Sense and senselessness

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Zygmunt Bauman. He published prolifically across the spectrum of sociology and social theory, and is considered one of the world’s most influential sociologists. Not known as a diarist, he did publish a work provocatively called, This is Not a Diary, with entries dated as if it were a diary - each one being a mini-essay on whatever sociology-related subject happened to come to mind that day. The first dated entry is titled, On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. Another - On the friends you have and the friends you think you have - is about the evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, under whom I, personally, studied many years ago.

Bauman was born to Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, on 19 November 1925. When the Nazis invaded, in 1939, his family fled to the Soviet Union where he enlisted in the Polish division of the Red Army, working as a political education instructor. He was involved in the battles of Kolberg and Berlin, and in May 1945 was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. In the early post-war years, he served as a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW) formed to combat Ukrainian and Polish insurgents, and as an informer for military intelligence. In parallel, he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1948, he married Janina Lewinson, and they had three daughters.

Having risen to the rank of major, Bauman was dishonourably discharged from the KBW, in 1953, when his father - a Zionist - sought permission to emigrate to Israel, even though he, himself, held anti-Zionist views. The following year he became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. A visit to the London School of Economics led to his first major book, in 1959, on the British socialist movement, some years later translated into English. Other books followed, notably the popular Socjologia na co dzień in 1964, later forming the basis for his English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically in 1990.

By the late 1960s, an orchestrated anti-semitic campaign was leading many Poles of Jewish descent, not least the intellectuals, to emigrate. At the same time, Bauman’s politics had fallen out of line with that of the communist government; so, in 1968, he gave up his Polish citizenship in order to be allowed to leave the country. He went first to Tel Aviv University, but, by 1972, he had taken up a chair in sociology at Leeds University. He retired in 1990, but since then has published over 40 books, on subjects such as globalisation, modernity and postmodernism, consumerism and morality. His wife, Janina, who also wrote a few books on her wartime memories, died in 2009. The following year, the University of Leeds launched The Bauman Institute in Bauman’s honour. Bauman himself died in 2017. There is further biographical information at Wikipedia, University of Leeds, The Guardian, The Culture Society, and The American Task Force on Palestine. The photo was found at Culture.pl.

There is no obvious evidence that Bauman kept a diary through his long life - although he might have done. However, in 2010 and 2011 he took it into his head to keep a kind of journal, with dated entries, but with all the entries more like mini-essays on current issues of interest or concern to him. Some of these were clearly inspired by things he had read, in the news or elsewhere, and so the dates do have some occasional relevance. The collection of mini-essays were published by Polity Press in 2012, and somewhere along the publishing road acquired the playful title: This is Not a Diary. A few pages can be read at Amazon.

Each dated entry starts with its own title, such as On the quandries of believing, On hurting flies and killing people, On glocalisation coming of age, On immoral axes and moral axemen, etc. Each entry is too long to quote in full, and, unfortunately, given the essay structure, any cutting back reduces, in every sense, Bauman’s little essays. Nevertheless, here are extracts from two sections. I’ve chosen the opening entry, partly because it is the first, and partly because it is, ostensibly, about diary keeping (though more about writing in general). I’ve chosen the second because it’s about a Robin Dunbar theory, and Robin was my tutor, some decades ago (when I was preparing an MSc biological anthropology thesis - on paternal care in primates; see my own diaries - November 1989).

3 September 2010
‘On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. I confess: as I am starting to write (it is 5 a.m.), I haven’t the slightest idea what, if anything, will follow, how long it will go on and how long I’ll need, feel the urge and wish to keep it going. And the intention, let alone the purpose, is anything but clear. The question ‘what for’ can hardly be answered. At the moment when I sat down at the computer, there was no new burning issue waiting to be chewed over and digested, no new book to be written or old stuff to be revised, recycled or updated, no new interviewer’s curiosity to be satiated, no new lecture to be sketched out in writing before being spoken - no request, commission or deadline . . . In short, there was neither a frame nailed together waiting to be filled, nor a plateful of podgy work in search of a mould and a form.

I guess the question ‘because of what’ is more in order in this case than the question ‘what for’. Causes to write are abundant, a crowd of volunteers line up to be noted, picked and chosen. The decision to start writing is, so to speak, ‘overdetermined’.

To begin with, I’ve failed to learn any other form of life except writing. A day without scribbling feels like a day wasted or criminally aborted, a duty neglected, a calling betrayed.

To go on, the game of words is for me the most heavenly of pleasures. I enjoy that game enormously - and the enjoyment reaches its peak when, after another reshuffle of the cards, the hand I get happens to be poor and I need to strain my brains and struggle hard to make up for the blanks and bypass the traps. Forget the destination; it is being on the move, and jumping over or kicking away the hurdles, that gives life its flavour. [. . .]

What, after all, is the difference between living and reporting life? We can do worse than take a hint from José Saramago, my lately discovered fount of inspiration. On his own quasi-diary he reflects: “I believe that all the words we speak, all the movements and gestures we make . . . can each and every one of them be understood as stray pieces of unintended autobiography, which, however involuntary, perhaps precisely because it is involuntary, is no less sincere or truthful than the most detailed account of life put into writing and onto paper.”

Exactly.’

27 December 2010
‘On the friends you have and the friends you think you have. Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist in Oxford, insists that ‘our minds are not designed [by evolution] to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world’. Dunbar has actually calculated that number; he found that ‘most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships’. Not unexpectedly, he’s called that limit, imposed by (biological) evolution, the ‘Dunbar number’. This hundred and a half is, we may comment, the number reached through biological evolution by our remote ancestors, and where it stopped, leaving the field to its much nimbler, more agile and dexterous, and above all more resourceful and less patient successor - called ‘cultural evolution’ (that is, triggered, shaped and driven by humans themselves, and deploying the teaching and learning process rather than changing the arrangement of genes). [. . .]

Electronic sustained ‘networks of friendship’ promised to break through recalcitrant, intrepid limitations to sociability set by our genetically transmitted equipment. Well, says Dunbar, they didn’t and will not: the promise can’t but be broken. ‘Yes.’ says Dunbar in his opinion piece for the New York Times of 25 December, ‘you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life.’ Among those thousands of Facebook friends, ‘meaningful relationships’, whether serviced electronically or lived off-line, are confined as before within the impassable limits of the ‘Dunbar number’. [. . .]

Dunbar is right that the electronic substitutes for face-to-face communication have brought the Stone Age inheritance up to date, adapting and adjusting the ways and means of human togetherness to the requirements of our nouvel age. What he seems to neglect, however, is that in the course of that adaptation those ways and means have also been considerably altered, and that as a result ‘meaningful relationships’ have also changed their meaning. And so must the content of the ‘Dunbar number’ concept have done. Unless it is precisely the number, and only the number, that exhausts its content. . .’

NB: As usual in Diary Review articles, trailing dots enclosed by square brackets (i.e. [. . .] ) indicate text I have left out from the source published text. Trailing dots not enclosed by square brackets are as found in the original text.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 19 October 2015.

Boglice round the neck

‘At the Crown, Sir Christopher told of killing the wormes with burnt oyle (elsewhere mentiond) and of curing his Lady of a thrush by hanging a bag of live boglice about her neck.’ This is a short extract from the diary of the remarkable polymath, Robert Hooke, born 380 years ago today. He was a scientist, philosopher, architect and inventor, distinguishing himself in many fields. He served as curator of experiments of the Royal Society and was a surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire, helping his friend Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral. For a decade or so, he kept a diary, which is a rich, dense record of that period in his life. In it are mentioned hundreds of taverns and coffee houses where he had meetings, and the names of thousands of people with whom he came into contact. He also describes, in passing, inventions, innovations, discoveries, and potential medical cures (such as Wren’s cure for thrush!).

