language we used to speak to each other, father and son. My daughter, at about the same age, found herself at home around hockey rinks, and teaches hockey to this day. My other son found beauty in philosophy, at a very early age. While the rest of the world is a vast, buzzing confusion, this is the realm they can master and understand. “Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home,” John O’Donohue writes.
The Greek word for “beauty” was kalon, which is related to the word for “call.” Beauty incites a desire to explore something and live within it. Children put posters of their obsessions on the wall. They draw images of them in art class and on the covers of their notebooks. “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart,” Vincent van Gogh wrote, in the middle of a life obsessed with beauty.
One day, when he was four or five, Albert Einstein had to stay home sick. His father brought him a compass. The sight of it, with the magnetic needle swinging about under the influence of a hidden force field, made him tremble. “I can still remember—at least I believe I can remember—that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things,” he later wrote.
He became obsessed with hidden forces, magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration. As one biographer put it, “Music, Nature and God became intermingled in him in a complex of feeling, a moral unity, the trace of which never vanished.”
That metaphysical curiosity drove him his entire life. “Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneering work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue,” Einstein wrote. “The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law.”
I am obviously no Wilson, van Gogh, or Einstein, but I also had my annunciation moment at age seven. I was reading a book about Paddington Bear and realized (or at least think I realized) that I wanted to be a writer. It’s easy now in retrospect to see how all the pieces fit together. My parents were academics, so books and writing were valued around the house. My grandfather was a beautiful letter writer who dreamed of getting his letters to the editor published in The New York Times. As the Paddington story opens, the little bear has traveled from Peru to London. He is alone and stranded at a train station until a loving family takes him in and cares for him. I guess as little children we all, at some level, feel that we are alone, and know we need a family to take us in.
In the fifty years since I read that opening scene of A Bear Called Paddington, there probably haven’t been two hundred days when I didn’t write something or at least prepare to write something. Recently I bought a Fitbit. It kept telling me that I was falling asleep between eight and eleven in the morning. But I wasn’t asleep; I was writing. Apparently writing is the time when my heartbeat is truly at rest; when I feel right with myself.
THE LAW OF YOUR VERY SELF
In this chapter, I’ve described childhood annunciation moments, but of course they don’t just happen in childhood. We’ve all known people who have had them, or had them again, at age thirty or fifty or eighty. But often when they happen in adulthood they can still be traced back to some grandparent, some ancient seed that first blossomed when we were young. In his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them.
He writes, “Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?’ Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.”