olivetti typewriter. That was one thing in the house whose noisy presence was almost incessantly felt. My father was an early bird: he would wake up naturally at four in the morning, promptly get up, raise all the curtains, open all the windows and turn on all the lights in the house, presumably with the intention to show widely to the neighborhood the virtuous hard worker that he was, and prevent anybody else from having a good sleep until a more humane hour of the day. He would fix himself coffee and then sit at the typewriter and work away until it was time for me to get up and get ready for school. My mother, on the contrary, was not a morning person, to say the least. She would begin working in the evening, after my father had already gone to sleep and I was also put to bed. The typewriter was back in use then and she would keep on working through the night. Ordinarily, she would go to sleep shortly before the time when my father woke up in the morning, but unfortunately their schedule was not always to carefully timed. The worst times of the day, besides the meal times, were the brief periods in the evenings or in the mornings when their waking time accidentally overlapped.

There finally came the day when I was allowed my share of the use of the typewriter, in the hours of the afternoon, when I was back from school. I perceived that as an important step into the slow and painful rite of passage that gradually gives access to the world of grownups. Being able to type my own writings acquired an enormous importance to me, be it uncertain poems, musings over plants and minerals, or summaries of my readings about the distant civilization of the Pacific islands. I felt that by typing them up I was giving my own thoughts more weight, more credibility in the currency of the adult world, where thoughts of children are so easily dismissed as irrelevant. I typed anything I happened to think about: descriptions of chemical experiments, short stories, dreams, summaries of books.

I was fascinated by the typewriter and the strange distribution of letters on the keyboard, so different from the order in which children were asked to recite the alphabet in first grade. When I was told that the letters have been distributed in that order to slow down the typing so that it would not jam the machine I was flabbergasted: I typed slowly then, with just one or two fingers, and I had barely learned how to find the letters in the right places on the keyboard. I could hardly imagine somebody typing so fast as to jam the machine. I was even told that the order of letters on the keyboard had to be designed in different ways for different languages, because letters occur with different frequencies, and that got me to regard these machine with even more of a sense of wonder.



There were other mechanisms, no less fascinating. The adding machine looked almost like a typewriter, with a keyboard and a lever, but it did something magnificent and mysterious: it added and multiplied numbers! It took a longer time for me to gain access to the adding machine: it probably was a more expensive piece of equipment and my parents feared, rightly, that I might try to take it apart to find out how it worked. Finally, after I promised repeatedly that I would not try to open it and take the mechanism apart, I was allowed to use it. It was hard to resist the temptation to do exactly what I had promised not to do: I wanted to know how a simple punching of keys and turning of a wheel could perform what I thought only a sentient being was able, sometime with effort, to achieve. Musing over the adding machine, trying to imagine how it might have worked, without having the possibility to verify my hypotheses, was probably what got me to develop an early attraction for the idea of automated computation and I started dreaming the dream of our modern civilization, the dream of intelligent machines. It would be a few years still until I could get my hands on my first computer, but the germs of the fascination I felt with it when the time came had been planted already with the mechanical keys and wheels of the old adding machine.



The most exciting of all the object of the grownup world that surrounded me was certainly the slide ruler. It was a beautiful piece cast in ivory, which had once belonged to my paternal grandfather, the engineer, who had passed it on to my father when he became a student of architecture. This was no adding machine. There was no hidden mechanism to explore or guess: the functioning was all in full sight and very simple apparently. I understood that I had reached a further step in conceptual abstraction, where the difficulty of things did not lie in the complicated way in which a mechanism is assembled (that had always been for me, up to that point, the notion of "complicated") but in something conceptual that resides entirely inside the mind. There was a concept, a mathematical one, by virtue of which the mechanism turned something apparently trivial, like sliding two narrow plates one past the other, into a sophisticated calculation. Something called logarithms. And there were books with tables of logarithms which were consulted in the process of calculation. The slide ruler gave me a different sense of curiosity, not the maverick desire to take mechanisms apart to see how their building blocks are put together, but a sense of longing for deeper understanding, for getting hold of the key that opens the door of meaning.