Hooke was born on 28 July 1635 (18 July Old Style) at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, the son of a churchman. He was educated at Westminster School and, thanks to a scholarship, at Christ Church, Oxford. He worked as an assistant for the scientist Robert Boyle between 1657 and 1662, and then became curator of experiments at the Royal Society. In 1663, he was made a fellow of the Society. In this mid-1660s period he was lecturing on subjects such as mechanics and geometry, and publishing books such as Micrographia with elaborate drawings of objects viewed through a microscope, and Cometa on the nature of comets.

After the great fire in 1666, Hooke was appointed one of three surveyors of London to supervise rebuilding works, and he himself designed some new buildings, such as Bethlehem Hospital. He was great friends with Christopher Wren, and they collaborated often, for example, on St Paul’s Cathedral, whose dome uses a method of construction conceived by Hooke. In the 1670s, Hooke seems to have been at odds with other scientists, including Newton and Huygens; and he and the Royal Society were the subject of Shadwell’s satirical play The Virtuoso. In 1677, Hooke took over as secretary of the Society. The following year he published Lectures De Potentia Bestitutiva or Of Spring, which described the law of elasticity, later known as Hooke’s Law. He was also responsible for a variety of other important scientific understandings, including phenomenon of diffraction.

In the 1680s, Hooke was involved in a further dispute with Newton over the latter’s Principia which was published without any recognition of Hooke’s contribution to the theories on planetary motions. Hooke never married, but he did have mistresses, including his niece whom he had cared for since she was 11. (In fact, Hooke recorded his sexual activity in the diary - see Felicity Henderson’s blog post for more on this. ) Hooke died in 1703. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Royal Museums Greenwich, Westminster School’s Robert Hooke website, Felicity Henderson’s blog on Hooke, or UCMP’s page on Hooke.

Robert Hooke began keeping a journal (or memorandum book) on 10 March 1672, and continued until May 1683. It’s considered the most important record of Hooke’s life, and is held by Guildhall Library, London. The manuscript was transcribed and published by Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams as The Diary of Robert Hooke (Taylor & Francis, 1935). The editors explain that the diary has a somewhat tortuous (and partly unknown) history.

For most of the first year, the entries are mainly concerned with the weather, but these give way to more general entries recording notable events and the author’s own activities. Each entry becomes, in fact, a dense record of Hooke’s movements and meetings, often difficult to interpret without further contextual information. By 1679, his stamina in recording the busy days begins to wane, and the entries become noticeably shorter, sometimes just one or two lines. The entry for Monday 28 June 1680, for example, reads: ‘Spent most of my time in considering all matters.’ The editors note that the diary is replete with chaotic punctuation (a full stop after every two or three words, as if, they add, Hooke had rested his pen on the paper while thinking up the next words to write).

Well over 100 taverns and coffee houses are mentioned in the published version of Hooke’s diary, all listed at the back; and there is also a biographical index with around 2,000 names. Dr Felicity Henderson, of Exeter University, who is currently editing the diary for a new edition to be published by Oxford University Press, has already made available, with the Royal Society, an annotated collection of Hooke’s diary entries which were omitted from the Robinson/Adams edition, i.e. from March to July 1672 and from January 1681 to May 1683. 

Here are several samples of Hooke’s diary style, taken from the 1935 publication.

18 May 1675
‘At Sir J. Mores. Player and Oliver Dogs. at Holburne conduit. - in quest of Sir Chr: Wren at Lords house. Mr. Colwall walked with Titus. Gave Grace chocolatt. Discoursed with Sir Chr: Wren. Noe money but to contribute towards his losse by wells and account. Dind with Boyl. Walkd with Scarborough in the park. Met with Montacue. Told Sir Christopher my Longitude inventions. Met the King in the Park. he shewd watch, affirmed it very good.’

25 May 1675
‘At Dr. Busbys. With the King and shewd my watch with a magnet with which he was well pleased and Invited me to come to him. Dind at Busbys. At Dr. Hameys £10. At Dr. Whitakers. Fine children. Mayer and his wife at Storys. Went home. Severall Disputes with Tompion urged him forward with watch - the rest of the week I forgot but I received the Double pendulum Sea clock and had a box made by Coffin for it, I hung it by strings. I shewd it Tompion upon Sunday when I drank Dulwich water. And upon Monday I went to the King. I was introduced by Colonel Titus. The King very well pleased I knew not what to ask. He went into his closet. Tompion and Harry with me I shewd it Sir Chr. Wren. Sir Chr. Wren unwilling to let me have any money though Woodroof had £50, unwilling I should have any room in Gallery at Whitehall, would have thrust me into the park.’

17 June 1675
‘At Mr. Montacues and at the ground with Mr. Russell and Montacue. Noe councell. Society Read Dr. Grew. Outlandish physitian. Oldenburg a Rascall. I propounded my theory about the digestion of liquors, about Putrefaction, about the parts of Liquors working one upon another etc. Received from Brounker order for receiving from Chest. Received it from Collonel Richards. Received also Hay Grains his bowle of silver from him. Gave J. Clay 5 shill.’

23 August 1675
‘R. Smith here about Dr. Hamey. With Andrews to Sir Ch. Wren about sand and rubble for Paules. Delivered back to Martin, Simsons book and Hobbs de mirabilibus Pecci. With Sir Ch: Wren to Lord Mayors to Bedlam. To Physicians Colledge. To Paules wharf. Coles at Hearnes. At Mrs. Mayors. Heard of Bloodworth’s sicknesse at Garaways.’

16 August 1677
‘Smart here about Hold, a note to be at East India house tomorrow. To founders in Bedlam for 2 ballances. Sent Tom to Scowen. At Sir Chr. Wrens. Passd Mr. Marshalls bill for Coleman street. Dind with Marshall and Oliver. to Rowlisons at Miter. At Home, Henshaw, Hoskins, Hill, Hawk, Whistler, Aubery. At the Crown, Sir Christopher told of killing the wormes with burnt oyle (elsewhere mentiond) and of curing his Lady of a thrush by hanging a bag of live boglice about her neck. Discoursed about theory of the Moon which I explained. Sir Christopher told his way of solving Keplers problem by the Cycloeid.’

10 August 1678
‘Received a note from Tillotson to Direct masons at Paules, the Bishop of Londons kindnesse. Directed Lamb about universall map. Calld at Lever Pits to fetch back a bad globe. at Gerrards, Goldsmith at Holburn bridge, Bloomsberry, Sir Ch. Wrens, to Paules. at Childs with Sir Ch. Wren, told him my designes of mapps, my equation of springs. took of Pit book of Education 2sh., borrowd Sansoms 43 mapps. Haak here. Grace bound Bocconi and Oughtred. Began introduction to Atlas from Lamb 4 sheets of the North Col. hemisphere. ill and melancholy.’

The Diary Junction

I was rather incredulous

‘He explained his call to my astonishment that Beadle, Tatum, and I were to be the co-recipients of the Nobel prize in medicine this year. I was rather incredulous: he insisted the AP was quoting the rumors and he was quite sure it would be announced Thursday.’ This is part of Joshua Lederberg’s diary entry on the day he heard he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Lederberg, who was born a century ago today, was an American scientist who pioneered work in bacterial genetics but who also advanced the influence of science and scientists in public policy development.

Lederberg was born 23 May 1925 in Montclair, New Jersey, the oldest of three sons. His father, a rabbi, and mother had emigrated from Palestine the year before. The family moved to Manhattan when Lederberg was still an infant. He attended Stuyvesant High School, which specialised in science and technology, and went on to Columbia University, where he studied zoology. There he came under the influence of biochemist Francis J. Ryan, who nurtured his passion to ‘bring the power of chemical analysis to the secrets of life’. In 1943, he enrolled in the Navy’s V-12 training program, which combined an accelerated premedical and medical curriculum, and was able to work at the clinical pathology laboratory at St. Albans Naval Hospital, gaining first-hand experience with parasites.

