In the movie It's A Wonderful Life, George Bailey tells Uncle Billy that the three most exciting sounds are of anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles. To me, one is that of a page being turned. Books transport you into periods and worlds that you can never hope to visit, most existing in either the past or the heads of their authors.

Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould focuses on two periods. One spans roughly 70 years since 1909 when C D Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale fossils in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott, in Gould's memorable words, shoe-horned every last Burgess animal into a modern group, viewing the fauna collection as a set of primitive or ancestral versions of later, improved forms. The view remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s and '80s, during which time H B Whittington, D Briggs, and S C Morris published painstakingly researched papers that significantly revised the fossil groupings. Some fossils have still not found a place in known existing or extinct groups.

The other period is the Middle Cambrian epoch on the geological timescale. The Cambrian period is well known for the Cambrian Explosion, the relatively accelerated evolution of more complex forms of life over a timeline of just 10-80 million years. The Burgess Shale fossils date from around 505 million years ago, placing them squarely in the Middle Cambrian epoch and just after the Explosion. The value of the Walcott discovery is the astonishing range of fossils found in the shale, and their near complete preservation. In an ecological study of the find described by Gould, Morris cites the following statistics

- 73300 specimens collected
- Nearly 88% animals
- 86% soft bodied, 14% with shells
- 119 genera in 140 species

Gould uses the two events to illustrate some of his controversial ideas. He argues that an important lesson from Burgess Shale is that chance plays a major role in evolution. In his own words, current patterns were not slowly evolved by continuous proliferation and advance, but set by a pronounced decimation (after a rapid initial diversification of anatomical designs), probably accomplished with a strong, perhaps controlling, component of lottery. Richard Dawkins, in a review of the book, praises the form (and some content - he says Gould makes worm anatomy descriptions unputdownable) but tears into the themes that Gould weaves - that much larger diversity prevailed in "Burgess Shale times" than exists today, that this contradicts current thinking and that evolutionists should be shocked by Gould's conclusion.

The book, as Dawkins found, is captivating. The story of the fossil discovery, its misinterpretation and the subsequent research that corrected it all read as close as one can get to a paleontological thriller. Gould is often eloquent, and always interesting, even as he goes into the anatomical details of the curious creatures -

A five eyed, long proboscis-bearing, 3-4 inch creature called Opabinia regalis that evoked general hilarity when Whittington first showed it to the Paleontological Association of Oxford;
Anomalocaris canadensis named before Walcott discovered parts of it in Burgess Shale (the name didn't prevent Walcott mistaking the different parts as either entire animals in themselves or parts of other animals);
Hallucigenia sparsa, a bizarre creature with seven pairs of stilts on one side of the trunk and seven tentacles on the other (portrayed in the book according to prevailing convention as walking on the stilts, while newer finds in China indicate that there might be a second set of tentacles with claws which are the legs. The stilts are on top acting as defence mechanisms!).

The Smithsonian has a gallery of specimens from the Burgess Shale.

It has been a long while since I got into this much biological detail, and Gould doesn't shy away from technical descriptions. I am glad I stuck with it though, and recommend the book to anyone who wants to know what kind of shenanigans life was up to 500 million years ago. Needless to say, the Darwin Wars are just one illustration of what shenanigans life is up to now. Long may we shenanigate.

Gould named the book after the movie, to emphasize how chance and contingency influence evolution.

Tags : Evolution Gould Books

What can you say about a seventy four year old author who has been interviewed by the media just thrice? That his work is dark and luminous? That he brings to life the contemplation of death? That he loves Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Melville, in alphabetical order?

I knew very little about Cormac McCarthy until I heard that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. Last Monday, a two hour wait for a delayed flight at the Chennai airport sent me into a bookstore. Going in to check for Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, I ended up purchasing The Road, Peter Carey's Theft and John Updike's Terrorist. Cormac came first, since I hadn't read any of his work. I finished The Road in a couple of flights, and cab rides in Delhi and Bangalore.

The back of the book says "A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other." That is one more hyphen than I found anywhere in the novel itself. The pistol is to ensure that the two can kill themselves before being taken by others who will ensure a slow, horrible death. The world is disintegrating, even "the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion". What is left of humanity reverts to barbaric practices.