The home and the world

After some time in school, I was able to spot who were the other misfit in the class, and I began to make some friends. Mine was probably the first generation that was exposed to a moderate amount of multiculturalism: of the forty children in the class only four spoke a different language at home. One was a Persian whose family had smelled trouble and left the country ahead of the Islamic Revolution. One was a Guatemalan, who was having the hardest time in school, the language being so similar that it was nearly impossible to eliminate systematic mistakes. One was a stiff Protestant Swiss German and the fourth, who was to become my closest ally in mischief, was a British who spoke with a very quaint Scottish accent. They were the only other people in that large crowd who looked with puzzlement at things everybody else gave for granted, and who, like me, seemed to perennially ponder over the Chatwin question: "What am I doing here?"

While I continued to speak proper language with the grownups, with my peers I ended up adopting a curious pidgin, born of a most improbable combination of languages.

My father, who noticed that I was so bored at school and who worried about my increasing use of pidgin instead of proper linguistic expressions, decided that, if I was going to speak in several languages, I might as well do it properly. He signed me up for a weekend language school that offered a package of intensive courses for school children covering three major European languages.

It was all very well with that, until my mother realized that one of the three languages I was learning was German. She stormed into the school and dragged me out of the classroom in the middle of a lecture, screaming that over her dead body I was ever going to speak a word of German.

For somebody whose father narrowly escaped ending his days in Auschwitz, and who grew up in the part of the country where German occupation had been the most atrocious, the reaction is understandable.

Learning those languages at that age, however, would have been a very good idea, and if I am still, to this day, using pidgin instead of proper languages when I move around Europe, it is probably due largely to that missed opportunity.

The stuff things are made of

During my first year in school I came to discover something wonderful, whose existence I couldn't even suspect. It didn't happen because of the school, or maybe only indirectly, by effect of the fact that after this new phase of my life began, my mother began to spend a lot more time with me than she had done in previous years. I guess that, somehow, I must have become a more interesting company by then.

My mother had a great secret passion. If you have caught the hints I dropped in previous postings, you already know which.

She had always been the best student at each and every school she attended (for the sake of knowledge only, it is understood). When she was about to finish school and ready to make the crucial decision on a course of higher studies, my grandfather arranged for her to meet his childhood friend, at the time not yet, but soon to become, Nobel laureate. I do not know what conversation took place, but something must have ignited the easily combustible material that constitutes a bright young inquisitive mind. Was it something about the synthesis of macromolecules, about the marvels of polymerization? I do not know. Chemistry became my mothers ever present secretly cultivated life passion.



Why a secret passion and not also a life career? Good question, one that neither I nor, I believe, my mother ever had a clear answer for. Being the bright student she was, she easily won admission, and with flying colors, to the Chemistry program of the then best university in the country, the Polytechnique where the famous chemical scientist himself had studied. She obtained a highly competitive fellowship to support her studies away from home, loved the place and started off distinguishing herself immediately as, needless to say, the best student in the program. She was all set and ready to march on into a bright future of laboratories, experiments, discoveries, passion and wonder.

Very soon and very unexpectedly, she quit the Chemistry program she was enjoying so much and transfered to the Architecture program within the same Polytechnique. It was only thanks to the fact that she immediately became the best student in the other program as well, that she was allowed to maintain her fellowship and continue.

Childhood is a state of captivity we seek at all costs to escape. Often parents fail to realize how badly their offspring need to get rid of their large looming shadows. There is nothing worse parents can do to their grown up children than failing to set them free. She loved Chemistry but could not stand the idea of her father still there breathing on her neck, with his friends, his expectations, his projections. She much preferred to sacrifice the one thing she loved the most and be free, than to remain chained to the umbilical chord of childhood. Her father, who understood the reason behind her choice, did not forgive her. She ran off to her newly chosen destiny and they remained on non-speaking terms for twenty years.