Lederberg returned to Columbia, finished his degree, and began training as a medical student, also continuing research under Ryan. He was soon much inspired by Oswald Avery’s DNA discoveries, and took a leave of absence to work with Edward L. Tatum, at Yale, an expert in bacteriology and the genetics of micro-organisms. At Yale, he made significant discoveries, including a new understanding of how bacteria evolve and acquire new properties, such as antibiotic resistance.

Lederberg then began mapping the E. coli chromosome, to show the exact locations of its genes. With Tatum’s support, he submitted research on genetic recombination in bacteria as his doctoral thesis, receiving a PhD degree from Yale in 1947. A year earlier he married a fellow scientist, Esther M. Zimmer. Instead of returning to finish a medical degree, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin. There, he was soon making breakthroughs, discovering, with Norton Zinder, how genetic material could be transferred from one strain of the bacterium Salmonella typhimurium to another using viral material. In 1954, he was promoted to Professor.

Two years later, the Society of Illinois Bacteriologists simultaneously awarded Joshua Lederberg and Esther Lederberg the Pasteur Medal, for ’their outstanding contributions to the fields of microbiology and genetics’. And in 1958, Lederberg, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum. Lederberg’s prize was cited ‘for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria’; and his colleagues were cited for ‘their discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events’.

Just days before receiving news of the Nobel Prize, Lederberg accepted an offer to become the first chairman of the newly-established Department of Genetics at Stanford University’s School of Medicine where he continued to lead research in bacterial genetics. But his interests also widened, relating genetics to the wider context of human health and biology, winning a place for biologists within the burgeoning US space programme. Beyond biological research, he became involved in expanding the role of computers in scientific research, bringing science into matters of public policy, and advising government on such issues. From 1966 to 1971, he wrote a weekly column - Science and Man - for the Washington Post.

In 1966, Lederberg divorced his wife, with whom he had had no children; two years later he married psychiatrist Marguerite Stein Kirsch. They had one daughter. Lederberg became University Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller University in 1990. There, he resumed his own research, continued to advise government and to lecture widely about science issues as they relate to public policies, such as those concerned with bioterrorism and infectious diseases. He died in 2008, Further information is available online from Wikipedia, Nasa, DNA from the beginning, a New York Times obituary, or the National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in science website.

The National Library of Medicine holds an archive of Lederberg’s papers, some of which it has made freely available online. Among these files are images of, and extracts from, Lederberg’s diaries (which range from 1948 to 1963).

20 January 1945
‘I had the evening all to myself, and particularly the excruciating pleasure of reading Avery ’43 on the deoxyribose nucleic acid responsible for type transformation in Pneumococcus. Terrific and unlimited in its implications. Viruses are gene-type compounds, but they cannot grow on synthetic or even dead media, and their capacity for production is limited to reproduction. The TF of Pneumococcus has every characteristic of a mutation. The obvious questions still to be considered are the fraction of serum that is involved in the reaction system; the induction of mutation in the TF by use of x-ray and more controllable methods; the problems of its antigenic specificity and relations to the specific polysaccharide whose manufacture it regulates or initiates. Also the possibility of activity of TF in vitro or in killed systems must be investigated, although the presence of phosphatases and desoxyribonucleases present a difficult problem. I can see real cause for excitement in this stuff though.’

Lederberg wrote a note on the transcript of the following diary entry as follows: ‘I was not keeping a diary at those days but this particular event led me to make notes on it just at the time.’

26 October 1958
‘[. . .] I was to work at the lab until about 12:30, then pick up Phyllis and Margaret for lunch and then see Phyllis off to her plane: --> Columbus->Denver->SFO->Sydney. At 11:30 + or - there was a call from a Mr. Lindquist of the “Tijding...” newspaper in Stockholm - the New York correspondent. He explained his call to my astonishment that Beadle, Tatum, and I were to be the co-recipients of the Nobel prize in medicine this year. I was rather incredulous: he insisted the AP was quoting the rumors and he was quite sure it would be announced Thursday. It’s no surprise, of course, that Beadle should be honored this way and it is a perceptive courtesy for Tatum but I am still quite astonished (as I was for the NAS last year) to be added on. I just had the impression that this kind of dignification in biology should go to the venerables and veterans and it is a bit of a shock to be classed that way. Of course in physics quite young men, e.g. Willis Lamb have been marked this way too. But I’m worried enough at keeping up a lab career that this kind of stigma has some dreadful connotations: I guess I just don’t believe in memorializing the live and kicking. On the whole I’m a little afraid the fuss and bother more than outweigh the egotistic satisfactions, the cash and the prestige factors that might help in getting my lab going. Perhaps I’m exaggerating the fuss; I was glad enough to be off the cover of Time, however! Anyhow I should have guessed sooner: several clues make some more sense now! - George Klein’s enigmatic correspondence (saying earlier he’d see me this year, then denying he was coming to the U.S.); Leo Goldberg’s request for a photograph; a telephone interview yesterday or Friday by Dag Nystadter reporter; George’s request for a bibliography last spring ( I suppose it did occur to me that George did have something of the sort in his mind then, but hardly this year.) Anyhow the trouble is it is by no means certain and there must be some possibility it is a mistake; I am rather nervously awaiting the AP bulletin to be picked up locally as I’m sure I’ll have no peace after that! I do feel as much as ever that the nonsense ought to be abolished but I don’t have the courage to meet it head on and I’m afraid it would raise even more fuss and perhaps affront Ed and Beadle in a rather nasty way. The best I can do is to be as inconspicuous about it as possible and make some reference to the obsolescence of personal distinction in scientific life.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 23 May 2015.

William Derham - natural philosopher

William Derham, an English clergyman and natural philosopher, died 230 years ago today. He was best known for his works on natural theology - trying to marry science with Christian ideology - and his early calculations of the speed of sound. Though not a diarist, he did keep weather records, moreover, he published commentaries on ‘meteorological diaries’ from as far afield as Naples and Bengal.

Derham was born in 1657 in Stoulton, Worcestershire. He showed an aptitude for learning from a young age, and was educated at Blockley Grammar School before entering Trinity College, Oxford, in 1675. He was ordained in 1681, and the following year became vicar of Wargrave, Berkshire, and from 1689 to 1735 he was Rector at Upminster, Essex. While at Upminster, in 1716, he became a Canon of Windsor - the vestry minutes show that thereafter he divided his time between those two places. His tenure at Upminster saw improvements to the church and its surroundings, and he was noted for his diligence in both pastoral and scholarly duties. 

Derham was deeply interested in natural philosophy and science. In 1696, he published his Artificial Clockmaker, which went through several editions. In 1703, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1713, he published Physico-Theology: or, a Demonstration of the being and attributes of God, from his works of creation (freely available to read at Googlebooks). This was widely read and translated into several languages. Similar books followed: Astro-theology (1714) and Christo-theology (1730) followed. 

One of Derham’s most significant scientific contributions was to calculate the speed of sound by measuring the time lapse between the flash and report of distant cannon fire. He edited and published some of the posthumous works of Robert Hooke, helping to cement Hooke’s legacy as a pioneering scientist. Derham also studied insects and birds and corresponded with leading intellectuals of the age, including Sir Isaac Newton.

Although Derham married and had a family, few details of his personal life have survived time. In Upminster, he was known for his hospitality and engagement with scientific and theological discussions. He died on 5 April 1735. His writings, particularly in natural theology, would later be cited by thinkers such as William Paley, forming part of the intellectual groundwork for discussions on design in nature. His careful empirical studies and theological reflections positioned him as a bridge between the worlds of faith and emerging science in the early 18th century. See Wikipedia and the Barking and District Historical Society for further information.

