Reading Charles Darwin's letters

I've just finished reading a selection of Charles Darwin's letters, edited by Frederick Burkhardt. It took me a long time to read even this small selection in its tiny print: reading, detouring to other books, reading again. Suddenly at some point I was hooked; it felt like a scientific thriller in the form of letters; I read whenever I could.

Towards the end, I was aware of the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, floating towards Darwin slowly, by sea. I knew friends would work out a way for Darwin to acknowledge Wallace's brilliance and still assert his own primacy. I knew that Darwin would survive the panic of exposure, and take his ideas further. But I read with urgency, all these years later: I had to see how he himself would describe it.

Other peoples' letters to Darwin are quoted, or implied in his answers, so we get some sense of all of them, all their lives.

At first, it's mostly family, as he voyages on the Beagle, calling out to them in England, out of his plaintive homesickness (and seasickness)--but also out of his wild enthusiasm for what he was seeing: rocks and plants and fossils; mussel shells high on the ledges of mountains.

Later he wrote to a widening circle of geologists and botanists and pigeon fanciers; to Asa Gray at Harvard; to clergy in their country villages, whom Darwin urged to collect whatever specimens he needed. "Send them soon," he said, and promised to pay for the postage. Once, at the beginning of a letter, he promised not to beg for anything, and then begged after all, at the end.

In return, he offered his own results: strange tales about the sex lives of barnacles; how long dried seeds would float on sea water, and what proportion would germinate afterward; small sketches of flowers visited by bees.

He also crowed about his growing family, blessed the relief of chloroform for Emma's later childbirths. He mourned the loss of the children who died. He worried about his own health.

Above all, he thought. He thought, in the form of fairly awful handwriting.

All those letters, carried by horses, by boats, gave Darwin another village besides Down. A slower village than our electronic one, but a village composed of words and imagination (and some skeletons, carefully wrapped.) He made his discoveries partly because he could write, and use writing: to beg for what he needed; to summarize the evidence that increasingly convinced him; to argue; to admit to bafflement.

In a famous early letter Darwin says he is "dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects." But the letters gave him, over time, people to talk to about insects, about all that detail of life in which he kept himself so gleefully immersed. Eventually, in fact, the letter-writing gave him vital contact with the few people to whom he could confide what he thought it all meant. In all his virtual village there were just two or three houses with knowledge of what was actually going on in Darwin's study. But there were those few, and letters gave them to him, and him to them.

If he were living and working now, would Darwin be writing a blog? Not necessarily. Maybe just a lot of emails--because he was so careful in the choice of his audience, and so concerned about being overheard by people who would not agree. He had less courage than his few close supporters wanted him to have, but enough courage to keep doing a very basic thing: to think, and follow the path of his thoughts.

Frederick Burkhardt, fellow of Clare College, patient decipherer and editor, is gone, having died in 2007. Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a wonderful forward which I read again after I'd finished the book, is also gone. Darwin himself, of course, is gone. I can't thank any of them. But here I am, along with others keyboarding at this very moment, treating these words formed of electrons as a kind of heaven we can address, a sort of garden in which we can place a few flowers and hope that somebody will see and smell them. A village in which all times can live together.

Village

This is an experiment. It's snowing again; I'm thinking how much I'm frightened by driving in snow, and how all the poets in my life, and most of the people I love, are a car ride or a plane ride or a train ride away.

(A ferry ride, some of them, and I wonder what it would be like to cross Long Island Sound on a ferry with snow falling into those gray-green waves. Every time I look at the inkblot of a storm on the weather map--where the snow often changes to rain once it's out to sea, which is grey or white changing to green in the color language of the map--I think of fat white wet flakes landing and disappearing on each swell.)

All my adulthood I've wanted a village in which everyone important to me lives either next door or across the common: family, friends, fellow poets, fellow teachers, past students, heroes and heroines, living, gone, all of us somehow close by. Picnics. Spontaneous parades. One night, all of us gather between the trees to look at Jupiter and a thin slice of moon, setting.

Three things resemble that, for me:

One is the body of my poetry, which exists because I discovered that words could hold in the light people from whom I was distant, and times.

The second virtual village is my teaching life, in which, for example, with my students' help, Sarah George Bagley and Henry David Thoreau and Abby Kelley Foster can all come to life together, and speak to us.

The third is this screen on which my words appear, on which the words of others appear, magically, so that conversations can happen that would not have happened, and often hold meanings that wouldn't have emerged any other way.

Electrons don't have the taste real stuff does; they taste sort of tinny; it feels like you should take them out of your mouth and put in bread with pesto, or chocolate, or anything else. But I am getting so I can ignore that, the same way we all ignore the fact that words aren't things. My grandson Abe was so young when he agreed that "horse" could be the word, or the horse, or a picture of a horse. All of them could gallop effectively.

So maybe the word "village" can be the buildings, or the voices, or the electron pictures of the voices, or any conjuring of a group of people who--this is the crucial part--listen to each other, in any way.