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Uncle Tungsten
by Oliver Sacks - Vintage edition 2001
My book club enjoyed Oliver Sacks' On the Move so much that we decided to add his Uncle Tungsten to our reading list. I thought it would just be autobiographical information about his childhood, I hadn't realized it was, in addition, a way of telling the story of the development of our current technological world, which is either based on science or, if you choose to view it this way, on the Mephistic Arts -- the un-natural powers Mephisto uses to assist Faust in his various adventures.
And I also hadn't anticipated that the story of Oliver Sacks' extended family would turn out to be the story of the bourgeoisie in miniature. Despite Fernand Braudel's focus on the role of the Sephardic Jews in the growth of capitalism in the West, I tend to think first of the Calvinist contribution. But Sacks' Ashkinazi Jewish family is perfect in their outsider's isolation from the prior class structure combined with their amazing enthusiasm for science, technology, and participation in so many of the trends that left the old order behind and created a new order with so many unanticipated consequences. They are even entrepreneurial in advancing science.
The conclusion of all this is that I must blog this book as well. The challenge here is that Sacks uses his child self to recreate all the scientific steps that lead to our current understanding of the world. As readers, we learn things as he does which re-creates the steps of the great names of science in the very few scientific centuries leading up to our times.
This is an inspired way to teach this history, but it is also frustrating because you can't discus the more profound levels of these subjects until the final secrets are revealed in the last chapters of the book. I am adopting yet another convention for this book, my comments will be color coded to distinguish notes made during my initial reading (in red) from notes made during this, second reading.
I was also going to honor his method and refrain from going into the "electronic" aspects of chemistry (the ones that most interest me) until the end. Alas, that was too difficult. I will be explaining the phenomena he describes so that it makes sense to me -- when I can.
He begins with a description of his childhood home near Hampstead and all the questions about the world that he had as a strikingly inquisitive child. This is a sort of overture of the autobiographical and scientific topics that will be developed over the course of the book. (It would be possible to do a musical version of this book.) I'm going to skip his overture except to fill in the cast of characters: Besides his parents (both doctors) there are his brothers Marcus, David, and, closest to his age, Michael. Then the all important uncles: David (Uncle Tungsten), Abe (physics) and aunts, Birdie, Lina, Len, and more will be introduced later. Then his Landau grandfather -- no longer living.
These first several chapters do a wonderful job of depicting a comfortable, supportive, middle class life supported by family, the Jewish faith, and the science and technology of the age. And all this on the very cusp of the deluge as, with the start of the war in Europe in 1939, both Oliver and his brother Michael are evacuated out of London to attend a "safer" school in the countryside.
Chapters 1-3.
p24 [Red indicates my original notes] Unrelated to what I'm interested in here, the teacher-turned-headmaster at the school the Sacks brothers attend seems to be unhinged by something relating to the new boarding school or the war. Or perhaps the power of his new position just brings out the worst in him. In any case, he is brutal to Oliver and Michael. Michael, as we know from On the Move, seems to be -- in his turn -- permanently unhinged by this experience and even Oliver is seriously affected.
The Greta the dachshund story seems to show, and I think this is what Sacks intends us to see, how young Oliver seems to have passed on his brutal treatment to the innocent Greta. This personal insight is very interesting. Child abuse, and child sexual abuse, is often passed down generation to generation. I've always been puzzled by the process or mechanism for this.
p30 The other common consequence of abuse is dissociation -- and even finding refuge in a new personality. Sacks' creation of elaborate fictions that he passed off as reality makes it sound like he was pretty close to dissociation. And, of course, it was Michael who's personality was actually unhinged by this wartime exile experience. I have to say, given the long term consequences of the evacuation just on this one family, you have to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have kept all the kids in London.
His extended family represents to a remarkable degree the bourgeois world order of science and trade. And being Jewish, they were in no way a part of the old Tory world order. Primo Levy (as we see him int The Periodic Table) is like this too, and I get the same feeling from Marcel's family in Lost Time, though that is supposed to be a middle class Catholic family.
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