Although there is no evidence that Derham was a diarist, he did leave behind his own weather records (see The Royal Society for images) as well as commentaries on the ‘meteorological diaries’ of others, such as this one with ‘diaries’ from Naples, Bengal and Christiana in 1727.

An arch-druid was buryed

‘At the Royal Society. Mr. Collison showed me a Druid bead of glass, enameled, found at Henbury, near Macclesfield. Henbury is the old grave, as our Saxon ancestors would call an old long barrow, where an arch-druid was buryed, and I suppose this ornament belonged to one. They wore such hanging from their neck.’ This is from the diaries of William Stukeley, an English antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman, who died 250 years ago today. Though trained as a physician, his life’s work - reflected in his diaries - was to explore and study the country’s antiquities. He is credited with pioneering the scholarly investigation of prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge.

Born in 1687, in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, Stukeley grew up in an era of expanding scientific curiosity. His early education at Stamford School set the stage for a lifetime of intellectual pursuit, and in 1703, he entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine and developed a fascination with antiquities. By 1710, he had qualified as a physician, establishing a practice in Boston, Lincolnshire. 

However, Stukeley’s interest in ancient monuments soon drew him away from medicine, and over the next decade he made extensive tours across Britain, meticulously sketching and documenting prehistoric sites. His travels led him to Stonehenge in 1719, where he undertook a first systematic study. After moving to London, he joined the Royal Society and became friends with Isaac Newton. The 1720s marked a period of intense study and fieldwork. He co-founded the Society of Roman Knights, dedicated to the study of Roman Britain, and became increasingly involved in Freemasonry. 

By 1721, Stukeley had been elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, this despite his continuing focus on antiquities rather than medicine. In 1724, he published Itinerarium Curiosum, a richly illustrated account of his travels. His life took a turn in 1726 when he married Frances Williamson (with whom he would have three daughters) and moved to Grantham. In 1739, two years after his first wife’s death, Stukeley married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Gale, dean of York, who brought a substantial marriage portion to the union. In 1740, he published Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids, proposing that these monuments were built by ancient Druids.

In late 1747, Stukeley became the rector for St George the Martyr, Queen Square, a parish in Bloomsbury, London, and soon after moved permanently to the city. In 1753, he was selected as a trustee to help establish the British Museum, reflecting his standing in London antiquarian circles. He was also involved in the running of the Foundling Hospital. One of his last books, in 1752, was a memoir of Newton in which he mentions how a falling apple inspired the theory of gravitation. He died on 3 March 1765. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the BBC.

Stukeley was an inveterate diary keeper. The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society holds a collection of his papers covering the years 1740 to 1751, and the Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts houses other papers including diaries. Many diary entries can be found in the three volumes of The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley as edited by the Surtees Society in the 1880s. These volumes (available at Internet Archive) remain an important source for researchers studying Stukeley’s life and work, as well as for those interested in the development of antiquarian studies and archaeology in 18th-century Britain. Volume 1 contains an autobiographical memoir and some chronological diary extracts from his early life, as well as correspondence. Volumes 2 and 3, however, are not structured as a chronological survey of his life, but by geographical counties (each county chapter including different kinds of texts, inc. diaries).

Here are some diary extracts as found in volume 2.

26 May 1743

‘Mrs. Lepla told me of a Roman urn dug up at Thorney Abby, with the ashes, which they buryed again. She says there’s a high raised gravel road, Roman, from Thorney to Ely, which, I doubt not, belonged to the Carsdike navigation, bringing corn from Cambridg. She says they dig up much antidiluvian oak there, of huge dimensions. They made a maypole of one, together with deers’ horns and nuts.’

4 November 1744

‘Dined with the Archbishop of York in his journey to town. His Grace told me Mr. Roger Gale dyed with a prophecy in his mouth, according to report of the country, viz., that it would be a most excessively wet harvest, for so it proved in the north this year, though with us it was very favourable. Mr. Hill told us he ordered a certain oak tree to be cut down, brought into his yard, and to be sawn into planks, a fortnight before his death. No one knew his purpose till he dyed, and then a paper was found directing they should dig a grave for him in such a place in the churchyard 8 foot deep or deeper if the springs hindered not. They should plank the bottom of it with those oak planks. He ordered his coffin to be made of a certain shape which he drew out upon paper, which being laid upon the planks was to be bricked round the height of the coffin, and a particular large blew stone which he mentioned laid over the whole, then to be filled up with earth and fresh sods laid so as that it might not be discernible where he was laid, that he might be the sooner forgot, as he exprest it.’

December 1748

‘A dog was taken from London in a ship, carried to Newcastle, some victuals given him, and let goe at the same time that a letter was put into the post to his master at London. The dog never had been at Newcastle before, yet was at home before the letter. Many are the instances of this nature, well attested. Therefore I conclude providence has extended some universal principle to all animals, which we are apt to call instinct, like that of attraction, gravitation, cohesion, electricity, &c., imparted to mere matter. This principle overrules animals, and irresistibly draws them on to pursue the ends purposed by them, or to which they are designed by providence, without variation, such as bees making their inimitable combs, birds making the nests peculiar to their kind, &c, whilst man acts spontaneously and of his own free will, and therefore only accountable for his actions. Many like storys are told of cats, a more unlikely creature than dogs, which I know to be true.’

16 February 1749

‘At the Royal Society. Mr. Collison showed me a Druid bead of glass, enameled, found at Henbury, near Macclesfield. Henbury is the old grave, as our Saxon ancestors would call an old long barrow, where an arch-druid was buryed, and I suppose this ornament belonged to one. They wore such hanging from their neck. Henbury is at the head of the river Pever. Henshaw, the next town, old wood. A great forest hard by, and a very open country too.’

24 July 1749

‘My wife, daughters, Mrs. Wade and I, went to Waltham Cross. We saw the two posts remaining which I set down 25 years ago to guard the noble edifice. Nevertheless it has very much suffered since that time. We visited the Abby. The front of the great gate-house remains, and some part of the north side of the abbatial buildings. The present cellar is part of the old cloysters, as thought; ’tis arched at top. At the very end of it, they have fixed up against the wall the side of king Harold’s tomb; ’tis a black stone with a grotesc head carved on it, and some cherubims. We saw the famous tulip tree, now in flower. The east of the present church has exactly the same appearance as that of Crowland. In both places they have pulled down the choir and transept. Crowland first church was exactly the same as what now remains here. They were both magnificent cathedrals of the first style; semicircular arches, great pillars. The building on the south is said to have belonged to the nuns of Cheshunt. We visited the old house at the end of the town, said to have been the house where the famous John Fox the martyrologist lived, whose family still remains in the town. There is his picture; and Archbishop Cranmer lived in the same place; his study remains. Mr. Fowler, the curate, showed me an old town book from the dissolution; mention of the last abbot, Robert Fuller.’

28 January 1752

‘Rode to Cheshunt; observed a Hebrew inscription over a door in Hockley in the hole ; an inscription by Clarkenwel. The two posts remain which I set up at Waltham cross 30 years agoe, and without them this curious fabric had been quite demolished by this time. The lord of the manor, instead of repairing it, as he ought to do, gave leave for the adjacent alehouse to build against it and take part of it away. The 4 Swans there belonged to Waltham Abby. The suit of rooms where the chimnys are were made for the tenants to meet in on court days, and to lodg pilgrims in. I take it that 4 swans with a cross were the arms of king Harold, and he had a mistress, whom he called swan’s neck, who only could find his body out among the slain.’

25 January 1759 

‘At the Antiquarian Society. A pot of English coins of Henry II. found near Southampton, some cut in half for halfpennys, some in quarters for farthings.’

