(In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.”) In one of my early conversations with him, he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs. …
Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material—wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens—has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal (masturbation reports give way to reports on children; career plans give way to retirement plans) and historical (did they vote for Dewey or Truman?; “What do you think about today’s student protesters, drug users, hippies, etc.?”). Secrets come out. One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay. With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
- a passage from “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June issue of The Atlantic.
The article focuses on a seven-decade study of the physical health, mental health, and success of 268 students who entered Harvard in the late 1930s. There’s such humanity in Shenk’s piece. Even before the passage above, the word “novel” kept coming to me — the sense that I was reading these miniature novels in Shenk’s thumbnail bios of the study participants. Maybe it’s just me and how I’ve spent the last few days with four generations of my family, but I suspect reading the article will trigger some pretty serious thought about the course of your own lifetime.
A link to the article is here…