As soon as I was old enough to go to school, my mother started talking to me about Chemistry. I learned how things are made of different elements, and that the varieties of combinations of these ninety something building blocks are responsible for all the different qualities of the things we see: the fact that water is liquid and transparent, the smell of ammonia that spreads around when the cat pees, the fact that certain objects are opaque, shiny, translucent, solid or liquid, it all boils down to these things called molecules. It was the most incredibly wonderful thing I had ever heard, but there was more. There were different bonds between atoms that formed molecules and a way to understand how the physical properties of the different elements recur in families. There was the periodic table. My mother drew for me, using the same large drawing table she used for the architecture blueprints, a giant size reproduction of Mendeleev's periodic table. It occupied the whole stretch of the wall along which my bed stood. I stared at it at night, reading with fascination, atomic number, atomic radius, isotope abundance, melting and boiling points. I noticed that only two of the elements are liquid at ordinary temperature (do you know which ones?). There were other, more mysterious numbers: electronegativity, first ionization energy; and then there was the most wonderful thing of all: electron configuration. Those cryptic codes like 3d^6 4s^2 (that's Iron) or 4d^10 5s (Silver) or 2s^2 2p^3 (Nitrogen) were a code that matched a large drawing my mother had added to the side of the main table, which illustrated schematically a nucleus, surrounded by shells where, she told me, the electrons resided. Some of these orbitals were round (s) some had more complicated shapes (p,d,f). I noticed (I had long hours to look at this thing every night) how p only appeared with atomic number 5 and then again with 13, d only with 21, and then once again with 39. The very last of the transuranic elements were decorated with question marks. Mother told me that we do not really know they are there, but they are expected on the basis of the structure of the shells. What a marvel science was, which could predict such wonders! Other children had guardian angels looking over their sleep. I had guardian atomic shells.



When she saw that I was completely hooked up on the periodic table of the elements, we began to explore the wider world of molecules. That's when I got the most beautiful toy I ever had: a kit to build molecular models.



I would rush to school in the morning, tucking away in the pockets of my coats all the best samples I had built the night before. I showed to everybody the shape of water and ammonia, and when even the molecules of sulphuric acid and nitroglycerine had failed to impress my classmates, I slowly extracted from my pocket the marvel of marvels: the benzene ring! They thought I was showing them some strange bracelet and they showed me bead chains and little mirrors. I was totally baffled.

All the colors of red

Ideological education is a heavy burden to carry.

My parents were suspicious of any conventional toys I may ask for. When they took me on vacation to a sea resort in the summer, I told them that I too wanted some of the little toy cars the other children were playing with on the beach. My father promptly gave me a long and detailed explanation on how toy cars are crypto-fascist instruments of capitalist propaganda. Being the instinctively cynical person I've always been, I thought he just didn't want to buy me a new toy. I was wrong: within a few days I got a large supply of toy excavators, trucks, bulldozers, cranes, tractors and all the imaginable forms of progressive and proletarian motorized vehicles.

Admittedly, an excavator is a lot more fun than a racing car for playing in the sand!



When one day during my first years in school I came home to my mother boasting that I was the best in the class, she beat the hell out of me, telling me (rightly) that one learns things for the pleasure of knowledge and not out of a desire to be better than other people. She yelled at me and insulted me, saying that I was an individualist. Not that, at the time, I had a completely clear idea of what "individualist" meant, but it was certainly something akin to "filthy worm crawling in the mud".

The most serious drawback with this type of education is the fact that I grew up in a world which does not exist and never did. Communism was a beautifully concocted fairytale of the modern era, but its proletarian workers paradise was no more real than dragons, wizards, and princesses of the fairytales of old. More desirable perhaps, more interesting, but certainly no more real.

I believe this contributed substantially in generating that feeling of misplacement that accompanied me through most of my life. In the beginning of my school years, this combined with the fact that I was out of phase with the pace of school education, and surrounded by other children whose families couldn't have been more remote from the world my parents belonged to.

People familiar with other educational systems may at this point wonder why I did not simply enroll directly in the third or fourth instead of the first grade in school, if I was already substantially ahead with things like reading and writing. It seems like a natural idea, but in the country where I grew up this is explicitly forbidden by the law. One cannot enroll in the year (N+1)-st of school education unless one has already attended all the years from 1 to N.
I was told that the reason for this regulation is to prevent parents from creating freak child prodigies who are total social misfits. One has to consider whether it is more alienating to be in the company of children of the same age with whom you have very little in common to communicate, or to be surrounded by slightly older children who share a number of similar experiences.