Laws of the world organism

‘Shouldn’t the student of modern subjects learn from geology, physics, chemistry, etc., the laws of the world organism? The perceived unity of the world is the most magnificent event in the study of nature, it is the content of all true philosophy; for even the mind and its development, which philosophy in its narrow sense has considered up until now, is itself a production of nature.’ This is from the diary of Karl August Möbius, an influential German zoologist born two centuries ago today. There are no published diaries kept by Möbius, but an American academic, Lynn K. Nyhart, quotes from the diaries in her celebrated book on the history of natural science in Germany. 

Möbius was born on 7 February 1825 in Eilenburg, Prussia, the only child of Johann Heinrich Möbius, a dancing teacher who died when Karl was just three, and his mother who was a descendant of Martin Luther. He was educated at home until the age of 12-13 when he was sent away to a private training college to prepare for a career in primary school teaching. From 1844 to 1849 he taught at Seesen in the Harz Mountains in Northern Germany. He went to the University of Berlin to study natural sciences under Johannes Muller, then took up teaching again at the Johanneum Grammar School in Hamburg. His continuing studies in the natural sciences gained him a reputation that led to a post at the Hamburg Museum of Natural History. In 1855, Möbius married Helene Meyer, and they had three children. 

In 1863, Möbius cofounded the first German sea water aquarium, in Hamburg. In 1868, shortly after passing his doctoral examination at the University of Halle, he was appointed Professor of Zoology at the University of Kiel. There he devised and opened a zoology institute which would for decades be considered a model for such establishments. Between 1868 and 1870, he was commissioned by the Ministry of Agricultural Affairs in Prussia to conduct research on the Bay of Kiel oyster beds. This led to his groundbreaking work Die Auster und die Austernwirtschaft (The Oyster and Oyster Farming) in 1877. In this, he introduced the concept of ‘biocenosis’ or ‘living community,’ describing the interdependence of species in an ecosystem.

In the mid-1870s, Möbius participated in scientific expeditions, including a journey to Mauritius and the Seychelles in 1874-1875, which resulted in a comprehensive review of the fauna in that area. In 1888, he became the director of the zoological collections of the Natural History Museum of Berlin, and Professor of Systematic and Geographical Zoology at the Kaiser Wilhelm University, also in Berlin, where he taught until he retired in 1905 at the age of 80. He died three years later. More information can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Kiel University

Although there is no evidence of any published diaries, Möbius did keep a diary from 1844 to 1849 while living in the Harz mountains. This is described and quoted from in Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany by Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Some pages can be previewed at Internet Archive.

In the book, Nyhart examines various responses that coalesced into the so-called ‘biological perspective’, including: the transformation of natural history practices; changes in museum displays; developments in classroom education; and the emergence of the modern zoo. In particular, she highlights the contributions of key figures such as Karl Möbius, who articulated the concept of the ‘living community’. The work is praised for being wide-ranging, closely argued, and very readable for it goes beyond just tracing the history of a scientific concept, offering insights into the broader cultural and institutional contexts of late 19th-century Germany

Here is one extract about Möbius and his diary.

‘During his time there, from 1844 to 1849, [Möbius] kept a diary that both recorded his love of nature and afforded him a chance to practice his writing - a form of conscious self-improvement and self-cultivation - as he strove tirelessly to prove himself. In the diary’s pages he alternated rhapsodies over his hikes in the mountains with admonishments to himself to be a better man. As he voraciously read history and nature writing, and studied English and the classical languages in his spare hours, he sought to live up to a standard of virtue that would overcome his resentment of his poverty. “Cannot the privation wrought by poverty and the disdain brought on by underestimation and misjudgment lead the spirit [den Geist] to depend on itself and to drive it to be enough for itself?” he agonized in September 1847. “Thoughts, feelings of inspiration, and pure will: these are the opinions that will break through the final barriers to draw us into the inspiring center of the All, into the deity.”

His communion with nature, which offered him considerable spiritual sustenance, was deepened by reading Humboldt. “Great Humboldt!” he gushed a few months later. “With the purest, most warmhearted enthusiasm you [Du] have penetrated into the unity [Zusammenhang] of the world, and in your Kosmos you have given to your race [deinem Geschlechte] the treasure of your spirit, your great knowledge, in clear, poetic language drenched with the warmth of your heart.” The human race “gazes in amazement at your work and wants to thank you on its knees.” 

Reading Shakespeare and Goethe inspired him to similar heights; their works allowed him to imagine himself “on the throne of the world,” with a view of God’s laws of eternal human nature. From this vantage point, he forgot his individual existence and felt part of a larger, God-given order. One route to this sublimation was science: “Science [die Wissenschaft] is the most beautiful bride. He whom she has once kissed is caught in her magic.” 

These youthful yearnings for connection and unity would persist in his private writing as preoccupations with community and self-abnegation and may be viewed as the first, ill-formed inklings of what would emerge in scientific form years later as his living-community concept.’

Here is a second extract.

‘By 1848 he was reading a pedagogical text called Education toward a Public Spirit (Erziehung zum Gemeingeist), whose author argued that philosophy was to play a very minor role in his proposed reformed “Naturgymnasium.” “Here I must object,” Möbius wrote in his diary “Shouldn’t the student of modern subjects [Realschiiler] learn from geology, physics, chemistry, etc., the laws of the world organism? The perceived unity of the world is the most magnificent event in the study of nature, it is the content of all true philosophy; for even the mind and its development, which philosophy in its narrow sense has considered up until now, is itself a production of nature.” ’

And here is a direct quotation by Nyhart from another diary kept by Möbius apparently between 1861 and 1863.

27 February 1863

‘When the son of a craftsman in a small town has come so far through his own work that he is counted among the more capable teachers and research scholars in a large city, he should act content if he is not granted a wished-for highest scientific position. He may keep working on with the accustomed effort, on the side of his practical profession, so that he never forgets his heritage. It is easy for us to consider ourselves more independent of the whole than we are. But our being follows on all sides from our birth, childhood, and course of development. We only want to be taken by others as we are in the present, and yet they always see, as well, how we got here.’

Ampère falling in love

André-Marie Ampère, dubbed the father of electrodynamics, was born 250 years ago today. A child of the enlightenment and Rousseau’s education principles, he became a great scientist without formal training. He left behind one youthful diary, a naive and charming account of his love and courtship of the woman who became his wife, but then died just four years later.

Ampère was born in Lyon, France, on 20 January 1775. His father was a prosperous businessman who admired the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In line with Rousseau’s education ideas, he left his son to educate himself at the family home - with a well-stocked library - at Poleymieux-au-Mont-d’Or near Lyon. Although his father came to be called into public service by the new revolutionary government, he was guillotined in 1793 as part of the so-called Jacobin purges. Ampère, himself, found regular work as a maths teacher in 1799. This gave him enough income to marry his sweetheart, Julie Carron.

In 1802, Ampère was appointed a professor of physics and chemistry at the École Centrale in Bourg-en-Bresse, which meant leaving Julie, by then a sick woman, and his son in Lyon. In Bourg, he produced his first treatise on mathematical probability - Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Games, which he sent to the Paris Academy of Sciences. Following the death of Julie, he moved to the capital and began teaching at the new École Polytechnique, where, in 1809, he was appointed professor of mathematics.

As well as holding positions at the École Polytechnique through to 1828, Ampère also taught philosophy and astronomy at the University of Paris for a while, and in 1824 was elected to the chair in experimental physics at the Collège de France. He engaged in all kinds of scientific enquiry, but, from 1820, when hearing of a Danish discovery which showed how a magnetic needle can be deflected by an electric current, he began developing theories to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism.

