Grandeur on the Flip Side
There were a few silver linings to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of those, for me, was that when I interviewed people for stories I was writing, they were pretty much always at home. And that meant I got to hear (and see, if we were on Zoom) their children in the background (and sometimes in the foreground!). There was a time when professionals shushed and hid their kids. The pandemic put an end to that, and I couldn’t be happier.
Recently, I’ve been writing a bit about Charles Darwin, and while digging around in one of the Darwin archives I came across something truly delightful. Darwin, of course, worked at home. And he didn’t shush and hide his kids (10 of them!) either. If you look at the reverse sides of Darwin’s writing, including drafts of The Origin of Species, you’ll find charming drawings by Darwin’s children.
Darwin wrote beautifully. The closing lines of The Origin of Species are perhaps the loveliest in all of science writing:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
But until this week, I didn’t realize there were forms so beautiful on the other side of the paper.
’til next time,
Avery
Images courtesy The American Museum of Natural History and the Cambridge University Library