My social skills with the other children had improved slightly from the preschool days. I had by then learned that there are other possible modes of interaction besides physical confrontation, but I still had a sense of unease. They showed me toys whose purpose and meaning I did not understand, and they seemed even more baffled by the ones I showed them. They talked a great deal about things that had something or another to do with TV, but when I started commenting on how interesting the cathodic tube was, they would go off and talk to someone else.

The trouble is that to me TV, for the very brief period of my life when there was one in the house, was a very interesting machine and it fascinated me like other mechanical devices that belonged to the world of adults, but it never was anything more than that. I think I must have been directly responsible for its final demise.



It was a very old apparatus, sitting precariously on a small coffee table in the corner of a room. Black and white only, of course. The process of turning it on was the most interesting thing about it. It took a good twenty minutes to complete. At first, nothing happened and the screen remained dark. Then, after a few minutes, a minute spec of light appeared in the middle of the screen. It stayed there, mute, shining without anything better to do. Slowly (very slowly) the small bright dot grew in size until the whole screen shone of white light. This wasn't it yet. At this point the object simply appeared to be a table lamp, but another transformation was taking place. The white light transformed itself in horizontal lines of gray, that moved up and down the screen and finally these turned into images and sounds. At that point it ceased to be interesting and I usually switched it off again. I must have been switching it on and off so many times, just to look closely at the process by which the cathodic tube lit up, that pretty soon it broke down irreparably and that was it. My parents were waiting for a good excuse to get rid of the TV-set anyway, since TV also did not fit very well with the principles of ideological education, so they never made any attempt to replace it.

That was the last time when I had direct access to TV. The next time in my life when I watched something at my place was in Boston in 1999, when I put the first DVD I ever bought (the movie Dr.Strangelove) into the drive of my desktop computer. In between, I had to do with the occasional TV watching at a friend's place, in my teens, after some study session. Did I miss anything? You tell me.

Learning

School was a tremendous disappointment.

Most children begin to learn how to read and write when they first enter elementary school at the age of six. Having learned how to read at two, I had a four year head start advantage. Four years are an eternity in childhood and I had filled it by reading a large number of books.



There are some that I remember fondly from the early days of my reading adventures. My parents were very careful in the choice of children books: they wanted to be sure to maximize the amount of learning that could be derived from any given book. They were selected for cultural as well as political content.

A very beautiful one was called "The island of the magic squares" and it also marked my first introduction to Art. The book was a fairytale cleverly concocted out of a juxtaposition of paintings by Paul Klee.



I myself was inspired to try some artistic creations. My parents, who among other things Architects ended up doing for a living have been often working in graphic design, had all sorts of material one could dream of, colors, brushes, paint. Soon all the walls in our apartment, up to the height of about three feet, were covered by my frescoes, resembling more Pollock than Klee. Every once in a while, when I had exhausted all the available space on the walls, they would pass a coat of white paint over everything and I was ready to start again.



I had another book with interesting artistic connection, an anti-war booklet meant for older children, illustrated by the anarchist painter Enrico Baj, full of his grotesque generals in uniform and gloomy images of nuclear war.



Some more of my early readings included a beautiful series of three books, "Jungle", "Prehistoric World", and "Pirates" that my father found for me. They contained a good deal of information, presented as an succession of short essays, poems, and artistic drawings, along with a series of simple games I could do on my own, from constructing a cardboard model of a prehistoric fish, to recognizing and reproducing footprints of various animals, to building model pirate vessels out of cereal boxes.

Books were people talking to me. They were the door to the world. Being an only child of working parents, at least until the time when I was old enough to roam the streets with other kids, books were my closest friends.

I slowly moved into more demanding readings, those without illustrations, written in small type and bound in small pocket format, in other words, those that are not meant to catch the eye of children. By the time I started going to school I was already in the habit, which I am still following now, of never leaving home without having at least a book in my pocket.

So, when I finally went to school, in the period while others were still struggling to distinguish one letter of the alphabet from another, I was making my first tentative steps in reading Voltaire, at first with my mother's help, soon on my own.

I understood it perfectly that the other children were just as intelligent and talented as I, but for some reason they had been deprived of a whole four years of education. Even with my adult understanding, I still don't get it why a simple and fundamental learning process is delayed by so much: at an early age the plasticity of a child's brain is enormous, learning how to read is a simple task, the simpler the sooner it is done.