It is for his work in understanding electromagnetism that Ampère is best remembered. He developed a physical account of electromagnetic phenomena, empirically demonstrable and mathematically predictive, and in 1827 published his major work, Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience. This work coined the name of a new science, electrodynamics, while Ampère also gave his name, in time, to Ampère’s Law, and the SI unit of electric current, the ampere, often shortened to amp. He died in 1836. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, NNBD, Encyclopaedia Britannica. James R. Hofmann’s biography - André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment an Electrodynamics - can also be previewed at Googlebooks.

Although Ampère is not known as a diarist, he did leave behind one published diary, a record of his courtship with his future wife. This was first published, in French, in 1869, as Journal et Correspondance de André-Marie Ampère (freely available in French at Internet Archive or Gallica). An 1875 English review of the book can be found in The North American Review (Vol. 121, No. 249, Oct., 1875), viewable online at JSTOR. The reviewer, T. S. Perry, says the volume is ‘idyllic’ and ‘charming’, and though Ampère was ‘far from being a fool, he certainly shows how foolish an intelligent man can be in the privacy of his diary’. And Perry adds: ‘Although Ampère’s letters and diary lack the historical value of Pepys’s they have a far higher interest in the light they throw upon the private life and character of a great and good man.’ High praise indeed.

An English translation was published by R. Bentley & Son, a few years later, in 1873, with the title The Story of his Love: being the journal and early correspondence of of André-Marie Ampère with his family circle during the First Republic, 1793-1804. The full text of the English version can be read online at Googlebooks.

10 April 1796
‘I saw her for the first time.’

10 August 1796
‘I went to her house, and they lent me ‘Le Nouvelle Morali di Soave’.’

3 September 1796
‘M. Coupier had left the day before. I went to return ‘Le Nouvelle’ and they allowed me to select a volume from the library. I took Mme. Deshoulières. I was a few moments alone with her.’

4 September 1796
‘I accompanied the two sisters after mass. I brought away the first volume of Benardin. She told me that she should be alone, as her mother and sister were leaving on Wednesday.’

9 September 1796
‘I went there, and only Elise.’

14 September 1796
‘I returned the second volume of Bernardin, and had some conversation both her and Jenny. I promised to bring some comedies on the following day.’

17 September 1796
‘I took them, and began to open my heart.’

27 January 1797
‘At length she has arrived from Lyons; her mother did not come into the room at once. Apparently for the sake of looking at some vignettes, I knelt by her side; her mother came in and made me sit down by her.’

9 June 1797
‘I was prevented from giving a lesson on account my cough; I went away rather early, taking with Gresset, and the third volume of the Histoire de France. Julie shows me the trick of solitaire, which I had guessed the evening before; I seated myself near Julie, and remained by her till the end.

Incidentally, referring to some airs and songs, I left C’est en vain que la nature on the table. I ate a cherry she had let fall, and kissed a rose which she had smelt; in the walk I twice gave her my hand to get over a stile, her mother made room for me on the seat between herself and Julia; in returning I told her that it was long since I had passed so happy a day, but that it was the contemplation of nature which had charmed me the most; she spoke to me the whole day with much kindness.’

21 May 1803
‘Walk in the garden. Julie very ill.’

9 July 1803
‘Julie very ill in the morning. I begged M. Mollet to take my place at the Lyceum. M. Pelotin continued the same treatment, in spite of the new symptom.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 20 January 2015.

Israeli astronaut’s diary

‘Launch. No, I couldn’t believe it. Until the moment the engine(s) were ignited, I still doubted it. In the last few days of our isolation in the Cape, since the fateful discussion [on] Sunday afternoon - in those days we all already felt that [this was] real, and yet - we didn’t believe it.’ This is from the space diary of Ilan Ramon, an Israeli fighter pilot and later the first Israeli astronaut. Tragically, he lost his life with six other crew members when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry into earth’s atmosphere. Astonishingly, though, 37 pages of a diary he kept during the mission were found at the Texas crash site. Now, more than 20 years later, these pages have been transferred to Israel’s national library in Jerusalem.  

Ramon was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, in June 1954, his father having fled Germany in 1935, and his Polish mother having survived Auschwitz. He joined the Israeli Air Force (IAF) in 1972 and graduated as a fighter pilot in 1974. He quickly rose through the ranks. He participated in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and took part in Operation Opera (the 1981 strike against Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor). He took time off from the military in the mid-1980s to study for a degree in electronics and computer engineering at Tel Aviv University. There he met Rona Bar Simantov, and they married in 1983. They had four children, but his oldest son Assaf died shortly after graduating from IAF flight school.

Within the IAF, Ramon served as a deputy squadron commander and later as a squadron commander. On being promoted to colonel in 1994, he became head of the Department of Operational Requirement for Weapon Development and Acquisition. In 1997, he was selected to become Israel’s first astronaut. He trained with NASA at the Johnson Space Center for five years becoming a payload specialist on the Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-107. The 16 day science and research flight ended in tragedy when, on 1 February 2003, the shuttle disintegrated, re-entering earth’s atmosphere. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, becoming the only non-US citizen to receive this honour. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the Ramon Foundation, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

During the ill-fated mission, Ramon kept a diary, making notes and comments in Hebrew. Astonishingly some of the pages of this diary survived the explosion, and were among 84,000 other fragments found in East Texas. The complex process of restoration and preservation was carried out at the Israel Museum, assisted by the Israel Police’s forensic department. Earlier this year, the diary was finally transferred to the National Library of Israel. The event garnered much publicity - see The Times of Israel, The Guardian, NBC News. Here are two widely quoted extracts from the recovered diary.

‘Launch. No, I couldn’t believe it. Until the moment the engine(s) were ignited, I still doubted it. In the last few days of our isolation in the Cape, since the fateful discussion [on] Sunday afternoon - in those days we all already felt that [this was] real, and yet - we didn’t believe it.’

‘Travel diary, day six. Today was perhaps the first day that I truly felt like I was really ‘living’ in space! I’ve turned into a man who lives and works in space. Like in the movies. We get up in the morning with some light levitation and we roll into the ‘family room’. Brush my teeth, wash my face, and then go to work. A little coffee. Some snacks on the way, off to the lab . . . a press conference with the Prime Minister, and then immediately back to work, observing the ozone layer.’

Extracts from Ramon’s earlier personal diary and that of his son were published in Above Us Only Sky - The Diaries of Ilan and Asaf Ramon by Merav Halperin (Gefen, 2021). And brief excerpts from both can be found at Our Soldiers.

Our civilization’s survival

It is 50 years today since the death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, an extraordinary American who made his name as an aviation pioneer. However, he became even more of a celebrity when his toddler son was kidnapped and then murdered (the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’). Subsequently, he inadvertently courted further publicity with his views on Germany, which led some to perceive him as a Nazi sympathiser - a view not dispelled, many years later, by the posthumous publication of a diary he kept during the war years. Long after his death, it was also discovered that apart from having a large family with his wife Anne Morrow, he had kept secret long-term relationships with at least three women, in Germany and Switzerland, each of whom had borne him children.

Lindbergh was born in 1902, the son of Swedish immigrants, his father being a lawyer and congressman, and his mother a chemistry teacher. He began to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left, after two years, to fly daredevil stunts at fairs. In 1924, he enlisted in the army, was trained to fly, and then joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation as a pilot. In 1927, he took up a $25,000 challenge, that had stood since 1919, to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Several St Louis businessmen helped finance the cost of a plane, with Lindbergh involved in the design. On 20 May he made the famous flight of around 5,600km in under 34 hours. Thereafter, he became a celebrity, and an active campaigner, partly backed by Harry Guggenheim, for the further development of aeronautics.

