Following a Question
"Following the itch of a question without foregone conclusion ..."
“I have a beat-up 1986 cassette tape interview with my grandfather. A fifth-grade southern accent rings like an out-of tune-horn against metered sentences from a grown man reluctant to talk about anything. I was looking for what must have been oversimplified truths about wars, loss and resilience. Every time I hear myself ask a question on tape today, I cringe with a similar head shake. But if [my interviews for the podcast series] the Spark has taught me anything, it’s that following the itch of a question without foregone conclusion or transactional reasoning is a really meaningful way to make a go of this life.” (Emphasis added.)
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, writing in “The Spark | Rhiannon Giddens,” on her multi-newsletter site, . (Learn more about Tift Merritt.)Asking open-ended questions of life is the one thing – maybe the one single thing – of which we can always avail ourselves, no matter how difficult or (at times) horrific our circumstances.
As Maria Popova tells it, in her look at heroic books that can help us “survive our own childhoods”:
“In T.H. White’s 1958 Arthurian classic The Once and Future King (public library) … the mystic-magician Merlyn … offers his advice … [to the] young not-yet-king Arthur on the mightiest antidote to disappointment and sorrow:”
"The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting." (Emphasis added.)
An example of how curiosity can sustain us under severe duress: during World War II – between nighttime aerial bombings by the Allied forces and under restrictions imposed by the Italian government on Jewish citizens – scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini learned and documented how the nervous system gets ‘wired,’ through her undercover research at a makeshift home lab in Turin. Building on the work of German-American neuroembryologist Viktor Hamburger, and collaborating at times with Italian anatomist Giuseppe Levi, she made careful observations of the development of chick embryos in fertilized eggs. “The experiments “absorbed her completely,” she later recalled.”
When researching her WWII-era experiments, Biology professor Bob Goldstein found that “the bombings intensified in November [1942]. On some nights, nearly 200 planes flew over Turin, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs. Bombs and devices to start fires hit industrial sites, homes, theaters, and hospitals. Hundreds of Turin residents were killed.” Levi-Montalcini later had to flee to the countryside, where she once again set up her home laboratory and kept working.
Goldstein “asked [her niece] Piera how she thought that Levi-Montalcini could have maintained her focus on research in the midst of a war, studying cell death while in real danger of her own death.” (One key insight from her research was that “cell death sculpts our nervous system: Our brain becomes wired to our body so precisely in large part because those nerve cells that fail to find targets simply die.”) Piera said that Levi-Montalcini “kept working to survive, to cope with that weird life of people who didn’t exist.”
Her early letters during WWII “elaborate on how Rita maintained her focus on research as a war began around her, describing the escape from despair that her research offered as the war began.” Levi-Montalcini wrote, “I am amazed at the complete possibility of escaping to the present, diving into the marvelous charms of nerve conduction.”
Rita Levi-Montalcini would later share a post-war Nobel Prize in 1986 for yet another world-changing discovery, Nerve Growth Factor: “the first of several growth factors discovered by scientists … now known to have critical roles in nervous system wiring and also in cancer.” A direct result of her quiet, persistent defiance to the chaotic and destructive world around her, to continue her exploration and learning around that “itch of a question.”
Fifty years after her 1942 article reporting on her world-changing experiments from a bedroom in Turin, she reflected on how she managed to focus on her research in the midst of a war, “when all the values I cherished were being crushed.” She wrote, “The answer may be found in the well-known refusal of human beings to accept reality at its face value, whether it be the fate of an individual, of a country, or of the whole of human society. Without this built-in defense mechanism, life would be unbearable.”
More about Tift Merritt
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Photo credit for Tift Merritt at her soundboard, above: Carolina Performing Arts via the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Photo cropped from the original, which appeared in an October 2020 UNC event announcement.)
In a small but cool bit of synchronicity, Bob Goldstein, who wrote about Rita Levi-Montalcini, above, is a Professor of Biology at … the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill! (A connection noticed only after writing this post.)
Great post.
The quote was terrific and the story of Rita inspiring. I kept thinking about Primo Levi/The Periodic Table, one of my favorite books.
Look forward to future posts!