Warning : Plot details follow -

The first thing that strikes you about the book is the form rather than the content - Spare prose that somehow is denser than the richest writing possible. An eschewal of punctuation that doesn't seem contrived. Words like rimstone, slutlamp, gryke, riprap, gambreled, and these in just the first 16 pages of the paperback, unfamiliar but evocative.

The atmosphere of much of The Road is laden with futility. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Yet the father and son carry within them a fire that smoulders on against the nothingness that surrounds. A blushing Cormac admits that the novel can be seen as a love story for his son. He describes an incident in his relatively recent fatherhood as the spark that created the story. The love blazes through the novel and culminates in a climax that appropriately has been described as redemptive.

Apocalpyse and its aftermath have been imagined for centuries. Yeats' The Second Coming has always been a favourite verse of mine. I can't help noticing some connections between his poem and Cormac's prose -

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, ...
... twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

... a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow .. It .. gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Yet the connection could be more due to the lyricism of The Road, rather than any allegory the two have in common.

The book has been received with acclaim, and Cormac talks of it in a rare interview. He says it is just about the boy and the man on the road, but obviously you can draw conclusions about all sorts of things. License having been given, I speculate about the Biblical themes in the novel. The Man and the Son of Man. In this case, it is not the Son who (though he loves the world entire) gives his life up, but the Father. In so doing, he provides the only light in a dark story - salvation for his only beloved Son who is then enfolded by the rest of good humanity.

A cataclysm that sounds like the casting out of Man from Eden. The Woman who succumbs to temptation - this time taking Death for a lover as she cannot face continued existence. A house that the Man enters after they have run out of food - there is seemingly nothing in it, but the Man stops on the grass half-faint. He looks back to see the Son watching him. Suddenly he seems to find the ground beneath him special. It is - a bunker with a huge cache of food lies beneath. Food that is like the multiplying of loaves and fish. A prophetic voice in the wilderness that does not see any sense in prophesying - People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

The pivot in the book seems to be the discovery of a stranded sailboat by the man and the boy. Named Pajaro de Esperanza, or the Bird of Hope, it evokes the Trinity completed by the Holy Ghost, who is usually depicted as a dove. It also brings to mind an Emily Dickinson poem, Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Dickinson of course lived a hermetic life, much as Cormac McCarthy seems to. To return to the novel, it gathers pace after the man and the boy retrieve as much as they can from the boat (leaving behind a sextant - a beautiful object but of no use in a world in which precise navigation is pointless). The boy sickens with fever and recovers, only for them to find that all their belongings are stolen. When they catch up with the thief and repossess their cart, something changes. The boy has always had compassion for the stray humans and animals they come across in their wanderings. The man ignores them as much as he can in his desire to keep the boy safe. After the latest encounter, the father says to the boy, You are not the one who has to worry about everything. Yes I am the boy replies, I am the one.

After this pronouncement, there seems to be very little left to do, except for them to reach the south and the Father to hand over the flame to humans. Yet those undertones seem to come to nothing. The religious symbolism does not resolve into anything explicit, which is just as well. Like a reviewer says, if we do destroy the planet it will be [perfectly plausible that it is] because of religious faith and not in spite of it.

In a 1992 interview, Cormac comments "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." The realization that I can be eaten by my neighbour when the planet immolates and the local grocery store stops delivering food is one that will clarify the priorities in my life, I think. I do not jest. The casual cannibalism in the book is shocking. The immediacy of portents on our planet that can result in the world of The Road lets me know how powerless I am, and a vast majority of humanity is, in shaping our future. A few men and women often deluded by the trappings of their office will dictate our legacy to our children.

There are very few words strung together of late with the power to bring tears to our eyes. Ten thousand years of history seem to render every generation a little more immune to the power of the written word. The Road reminds me how it was for a writer to take ahold of my mind and make it imagine. In the Oprah interview, Cormac talks of his life and how just when things were truly truly bleak, something totally unforeseen always happened. His novel is full of unforeseen events that allow the man and the boy to carry on, and the end must be the most unforeseen of them all, for a Cormac novel.

Oprah also asks him if he is passionate about writing and as he hesitates, describes how she goes around telling students to follow their passion. Cormac sets her down gently, calling passion a fancy word but says he likes what he does. I hope he continues to like writing and writes more than ever.

Update : The Cormac McCarthy Society has some great resources on the author and his work.

Tags : cormac mccarthy the road books