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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
>> Richard Holmes is best known as the world's preeminent biographer
of the romantic era poets.
He not only tells the tales of these writers, he absorbs their lives.
He projects the romantic sensibility.
His two volume biography
of Coleridge has been called the near masterpiece of empathy.
But after studying the romantic era for years,
Holmes realized something.
There was a powerful largely overlooked influence
on the romantic culture and on the writers of the time,
and that influence was science.
He explores this theme in his new book, The Age of Wonder:
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty
and Terror of Science.
Holmes was born in London and educated
at Churchill College Cambridge.
He began his career as a journalist.
For 20 years, he was a feature writer
and a reviewer for the London Times.
His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, was published in 1974
and won the Somerset Maugham Prize.
That was followed by his first volume on Coleridge.
Next came an account of the friendship between Samuel Johnson
and the poet Richard Savage.
He's also written two volumes of memoirs focusing
on the craft of biography.
One reviewer has described his latest, The Age of Wonder,
as a big hearted river of a book in which the twin engines
of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page.
In Holmes' view, romantic era scientist and poets shared a vision.
Both held to the hope for human improvement.
Coleridge believes that science had a poetic side
because it too had a passion for hope.
Some observers believe Holmes' newest book has a lesson
for us today.
It can serve as a model for bringing the sciences and the arts together
so we can all grasp the beauty and terror of modern life.
Holmes might agree for he has said scientific breakthrough's promised
benefits but also raised fears.
It was such in the romantic era and it is still today.
Please join me in welcoming Richard Holmes.
[ Applause ]
>> I would just like to introduce Suzy [phonetic],
who is our signer today.
[ Applause ]
>> It's a great pleasure to be here.
I've just flown in from London.
Why I'm the only man in the tent wearing a suit?
[ Laughter ]
>> I probably will take it off later on, right?
And I'm tremendously grateful to two major institutions,
of course the Library of Congress, which I want to say something about,
and also the Washington Post which I want to say something about.
But there's a third institution and this requires me to put this hat on.
And you can't read it but it says Junior League of Washington,
and they are the young ladies who at the signing in have been looking
after you in the hats, the white and black hats,
and they've just elected me the only male member
of the Junior League of Washington.
[ Applause ]
>> And the point about them, you-- many of you will know,
they do wonderful work helping people challenged
in their reading abilities of all ages, alright.
And they go fund gathering.
And if you want to help them, go straight on to the net.
It's jlw.com and make a contribution because that is one
of the major themes as I understand at the festival, books,
reading, helping people to read.
So that's JLV-- the JLW.
I have to say, I had a certain disappointment arriving here
in Washington because I understood that it was traditional
that the rain poured down.
You probably-- some of you wish the rain was pouring down, alright,
but it was-- I had a special joke arranged for this
which I'm gonna tell anyway, alright, which has to do
with writing and some of you may have been to the big festival
in England, in Wales, in fact the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival,
and there traditionally also the rain pours down.
So to get to the tent, you have to wade through mud, okay,
and this was happening to me 2, 3 years ago and just as I got
to the tent, remember this is Wales, a voice called out and you'll have
to do this with a Welsh accent, "fine weather for biographers."
[ Laughter ]
>> And then he added, "plenty of feet of clay."
[ Laughter ]
>> Very, very true.
So, nonetheless I'm very glad that it's shining today.
I wanted to say this about the Library of Congress which is one
of your great national institutions.
For the first time, I had a chance to get to see it,
and one of the things I came away with was the Jefferson,
the Thomas Jefferson Library.
It's so impressive partly because it's small.
It's not too monumental.
It's possible to have it in probably a room and a half.
And Jefferson organized his library
under three headings, not Dewey organization.
He organized it under memory, reason, and imagination.
And I thought about this and I thought
that roughly defines the task of a writer like me.
For memory, we are going back into history to discover
and particularly the history of science in this case.
Reason, we try to understand and explain the science
that has been done in the past.
And imagination, we try to bring it to life.
So for me, there is Jeffersonian concept, memory, reason,
imagination, very, very important.
When I arrived at customs and immigration,
the officer looked very carefully at me and then said, "Professor Holmes,
what is the purpose of your visit?"
Now, have you understood this right?
The purpose of your visit.
This seems to me like a metaphysical question.
Like, what is the purpose of the universe,
and I hardly noticed him stamping my thing and sending me out, okay.
And so in a way, that's what I want to talk
about this very few minutes the purpose
of the visit, the purpose of writing.
I've been steady.
I was told that I should spend 20 minutes not talking about my book
and then 10 minutes answering questions
about not talking about my book.
