Inverse Inspiration: a Call to Do Nothing More

While looking for excellent examples of expository writing one late afternoon this week, I fell into the kind of sleep I remember observing in my dad when I was young enough to demand a bedtime story read aloud. I struggled out of sleep and kept flipping pages, but my mind wandered. Man, I love the summer. No homeschooling the kids. No Zoom teaching.

Anyway, as I lay there reading, I remembered how pleasant it was when my parents read to me. My mother read to me more often during the day. I have one particularly vivid memory of a rainy day when she read all of Roald Dahl's George's Marvelous Medicine in one sitting. That was a good day. My father was on bedtime story duty. He would settle on the hallway floor between the bedrooms and start the chapter or book enthusiastically enough but after a few minutes, his voice would become quieter, then slurred, then silent. My brothers might yell our father awake, but I climbed out of bed and sat down next to him. Yelling was not my style (then). I gently pried open my father's eyelids so he could keep reading.

You'd think that my dad's exhaustion at night and my love for books would have motivated me to learn to read at a young age. But I didn't read well enough to enjoy reading to myself until about third grade. And, of course, I haven't stopped reading since then. Even when sleepy. Or especially when sleepy? Something about reading oneself to sleep is so pleasant. As long as no child is there to pry your eyelids apart.

One of the essays I came across in my recent sleepy search for expository writing examples was Jacob Bronowski's essay "The Nature of Scientific Reasoning," which I thought might have some relevance to our current situation. I was looking for writing that explains (you know, the definition of "expository"), but as is so often the case, authors explain and persuade almost simultaneously. In this essay, originally part of the book Science and Human Values (1956), Bronowski argues that science is not observations made about a collection of facts but rather "a search for unity in hidden likenesses." He explains that this search can be on a large or small scale but whatever form it takes, it always involves the creative imagination grasping a new order that was previously hidden but, now revealed, "gives unity to what had long seemed unlike."

One of his examples to explain the way science works is Isaac Newton's famous falling apple story. Brownowski writes, "In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Cambridge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for knowledge and, in his own phrase, 'I was in the prime of my age for invention.' In this eager, boyish mood, sitting one day in the garden of his widowed mother, he saw an apple fall. So far the books have the story right; we think we even know the kind of apple; tradition has it that it was a Flower of Kent. But now they miss the crux of the story. For what struck the young Newton at the sight was not the thought that the apple must be drawn to the earth by gravity; that conception was older than Newton. What struck him was the conjecture that the same force of gravity, which reaches to the top of the tree, might go on reaching out beyond the earth and its air, endlessly into space. Gravity might reach the moon; this was Newton's new thought; and it might be gravity which holds the moon in her orbit. There and then he calculated what force from the earth (fall off as the square of the distance) would hold the moon, and compared it with the known force of gravity at tree height. The forces agreed; Newton says laconically, 'I found them answer pretty nearly.' Yet they agreed only nearly; the likeness and the approximation go together, for no likeness is exact. In Newton's science modern science is full grown. It grows from a comparison."

Way back in March, the fact that Newton made this discovery during a time when his college was closed due to a pandemic made it's rounds of the internet. Take heart, students! this and other articles say. Look at what Newton did while stuck at home!

But Bronowski isn't writing about Newton's theory of universal gravitation to inspire students stuck at home. Thank goodness. You're probably not surprised if I say I'm not feeling especially receptive to glib inspiration right now. Also, it may have been easier to hear that message last spring when we all thought life would get back to normal in a few months. Now as the only certainty for next school year is the uncertainty of how it all will work, it's a little harder to swallow pep talks about the silver lining of this pandemic and its effect on students.

No, Bronowski's is a larger aim: show readers that scientific reasoning works by connecting unlike things that can together express a single concept. This analogous way of thinking, Brownoski says, is behind "the progress of science," which is the discovery of "a new order which gives new unity to that which had long seemed unlike."