While in Mexico on a promotion trip, Lindbergh met Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador. They married in 1929, he taught her to fly, and they made many foreign trips. In 1932, their toddler son, Charles, was kidnapped - causing a media frenzy - and ten weeks later the body was found. It took more than two years for the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’ to be resolved when, in 1934, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found responsible for the murder. He was executed in 1936. Since then, though, Hauptmann’s guilt has been much debated, with many books being written on the case, some asserting his innocence, others backing the original judgement.

To escape the press and media attention during these years, the Lindberghs and a second son (four other children were to follow) moved to England. Subsequently, Lindbergh attracted more public attention when he accepted a German medal of honour from Hermann Goering. After returning to the US in 1939, Lindbergh campaigned against US involvement in the European war, and was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. After Pearl Harbor, though, he sought involvement in the war, and ended up flying about 50 combat missions even though he was a civilian. He also helped develop aviation techniques.

After the War, Lindbergh worked as an adviser for government and industry. His book The Spirit of St Louis, an expanded account of the 1927 flight, won a Pulitzer Prize. In the 1960s, he campaigned on environmental issues. From 1957 until his death on 26 August 1974, Lindbergh maintained a secret affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a German hatmaker, who had three children by him, as well as affairs with two other women (one German, one Swiss) who each bore him two children. It would be nearly 30 years after his death before these affairs became public. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, or the Spirit of St. Louis 2 Project.

In 1937, two years before the war in Europe began, Lindbergh began to write a diary, which he kept up until the war was over in 1945. However, this was not published until 1970 when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich brought out The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. William Jovanovich, himself, provided a short introduction to the book:

‘The quarter century that has passed since the ending of World War II has dimmed our recollection, which is reason enough for us to be interested in reading a unique record of that terrible time. But the years have also lessened our sense of certitude. The past is always compromised by the present: many of the assurances of long ago, on re-examination, turn into questions and speculations. Both the exercise of memory and the writing of history tend to make it so, however different they are in resource. The historian will attempt to read the whole record of the past so far as he is able, but since he cannot write the whole record, he will select those events and circumstances that accommodate his thesis or his bias or his style or whatever. Those selected items of occurrence become, as Max Weber concluded, the facts of history.

So, too, in writing of the moment, as in a diary or journal, an act of selection takes place. One must decide what was significant in the course of a day before he can keep a reasonably short record of its passing. Yet the journal becomes, in the hands of a serious and candid person, an exceptional means by which events can be depicted literally, which is to say depicted with both accuracy of account and a consistency of view. This one recognises, casting back, in the journals of John Wesley, of Thoreau, and of General Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon, among a few other. It may be seen, now, in the wartime journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, which are here published twenty-five years after the last of the entries was written.’

Jovanovich also included a letter he received from Lindbergh. Jovanovich asked what Lindbergh had concluded on rereading the diaries, and Lindbergh replied: ‘We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.’  In the letter, Lindbergh also summarised his reasons for writing the journal in the first place, and his reasons for agreeing to publishing it:

‘More than a generation after the war’s end, our occupying armies still must occupy, and the world has not been made safe for democracy and freedom. On the contrary, our own system of democratic government is being challenged by that greatest of dangers to any government: internal dissatisfaction and unrest. It is alarmingly possible that World War II marks the beginning of our Western civilization’s breakdown, as it already marks the breakdown of the greatest empire ever built by man. Certainly our civilization’s survival depends on meeting the challenges that tower before us with unprecedented magnitude in almost every field of modern life. Most of these challenges were, at least, intensified through the waging of World War II. Are we now headed toward a third and still more disastrous war between world nations? Or can we improve human relationships sufficiently to avoid such a holocaust? Since it is inherent in the way of life that issues will continue between men, I believe human relationships can best be improved through clarifying the issues and conditions surrounding them. I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues and conditions of the past and thereby contribute to understanding issues and conditions of the present and the future.’

The New York Times found Lindbergh’s diary fascinating. Eric Goldman, in his review, wrote: ‘Except in the limited instances where the entries concern highly technical matters, the “Wartime Journals” are fascinating, almost hypnotically so. The prose is always lean, often pungent; on occasions when Lindbergh’s mind or emotions were deeply engaged, it rises to a compelling eloquence.’ However, Goldman also finds much to question about Lindbergh’s beliefs:

‘If readers will surely be held by the volume, many will read on with decidedly mixed feelings. The integrity with which the journals have been published presents again the Charles Lindbergh who outraged millions of Americans in 1939-41. The basic issue involved in World War II, the diary repeatedly stresses, was the preservation of “civilization,” defined as the comforts and attitudes of the “Nordic,” middle-class West, against the forces of “disorder” and “leveling” threatening from within and without. The democracies were losing “character”; the “virility” of Nazi Germany was the barrier against the greatest menace, the Communism of “Asiatic” Russia. Franklin Roosevelt is pictured as a relentless schemer, distrusted by “friend or enemy,” who was quite capable of taking the nation to war out of sheer politics and vainglory. The diary show that Lindbergh had considerable compassion for the German Jews. But much more than his public charge, it attacks the “Jewish influence” in bringing war to the United States, particularly as a result of Jewish “control” of “huge part” of the mass media. A good deal of space is given to describing brutalities by U.S. troops against Japanese soldiers; the atrocities of individual Americans are equated with the official policy of the Third Reich. Not a sentence excoriates Nazism as a general credo or poses it as a menace to civilization in any tenable definition of the word, including Lindbergh’s own. Entry after entry bespeaks a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with the “race problem,” those “northern peoples” versus all others.’

The full volume can be borrowed digitally at Internet Archive. Moreover pages from The Boyhood Diary of Charles Lindbergh 1913-1916, published by Capstone Press in 2001, can be read online at Googlebooks. 

Here, though, are two extracts taken from the The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh.

26 August 1938
‘Left embassy at 10:30 after usual problem of tipping the servants. More difficult here because of exchange problem and the fact that American Embassy help are mostly Italian. [. . .]

Arrived at aerodrome shortly before 11:00. Many Russians and Americans there to see us off. Impossible to keep them from doing this, although it makes extra work for them and delays us in getting started. Took off Moscow 11:15. [. . .]

We flew first to Tula, then to Orel, then to Kharkov, making our first landing at the latter place. After a half hour’s stop at Kharkov, we flew practically direct to Rostov on Don. Our routes are laid out for us by the Russian officials, and we attempt to follow them exactly. I miss the unrestricted routes of the United States. Immediately after taking off from the Moscow aerodrome, we passed over the aircraft factory I visited several days ago. A few minutes later we passed several training fields. [. . .]

We are having high oil temperatures in this hot weather. Sometimes above 90°C. Everything else is all right, except both voltmeter and ammeter are fluctuating excessively. The English mechanics don’t understand this equipment, even though Phillips & Powis are the agents for our Menasco engine. In consequence it is never properly serviced. The English regulations load you down with logbooks, licenses, and other papers, but one good American mechanic is worth all of them, ten times over, including the Air Ministry inspections. I keep up the logs only enough to get by the regulations. They are no value whatsoever from my standpoint, but if I should crash the plane I am sure the authorities would blame it on some omitted entry or a bit of overload, regardless of the actual cause.

The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

We had a good opportunity to see the collective farms and coal mines of the Ukraine. The collective farms are unlike anything I have seen elsewhere. They consist of a row of twenty or so houses, strung out along a road, with garden patches of an acre or so behind them, and large fields outside.

Landed Rostov 7:01. There was a group of people to meet us, including the mayor and the head of the local Intourist. Also the head of the flying school we came to see. Colonel Slepnev was there, having flown from Moscow ahead of us. The Russians are doing everything possible for us. I feel embarrassed because it so much. Dislike to cause so much trouble. Colonel Slepnev had only one hour’s sleep last night. We have never seen anything to exceed Russian hospitality. Also, they have been unusually considerate in not crowding our days with too many engagements.’

