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ENTRY - JOSEPH J. WEISS, MD MEMORIAL ESSAY CONTEST
SING FOR
OUR TIME TOO
GARGI BANERJEE, MD - ANESTHESIOLOGY, HFHS
E. O. Wilson believes that the sciences and the humanities must be bridged and insights from one, translated onto the other. Why, you ask? Read on.
“Sing to me of the man, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course”
And if we do travel across time and place, we may just gain a sense of scale; to see our own lives set against the frame of this world. And know the stories of those who have made the world of today. Many of them were nonentities, the least destined to succeed in the paths they chose. Some of the greatest economists never mastered the elementary economics of their personal finances! Some of these men were never accorded recognition. A few brought upon themselves much disgrace. Karl Marx was thoroughly punished for his radical views: he was denied a college education, declared stateless and forced into hiding. While George Orwell, rejected his restrictive Victorian education and despised the class of intellectuals. Oscar Wilde, a self proclaimed genius, garnered fame and infamy in equal measure and wound up in prison. Dostoyevsky escaped the firing squad by minutes!
It sounds adventurous...strange...scary...even a bit absurd. The humanities give us a tour of all that lies in the world outside. For a while, it lets us wander away and dwell in the minds of others as we try to make sense of their lives and what mattered to them.
Karl Marx trained in philosophy and learned economics much later. So he could see that the factory workers were deprived, not only from fair wages but from the joy of work: because work is the expression of our existence, it is the very heart of who we are.
While Marx was a revolutionary, obsessed with his scheme to redeem humanity, George Orwell, was his opposite,
described as “a little too moth eaten for his age”. At a time when Europe was swept by fervid storms of high ideals, he wrote a fable showing the counterpoint of revolutions. His life and writing were both stripped of clutter. He cast aside his privileges of class and status and championed something unexpectedly Marxist: the needs and opinions of the ordinary people.
If Orwell were moth eaten, Oscar Wilde was glittery. His life was short and scandalous but his plays sparkled with wit. His writing reveled in something that Orwell rejected: art for its own sake. Orwell strived to expose a lie or reveal a truth. Wilde delighted in creating Beauty.
To behold that beauty was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life’s work. His life was embittered with tragedies and personal failures: his father’s murder, his own drinking and gambling,
near execution and years of forced labor in Siberia. His conclusion: our world will always be out of control; suffering is ineradicable, but joy - a constant possibility.
An early existentialist, he brushed off notions of progress, which aimed to fix social problems, cure illnesses and straighten out our muddled minds. His attitude to such ambitions was bleak but compassionate. He wanted us to be reconciled to our flawed and fractured selves with grace.
We physicians, spend most of our time reading. Work
is hectic, time scarce, keeping up, a struggle. Art and philosophy don’t offer practical relief. Our world presses hard upon us. But to fail, Dostoyevsky would say, is forgivable. And Wilde would remind us that the tragedy of love is not hate but indifference. And Marx would encourage us to apply that aphorism to our work: relish it.
“Launch out on his story...
start from where you will--
sing for our time too.”
Homer
Second Quarter 2021 Detroit Medical News 25