A century and a half after Novalis declared that laboratories will be temples, the poet turned marine biologist Rachel Carson (Might 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) consecrated science in her lyrical writings concerning the pure world. On the middle of her artistic cosmogony was a significant symbiosis between literature and science in illuminating the character of actuality — a credo she formulated instantly solely as soon as, within the acceptance speech, excerpted in Figuring, for the Nationwide Guide Award her 1951 ebook The Sea Around Us had earned her: “a piece of scientific accuracy offered with poetic creativeness and such readability of favor and originality of method as to win and maintain each reader’s consideration,” learn the award quotation.
On the ceremony held on January 29, 1952, the drama critic John Mason Brown welcomed Carson to the stage with introductory remarks that captured the unexampled allure of her scientific-artistic sensibility:
Miss Carson [has] made these odd creatures of the ocean, these bipeds often called women and men, the world over within the thriller of our beginnings and the profundity and fantastic thing about one thing far larger than mortals, with their petty egotisms and vanities, can hope to know… She has atomized our egos and introduced to every reader not solely a brand new humility however a brand new sense of the inscrutable vastness and interrelation of forces past our data or management. She has positioned us as specks in time and but inheritors of a historical past older, and positively deeper, than many people realized… The place prose ends and poetry begins is usually laborious to say. However I do know that Miss Carson writes poetic prose or prose poetry of unusual magnificence.
Rising from the desk she shared with the poet Marianne Moore, Carson took the rostrum, regarded softly, virtually shyly, on the viewers along with her eyes the colour of sea water, and spoke with assured composure concerning the animating ethos of her work:
The supplies of science are the supplies of life itself. Science is a part of the truth of dwelling; it’s the what, the how, and the why of the whole lot in our expertise. It’s inconceivable to grasp man* with out understanding his surroundings and the forces which have molded him bodily and mentally.
The intention of science is to find and illuminate reality. And that, I take it, is the intention of literature, whether or not biography or historical past or fiction; it appears to me, then, that there will be no separate literature of science.
Talking earlier than we found the double helix, earlier than we set foot on the Moon, earlier than we heard the sound of spacetime within the collision of two black holes, Carson considers how science invitations us to be wonder-smitten by actuality, which is the final word poetry of existence:
We reside in a scientific age; but we assume that data of science is the prerogative of solely a small variety of human beings, remoted and priestlike of their laboratories. This isn’t true. It can’t be true. The supplies of science are the supplies of life itself. Science is a part of the truth of dwelling; it’s the what, the how, and the why of the whole lot in our expertise. It’s inconceivable to grasp man with out understanding his surroundings and the forces which have molded him bodily and mentally.
[…]
The winds, the ocean, and the shifting tides are what they’re. If there may be surprise and wonder and majesty in them, science will uncover these qualities. If they aren’t there, science can not create them. If there may be poetry in my ebook concerning the sea, it’s not as a result of I intentionally put it there, however as a result of nobody may write honestly concerning the sea and miss the poetry.
In a sentiment she would echo a decade later in her bittersweet farewell and challenge to posterity, she intimates that such a worldview could make us higher stewards of this irreplaceable world — which suggests, invariably, higher stewards of our personal survival:
I ponder if we’ve got not too lengthy been trying by the unsuitable finish of the telescope. We have now regarded first at man along with his vanities and greed and his issues of a day or a yr; after which solely, and from this biased perspective, we’ve got regarded outward on the earth he has inhabited so briefly and on the universe wherein our earth is so minute a component. But these are the good realities, and in opposition to them we see our human issues in a special perspective. Maybe if we reversed the telescope and checked out man down these lengthy vis- tas, we should always discover much less time and inclination to plan for our personal destruction.
Complement with Carson, at her best, on the ocean and the meaning of life, the story of how she inspired M.C. Escher, and this stunning choral tribute to her legacy, then revisit Ursula Ok. Le Guin on the relationship between poetry and science.