I was bored and restless at school. I wouldn't get it that pupils were supposed to sit at their desks and as soon as I was bored with what was going on, which was very soon, I just shot off to somewhere else in the room and started playing some games on my own. This didn't go down well with the discipline of a conservative school and it was immediate open war between me and the "authorities".

Even though school was not the exciting adventure I had envisioned, something remarkable happened around that time. My mother began to spend a lot more time with me than she had ever done before. I felt as if I had undergone a rite of passage and I was finally worthy of her full attention.

The wind of revolution

It wasn't only in my immediate surroundings that life was in turmoil, but the world at large seemed to echo the high waves we had been wading. One of my earliest sharp memories was of a big commotion in the streets, large crowds assembling with banners, an overall palpable tension in the air, my own parents at home in the same agitated state. A name was repeated many times, "Allende". Somewhere, on a far away corner of the world, one of the most brutal military putsches in history was unfolding. It was the 11th of September, 1973.

While Latin America was being brutalized by military fascists, while the Soviet Union sank into the deep freeze of the Brezhnev era, Western Europe was still blooming in dreams of revolution. Students occupied all the venues of higher learning and turned them into a permanent Woodstock. Philosophers delivered fiery speeches calling people to arms against the tyranny of the bourgeois society. Interpersonal and social relations were undergoing deep changes like metamorphic rocks. They were being reconstituted and reinvented. People were beginning to shed off the burden of traditional society at last, but repression was quick on their heels. Philosophers ended up in jail, students were beaten up by ruthless police forces, anarchists were defenestrated. When a future Nobel laureate for literature protested against the brutality of the repression, his theater house was burnt down and his company evicted. Anyone who called for a radical change in the texture of society was branded a dangerous terrorist.

I might have ended up among them, had I been some fifteen years older. I fit the right psychological profile and that's why I raise red flags with any security agency I come in contact with. I never had the occasion to become a real troublemaker though, I was always too young or too busy with other occupations. I produced my best over my high school years, and got all the right training on how to "hold the square" during a demonstration and similarly useful skills I seldom practiced later in life.

Back to my childhood days, my parents and their friends had been with the revolutionary movement from the start. As former resistance fighters in the late stages of World War II, they sympathized with the new student uprising against a society where fascism had been slowly creeping back, even though by then they were too old to mingle with that crowd of teenagers. I knew Communist and Anarchist songs long before I had heard any of the popular children tunes of the day.

When it came to sending me to school, all of a sudden I was faced with a very different type of environment. At the time, public schools did not offer extra curricular afternoon hours for the pupils whose parents were at work until five or six in the evening. Only a few private schools had that service available. Additionally, my father's parents increased steadily their pressure on the choice of the school. With all those Jews, Anarchists, Communists, and other riffraff in the family, they demanded that I be given at least a few years of proper education in a proper catholic school. Given that the private schools offering afternoon hours were all run by catholic organizations, and that there happened to be one just a block away from where we lived, my parents reluctantly agreed.

That was my first encounter with religion and within a week I was a militant atheist.



When I confided one day to my mother that I couldn't stand churches, priests and nuns, and all that mambo jambo about gods, angels, and demons, she approvingly gave me Voltaire's "Dictionnaire philosophique", which became one of my favorite childhood books.

Others

There were other things that happened during that first stretch of time of my life, before I walked through the first gate and stepped into the social life of preschool. As the reader might have guessed from my quick overview, there were streaks of shadows coloring the family history. These days people prefer to call it bipolar disorder, because the traditional name manic-depression was telling the truth too crudely. The rose by any other name. Like a rose, it has fragrance and thorns and both are transmitted with the chromosomes.

My mother took the full brunt. The worst came, as it often does, after giving birth, and by the time I was ready to get into the outer world of social relations, she was passed her second suicide attempt. I have too blurred a memory of that period to try to concoct a precise storytelling, but one detail I do remember is the dress she wore on the day when she returned home after what had seemed to me like an enormously long period of hospitalization. (It might have lasted just a few days for what I know, but that's how a two years old child perceives things.)