So, we'll see how we get on with that.
So, I thought I'd do this in this shape of form.
I'm going to use questions.
People have actually asked me in very the brief time I've been here,
and the first one was, "Mr. Holmes,
did you come from London by hot air balloon?"
It's on [inaudible] with the cover of the book
to which my quick answer was, well, the first hot air balloon
across the atlantic from England to America was described by none other
than Edgar Allan Poe in the New York Sun in 1844.
Three English pilots, including the famous Charles Green,
and they overflew Greenland and they landed on the shore somewhere,
I think in Massachusetts.
This was the biggest scoop the New York Sun had ever had.
And then Edgar Allan Poe realized and revealed
that it was a complete hoax.
They had never crossed the Atlantic.
It was the first of his stories of mystery
and imagination that was in 1844.
But the first person who flew the English Channel,
it was an English balloon
but the pilot was an American, Dr. John Jeffries.
So that's a little bit of history which appears in my book.
And the first woman aeronaut was an actress, Mrs. Sage
and she has a great comic turn in my book.
And at the end of this week coming, I'm going--
so it's maybe the last you ever see of me,
to the international balloon fiesta in New Mexico to fly with the winner
of the American hot air challenge cup.
Bye-bye. [Laughter] Second question,
can you remember your long subtitle, alright.
In fact, it's amazing.
I just noticed it's not on the cover of the book, okay.
Anyway, the long subtitle is how the romantic generation discovered the
beauty and terror of science,
and that is in a way my first serious point
because this is a history of age in the century of science
that the notion that science is both beautiful and threatening
and menacing is a key idea to grasp and one
that we have absolutely inherited.
>> And one of the themes of my book is to see how this began in Europe
and in England in the late 18th century.
I'll give you one example of this, that there's a passage
or chapter describing the invention of the minus safety lamp
which I'm sure some of you [inaudible]
by the chemist Humphry Davy, a brilliant piece of invention
which I tried to describe which prevented the deep mine explosions
of methane, a beautiful invention benefit to mankind.
But what happened?
As a result of that lamp minus, we're sent deeper and deeper
into the minds and gradually the casualties grew again.
So it's a double-edged sword, and that would be an example.
There are others, but that's just one for the book.
Question, would you describe your book differently
to a science graduate or an arts graduate?
To a science graduate, I would say this book weighs 9.958 kilograms.
It's 5 centimeters thick.
It's 485 pages long.
It's got 72 footnotes and it's got 306 lines of poetry in it
which is the point I began to look skeptical.
How would I describe it to an arts graduate?
Well, I'd say this is a group biography
and it takes a particular period
between Captain Cook's first navigation of the globe, 1768,
and Charles Darwin setting out in 1831,
famous voyage to the Galapagos Island.
So it's that period of time about 60 years
and it emphasizes the friendship and the contact and the letter writing
and the inspiration that moved between literary writers and poets
and the scientists of the period.
Now, sometimes people say, are you sure?
Are you sure about this?
Then we'll give you one single proof and I want to read a poem.
I promised my self I'll read a poem, and this-- let me set it up.
First of all, it's by a woman poet,
and this is again a very important theme of the kind
of history I'm writing because I think that women have been written
out the history of science certainly in the 18th and 19th century,
and I think there's a lot of recovery to do.
And this poem is by Anna Barbauld and she was working
as an assistant to Joseph Priestley.
As you know, his laboratory was burnt down and he came here
to the land of the free, it's Philadelphia, and he worked there
for the finer years of his life.
This was when he was still in England
and he was doing experiments with a vacuum.
Some of you may have seen the famous picture
by Joseph Reiter Darby [phonetic] which is a bird fluttering
in a big glass vacuum tube and the idea was to experiment
with what was the mysterious gas in the tube
that kept the bird, the dove alive.
And Priestley in fact was on the trail of oxygen.
He used all kinds of animals and one was a mouse.
So he had laboratory mouse.
And Anna Barbauld began to worry not so much about oxygen
but about the mouse and so she wrote a poem
which was called the Mouse's Petition to Dr. Priestley found
in the cage where he had been confined all night
by which we understand the mouse, not Dr. Priestley.
So you have to imagine that just like today, experimental cage,
this mouse was scheduled to undergo the oxygen test the following day,
and when Priestley came down, he found this poem.
I just wanna quote a couple of lines from this.
And this is Anna Barbauld who was very well read in science
but suddenly putting herself in the place of a non-volunteering mouse.
And this is what the mouse says to the scientist.
For here forlorn and sad I sit within the wiry grate and tremble
at the approaching morn which brings impending fate.