This view of scientific reasoning, as opposed to the one which sees science as merely the observation and collection of facts, would help all of us as we attempt to understand what "the science says" about our current pandemic. Science says nothing ever. Scientists say a lot of things. And when you realize that scientists are going through a process of reasoning which involves making connections that are not at all obvious (at first) and then require testing in order to verify, you begin to see that, yes, we need to listen to good scientists very carefully. Yet we also need to see that what they are doing is not as simple as relating "the facts." And their processes take time.

Time . . . careful thought . . . fruitful comparisons.

The next essay I read on that sleepy afternoon was Isaac Asimov's "The Eureka Phenomenon" published originally in 1971 as part of The Left Hand of the Electron. In this delightful essay, Asimov discusses how he had the habit of going to see movies "loaded with action but which made no demand on the intellect" whenever he found himself unable to write any further, either in his fiction or scientific writing. After watching these movies and engaging in no "conscious thinking," he found the solution to his earlier problem easy to solve.

Asimov goes on to discuss what he calls "involuntary" or "unnoticed thinking." He uses Archimedes as an example of such thinking. Everyone knows the story: this ancient mathematician is stumped as he tries to figure out the volume of an irregularly shaped gold crown. But then, one day while relaxing in the bath, he makes a connection. Volume. . . displacement . . .water.  He gets it! Eureka! (Just like Newton in the garden under the apple tree.)

I'm really resistant to inspiration right now, so I put my book aside and fell asleep. Nobody pried open my eyelids but I did wake up about 10 minutes later when somebody wailed and somebody else slammed a door and somebody else yelled, "Mom!" in that two-syllable way that tells you there's a complaint about to be made.

Maybe my brain needed some time to do some involuntary thinking, which I think might be a little bit like what scientists are now calling the Default Mode Network, (which I learned about just recently while listening to the No Stupid Questions podcast). I've found myself coming back to these two essays in my thoughts all week. As I jogged. As I showered. As I sat watching kids in the pool. As I hiked. Even, if you can believe it, as I read aloud to my kids. (Yes, I can read aloud and think of something different.)

And as I slowly cogitated over time, I realized these two essays and their main examples--Newton and Archimedes--are entirely pertinent to our current situation. But not in some "look at what great things come out of pandemics and mental downtime!" kind of way. Both of these examples show that humans often arrive at momentous discoveries when given the time and the quiet space of inactive thinking to build upon their previous experience and knowledge. The "lesson" (if you want to call it that) from these two examples isn't glibly inspirational. The lesson here is kind of the inverse of a "look what great things you can do during the pandemic!" Instead, it's a pretty drastic call to all parents and teachers.

If we hope to see any benefits from the slowdown of life that some might experience due to the COVID pandemic, we need to cultivate and reward habits of thought that require time and quiet, inactive thinking. We need to stop trying to make life during a pandemic a virtual imitation of life during "normal" times.

We all need to see the boring days of being at home during the pandemic as a great chance to practice what Asimov called "unnoticed thinking." For instance, after my sleepy afternoon of reading in bed, I realized that some of my best childhood memories involve being read to. In the past week, I've read to my kids a lot. Anytime anyone requests a book, I've been willing to drop what I'm doing and read. My little reverie connected me with something I'd kind of forgotten.

I'm not saying we should give up all virtual meetings and classrooms and throw our computers and phones in the trash. There's definitely a good use for virtual connections right now. I am saying that we should be more thoughtful about how we demand virtual connection as if it is the best way to live when we can't actually meet in person. And I am saying that educators and parents need to see that sitting around and doing "nothing" can be very good for all of us. Let's not let our anxieties push us to demand fruitless at-home activities from our youngsters or ourselves.

I'm not here to dictate the best way to live or teach during the pandemic. But I am glad that people like Newton and Archimedes sat around in a state of apparent mental inaction. Doing so literally changed the world. Let's allow their stories to help us commit to doing the hard work of sitting around and staring at trees. Or taking a leisurely bath. Or watching a movie. Or going for a walk. Or swinging in the hammock. Or reading in bed in the afternoon until you fall asleep. Or . . . whatever you do when you need to let your mind rest so that you can quietly be surprised by your own thoughts.