21 July 1944
‘The Japanese stronghold on the cliffs of Biak is to be attacked again in the morning. Several hundred Japs are still holding out in caves and crevices in an area about 300 yards wide and 1,000 yards long. So far, they have thrown back all of our attacks, and inflicted nearly one hundred casualties on our infantrymen. They have as perfect a natural defensive position as could be devised - sharp coral ridges overlooking and paralleling the coast, filled with deep and interlocking caves and screened from our artillery fire by coral ledges. This area is clearly visible from the top of the coral cliff, ten feet from the back door of the officers quarters where I am staying - a brown ridge surrounded by green jungle on the coast of Biak about three miles across the water from Owi Island.

The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them.

If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as “yellow sons of bitches.” Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here.

It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy - for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts. [. . .]

We must bomb them out, those Jap soldiers, because this is war, and if we do not kill them, they will kill us now that we have removed the possibility of surrender. But I would have more respect for the character of our people if we could give them a decent burial instead of kicking in the teeth of corpses, and pushing their bodies into hollows in the ground, scooped out and covered up by bulldozers. After that, we will leave their graves unmarked and say, “That’s the only way to handle the yellow sons of bitches.”

Over to the 35th Fighter Squadron in the evening to give a half hour’s talk to the pilots on fuel economy and the P-38.’

See also Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 August 2014.

Diary of a fallen psychoanalyst

‘I am 44 today and I have a distinct feeling I have reached halfway exactly. So far in my adult years I have lived by temperament and a belligerently reactive mind. Now I feel I can start to live from true self and sensibility . . . I have heaped huge odds against myself and I have also come a long distance.’ This is from the diaries - or Work Books, as he called them - of the controversial Indian-born psychoanalyst Masud Kahn. Born a century ago today, Kahn was a charismatic and, ultimately, a controversial figure.

Kahn was born in Jhelum in the Punjab, then part of British India (now in Pakistan). His father, Fazaldad was a Shiite Muslim of peasant birth but he became rich by selling horses to the British army and for polo. He married four times, and was in his 70s when he married Kahn’s mother (then still in her teens). Khan was raised with an older brother Tahir and a younger sister Mahmooda on his father’s estate in the Montgomery District. They moved to Lyallpur when Khan was 13. He was not allowed to see much of his mother during his early years, but after his father died in 1943, he went to live with her. 

Kahn attended the University of Punjab at Faisalabad and Lahore from 1942 to 1945, obtained his BA in English literature, and an MA with a thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Further studies and training led to him being qualified as an analyst in 1950, as a child analyst in 1952 under the supervision of Donald Winnicott, and a training analyst in 1959. That same year he married Svetlana Beriosova. They had no children and divorced in 1974.

Kahn’s career within the International Psychoanalytical Association is said to have been brilliant, and his publishing activities intense. He was appointed editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and coeditor of the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, for which he wrote many articles. During the 1970s, Khan’s practice was challenged within the British Psycho-Analytical Association. Following complaints and considerable hesitation, his title as a training analyst was withdrawn in 1975. At the same time he began suffering from lung cancer. In his final work, When Spring Comes (1988), Khan was so revealing in his discussions of technique and counter-transference that he was accused of madness, anti-Semitism, and bisexuality. The affair caused a scandal, and Khan was thrown out of the British Psycho-Analytical Association in 1988. He died in London the following year. Further information is available at Wikipedia and Encyclopedia.com.

From August 1967 to March 1980, Kahn wrote in what he called ‘Work Books’, essentially a diary. He left behind 39 such books containing, variously, observations and reflections on his own life, the world of psychoanalysis, his evolving theoretical formulations, Western culture, and the turbulent social and political developments of the time. A selection of extracts from the first 14 books were edited by Dr Linda Hopkins and Dr Steven Kuchuck and published in 2022 by Karnac Books as Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst: The Work Books of Masud Khan 1967-1972. Some pages can be freely sampled at Amazon.

According to the publisher, ‘this unique, first-person account of a particularly fertile period of European and American intellectual and cultural society is an absolute must-read for those interested in psychoanalysis, history, or biography.’ Inside, ‘readers will find fascinating entries on Khan’s colleague and mentor Donald Winnicott and other well-known analysts of the period, including Anna Freud. Khan’s unique charm extended to celebrity social circles, with cultural figures such as Julie Andrews, the Redgraves, and Henri Cartier-Bresson featuring in these pages of his diary.’

15 January 1968
‘All madness [has an external cause], hence madness cannot be cured (i.e. assimilated), only exorcised. From this derives the terrible total urgency of madness to exteriorize, objectify and declare itself and be met and known. The self stays hidden behind madness.

My need to learn French derives from the necessity of having words that are not confused with the chattering anxious countenance of my mother from infancy. Only thus can I hope to speak from my true self. All the other languages, especially English, are my manic expertise to drown her voiceless chatter and muttering in my head.’

17 January 1968
‘American civilization: it produced epic products before it had achieved its character and shape - e.g. Whitman and Melville. Chaucer, Spencer and Shakespeare epitomize some 500 years of evolution of feudal-royal tradition in England, before it changes character and begins its long route to mediocrity through democracy. Similarly, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorki come at the end of a tradition. Same is true of Homer and Sophocles in the history of Greek literature, and Goethe, Heine and Nietzche in German, and Racine, Moliere and Corneille in French.’

30 January 1968
‘An hour’s meeting with Anna Freud. Sagacious, gracious, reticent and ceremonious person she is. Her advice: “Only do what you want, and speak only what you really mean.” ’

11 February 1968
‘Trauma: very rarely that which cumulatively achieves the psychic functions of trauma is traumatic at source.’

30 March 1968
‘Lacan has depersonalized the developmental-maturational process of human individuation into a mere language-game.’

6 June 1968
‘Robert Kennedy died. Another American murderous triumph over humanism.

The real cause of eruptive murderous violence against liberal individuals in America derives from a simple fact: here is the most powerful militaristic nation of our century that by its own overt and avowed ethos is committed against military conquest. This has never happened before in the history of peoples and nations. Powerful nations have conquered others, then exploited and conditionally nurtured them and gradually decayed and perished, and prided themselves for it. America has won wars and victories but not asserted its right to explicit possession and triumph from power. Hence its strength has never found a validity in facts mirrored by the humbled pride of others. Instead, its power has expressed itself by devious economic imperialism and pseudo-reparative intrusions of political idealism. In these, there is shame and guilt mixed with devious gain and not explicit endorsement of aggressively achieved self-esteem. 

Even the Negroes in America had been bought and not conquered - slaves by trade and deceit, and not from aggressive assertion of victory. Hence the aggressive pride of America has no idiom of actions and events to actualize it. In human history there are no models that can guide American ethos and policy. America is at present being murdered from lack of metaphors that could integrate its idealism to a frustrated strength from choice. The result is random hooliganism of murder!’

21 July 1968
‘I am 44 today and I have a distinct feeling I have reached halfway exactly. So far in my adult years I have lived by temperament and a belligerently reactive mind. Now I feel I can start to live from true self and sensibility . . . I have heaped huge odds against myself and I have also come a long distance.

Why has love been so idolized, when it is hate that has led to all true expansions, conquests, social institutions and individual progress? Why has hate become an ugly condemned word and emotion, when it alone has mobilized and initiated some of the most creative ventures of human effort and enterprise as well as achievement? A true understanding of the creative role of HATE alone would lead to a firm and solid establishment of human and humane order: social and individual.

Orientate my book Alienation in Perversions basically about the vicissitudes of hate in the aetiology and dynamics of perversions . . . What has led to stasis in analytic research on this topic is the exclusive emphasis on eroticism and vicissitudes of libidinal impulses.’