The cheerful light, the vital air of blessings widely given,
let nature's commoners enjoy the common gifts of heaven.
The well thought philosophic mind to all compassion gifts and cast
around the world an equal eye and feels for all that lives.
So there is possibly the first animal rights poem, alright.
And very interestingly, it came out of this scientific laboratory
in 18-- 1773, and that's just one tiny example of the thing
that happens throughout my book, and what interest me
so much is the connection between the writer--
the literary writer and the scientist.
Question, why did you change after writing--
after waiting for 40 years
on literary biography to science biography?
I felt there was a slight tone of reproach in that question.
Why did-- why did you do that?
The quick answer is I'd written
about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
the one who took the ***, you remember Kubla Khan,
and it turned out that as a young man,
his great friend was Humphry Davy who is gonna be the greatest chemist
of the age and become president of the Royal Society.
And I discovered when Davy was experimenting with a new kind
of gas, nitrous oxide, which is also called laughing gas,
he called for volunteers and amazingly among them,
hot from his *** experiments,
was the 24-year-old Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
So you have to imagine, the scientist and the poet breathing
in the nitrous oxide and then dancing, knocking people
over in the street, writing poetry under the influence.
It's all there in the book and it's there in the notebooks.
So that friendship made me think if that's Coleridge and Davy, the poet
and the scientist, maybe there's a much bigger story there.
So, that was one of the things that set me off.
I should also say I had an amazing chance
when I started to write this book.
I got a summer fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge
and that is Trinity is the great-- it's Newton's College.
It's the great scientific college in England.
And it-- there you-- when you dine, I was there for 6 months,
you just sit anywhere on the table, okay, that that long table is
in their place, you don't know who you're gonna sit next to.
And I have to say in the time I was there,
there were six Nobel Prize winners and I sat next to each of them
and it was very interesting to try and ask some questions.
And one of the things I found is
that unlike many literary professors,
the scientists loved explaining things and they were really good
at doing it, and that was something that fascinated me, converted me,
and now let me give you one pure example of this that I sat
down one evening next to a Russian mathematician who spoke no English
at all and the one thing I knew is that he knew about Evariste Galois,
the great romantic mathematician.
So that was the one thing I turned to him.
I said, Evariste Galois, and this wonderful smile spread
across his face and then he leaned across the table
and managed this college table with all the silverware,
alright, don't you think?
And he drew all the silverware over him and he began to lay
out an algebraic box with the knives and the forks and the pepper
and he explained without using any words, Evariste Galois' theory.
It cost chaos, the waiters had to come and intervene in the end, okay,
but-- [Laughter] And that was just one example and that changed me.
I thought this is something to meet people like that.
It's something I must write about.
Question, are scientists madder than poets?
The answer is it's fully [inaudible] my book.
The answer is no and yes sir.
And that story William and Caroline Herschel, again,
I emphasized Caroline Herschel, two astronomers, brother and sister,
a kind of William and Dorothy Wadsworth
of astronomy is extraordinary, very passionate,
very interesting relationship, full of ups and downs
and extraordinary exchanges.
Caroline became the first really efficient woman astronomer
of the period, in fact got a government pension,
and she did a wonderful thing.
She kept a journal just like Dorothy Wadsworth
of William Herschel's observations and they are there in the archive
and it's something I was able to use.
I have to say the first page, they were both from Hannover.
It was written in German.
I thought my luck was out.
And then from then on, as she was working
in England, she wrote in English.
So their story shows a kind of passion which I would certainly
as bright and strong as anything of the poets.
>> Question, did you get any fan letters?
Well, I got a fan letter from NASA and they pointed out that
in the footnote on page 295 where I described the Hubble telescope,
I had got one figure 9.91 percent out.
But as it referred to the cost of the Hubble, they were not pleased.
[Laughter] I also-- I had a wonderful former fan letter
which is relevant now from Harold Varmus who is the--
a Nobel Prize winner in medicine who's gonna be talking initially
after me in another tent who said that he'd recommended my book
to the freshmen of Amherst College,
and the result is I think it broke the bank because the department had
to buy 459 copies of it, alright.
And so that's the kind of fan that you really like, alright.
Special story telling methods.
Yes. One is to keep to length and to keep to time
which I'm rapidly running out from, but let me describe one thing
in the book is the use of the vertical footnote.
Everybody ask me what's a vertical footnote?
The main body of the story you tell is in chronological time
but continually, you want to drop out of that time and go back
to what happened before or go forward to see the influence,
hence a footnote which describes the Hubble telescope.
So that's one technique in a way that I thought I pioneered slightly
in using literary methods
to describe scientific effects, the vertical footnote.