The preschool years, three of them altogether, consisted of a collection of very different experiences. During the first year I was a sickly child, with frequent high fevers that needed endless injections. Within weeks I got to be scared of the sound of the doorbell, which I expected would bring the nurse with the painful needles. This went on for quite some time, creating all sorts of trouble, because what do you do with a sick child when both parents are off at work with a long commute by train? After my mother had to take an unpaid leave of absence, which further deteriorated her general mental state for reasons that are plainly obvious, the crisis was finally resolved by a simple tonsillectomy and I was as good as new.

This ordeal occupied much of my first year in preschool. The second year was altogether different and no less eventful. My mother, who had lost the job from which she took leave, had by then decided to break up with my father and move back to stay with her parents for some time, while she was looking for a new job. I went along, not so much because I was consulted about it (I might have agreed if I had been) but because children are captives of the adult world and so be it.



I remember vaguely a Montessori preschool in the town near the sea. This was different from the preschool I had seldom seen during the previous year, in between my bouts of fever. The basic principle of the Montessori method, that children are capable of self-directed learning activities, appealed to me a lot, but its material realization I found disappointing.

Meanwhile, huge storms were brewing up. My mother, who ran away from home at age eighteen, was ill at ease finding herself back with her parents a good twenty years later. My troubled grandfather, who in the last years of his life had taken up a course of higher education in philosophy, brooding over Horkheimer's "Eclipse of Reason" and over the ghosts of his past, my mother's younger sister, who spent most of her time in extreme mountain climbing, and my twice fugitive mother were making up an explosive combination. The cold reproaching looks of my grandmother ignited it all and, after a fistfight between the two sisters left blood stains on my grandmother's lace tablecloth, we were back to my father's place.

There began my third year of preschool, in the same place where I had done my first. This time I was healthy and strong and I didn't miss a day. So there came a time when I finally discovered the other children. During the previous year I had discovered my cousin, who was my same age, but now that I was alone again I finally noticed that others were there. I cannot say much in praise of my social skills: mostly I learned how to fight. I had a powerful jab, thrown with my left fist, which was good enough to discourage anyone looking for a fight. I applied it with generosity.

After establishing my dominance by brute force, I resorted to a trick which must be well known to all primitive societies where clan structure is based on the same principles that dominate the social life of five year old children. I appealed to magical thinking. Children (and not a few adults) are doused in magical thinking and it's always easy to manipulate that to one's advantage. I challenged others to bite my arm as hard as they possibly could, claiming that my supernatural strength would cause me to feel no pain. It was just good psychological control, but it sufficed to enshrine my position in the group without fear of further challenge. I despised it all. I kept spending my days there, in that same dusty courtyard, waiting for my parents to return from work and bring me home. Home was the place where interesting things happened. I liked home back then.



Both my parents liked to spend time playing games with me and my toys. Because they did not like each other's company, and because both had other work to do, I had separate playing sessions with either one of them. At around that time my toys were conventional, for a brief period. My father, who for incomprehensible reasons was fond of old Western movies of the John Wayne and Gary Cooper type, had given me a set of toy soldiers with Indians and Cowboys. No toy soldiers of the modern World War II type were ever allowed in the house. The playful revival of a genocide that happened a century earlier in another continent is easier than the one that happened yesterday in your backyard. I didn't give the Cowboys as much as a second look, but the Indians had red skins, wore feathers, spoke to eagles and had, at least in my playful narrative, a control over the forces of nature that white skin with forked tongue couldn't dream of. So it was that, in my games, American history took a much different course.

My mother spent less time with me, in those days, than father did. She was working hard, late into the night. She had a longer commute to go to work each day, came home later and generally too tired to do much with the remains of her day. When she had time for me, she told me beautiful stories, of animals living in the jungles, of distant worlds made of giant clouds, moons covered with ice, asteroids, deep oceans where whales sang long and beautiful songs. I had a poster of the craters of the moon hanging next to my bed and she showed me places up there where people walked. They had strange and mysterious names: "Sea of Tranquility", "Ocean of Storms", "Descartes", "Taurus-Littrow".

Then the time came when something very promising was about to begin: a word I heard many times, which evoked wonders and mysteries in my mind, another door that was about to open up into a new era of life -- school.