What are you going to write next?
I don't have to answer that question.
So that rapidly moves us on to the tenth and the last and this is this.
I think I got two [inaudible].
The other institution that is responsible
for me being here is the Washington Post which I have huge respect for,
and they asked this question which is a serious one.
Can writers change the world?
And I just want to finish with the draft
of the piece I sent in the blog about this.
I have a literary Irish aunt, a fiery fan of James Joyce,
who once dismissed this question with a snort
of derision signed in Irish.
[Laughter] Writers don't have to change the world.
Sure, it's changing fast enough anyway.
They should try and slow it down instead
or maybe make it go backwards.
So considering this response, I've slightly reformulated the question,
when did people stop believing that writers could
or should change the world.
Because up to the mid 19th century in Europe,
this was an automatic assumption,
part of the enlightenment project central to the idea of progress.
Knowledge is power said Francis Bacon.
In 1820, the poet Shelley who I've written
about could still hopefully say poets and philosophers
of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
So I have to tell you the late poet W.H. [inaudible] Auden said, well,
that makes writers sound rather like secret policemen, okay [inaudible].
But Shelley's exact contemporary, Humphry Davy who I've mentioned,
he put a different view and this is something I want to leave you with.
It wasn't writers but maybe it was the scientists
who are changing the world and he said, if you compared Shakespeare
or Francis Bacon, Milton or Newton,
who do you think had changed the world more?
Very interesting question and I think there is an answer now
which says from the 20th century with penicillin, air travel,
and nuclear power, 21st century mobile phone, internet,
planet change, et cetera, that might be the proper response.
But then, I think writers have inherited a new form
of this question.
Is it changed for the better or for the worse?
Is our world the kind we want or the kind we should have
or the kind we have foolishly lost?
Do we have reasons to hope or to fear, to dream and wonder or simply
to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing?
By posing such questions and exploring all possible answers,
writers are no longer asked to change the world.
They are asked continually to re-imagine it,
which is a far more radical request.
But I'm not sure that my Joycean aunt would approve all the same.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> I think we got time for just a couple of questions.
Are there any in the romantic generation net today you believe
would be or could be or should be scientifically,
clinically categorized as manic-depressive, bipolar,
schizophrenic, and/or in some other category of mental illness?
>> Okay. I guess there has been a whole thesis written about this,
the mental or bipolar thing of writers or scientists.
My answer to that would be no, but what is very, very noticeable
with someone like Davy or the Herschels
or Mungo Park explorer is a kind of recklessness,
a passionate recklessness that they would push and sacrifice themselves
to find the truth to pursue their science.
I give you one example from Davy and you can tell me
if you think this is manic-depressive or not.
When he was testing those gases, they didn't know what they were,
he inhaled carbon monoxide.
It is one now used for committing suicide
in the car and the backyard, okay.
That gas, they didn't know it, and he inhaled it
and he virtually killed himself.
He came back and he re-inhaled it and he wrote as he was breathing,
his pulse rate, his visionary distortions and this note,
I do not think I shall die.
Now, what kind of extremism is that?
And that happens again and again at this period and it's a kind
of recklessness with which I think science has still driven.
So that's my slightly depressive answer.
I reckon we've got-- have we got one more minute?
One more minute, one more question.
Sir.
>> I'd be interested in your view of Stephen Hawking
as scientist and as popular writer.
His new book is selling like hot cakes here and in England
and I'd be interested in your reaction to him.
>> Okay. You should have asked that 25 minutes ago.
Very good question.
Okay. The new book is called The Grand Design
and it's become controversial partly because it sounds
like an atheist track, alright.
That's one of the problems there.
This is what I'd say about that book.
It's a problem that begins in the 19th century that more
and more science is expressed in terms of pure mathematics,
and pure mathematical setups are very difficult
to imagine or visualize.
And when you get to string theory or M-theory, it is very difficult
to know, is the scientist speculating
or is it something that can be proved?
And I think that's a very, very big dilemma
and I just finally add one more thing very important
which I call displacement, and this bare on the two cultures.
One of the things that's happened since Copernicus removed the earth
from the center of the solar system and said it was the sun,
science has displaced us more and more in terms of time,
how small we are in terms of the universe, how irrelevant we are
to a quantum universe, that is to say they're very, very small,
and also to the very, very big, and also in terms of time and evolution.
We seem to occupy a more and more displaced space and
yet at the same time, we are developing beautiful theories
and we are writing and we are here today.
And I think there is the division
between the science culture displacing us
and the literary culture trying to put his back and put meaning
into everything around this.
There's the difference and that's my time.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> Okay. Very good.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.