finger skimming over pages of blue ocean. And then I found it: three small chips of light green arranged as three points in a ragged isoceles, its topography rendered unspecific and blurry, a little less than a thousand miles east of Tahiti. Further research yielded a small collection of facts, each interesting on its own but which oncecombined somehow failed to illuminate one another in any helpful way. The country, I read, had never been colonized. Like the Hawaiians, its people were thought to have immigrated from Tahiti five thousand years ago on outrigger canoes. They were a hunting and fishing culture; all children, both boys and girls, were expected to kill (the encyclopedia did not specify how) a wild boar before their fourteenth birthday. 20 They had a king, Tuimai’ele, who had three wives and thirty children and who lived in a wooden palace in the capital, Tavaka. It was not a wealthy country, but the soil was rich and there was always food. But once its people had been notorious for their ferocity, and tales of their love of brutality and zest for cruelty had carried across the seas—so far, in fact, that theirs was the lone country that Captain James Cook purposefully bypassed in his 1787 travels through the Pacific. (“The fierceness of the Wevooans,” he wrote in a letter to a friend the year prior, “makes the crew uneasy, and as it is difficult to sail, we shall not be anchoring there.”)
I read this in the encyclopedia, but I could not believe all of it: the wooden palace, the king with thirty children, the wild boar killing—they all seemed somehow familiar, like something I had once read in, say, a Kipling story about some faraway, allegorical land. But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.
12 Hamilton College, summa cum laude, 1946; Harvard Medical School, cum laude, 1950. Both Norton and Owen received medical deferments from the armed forces in 1944, Norton on the grounds of his flat feet and mild but recurring sciatica and Owen for his asthma and extreme astigmatism.
13 A well-known professor might pick one, or at the most two, of his most promising medical or undergraduate students to work in his lab for anything from one to four terms. These students are usually chosen on the basis of their grades, test scores, dedication, and diligence.
14 It is difficult to overstate Gregory Smythe’s influence and importance to the scientific community in the 1940s and ’50s. Until his theories fell out of favor, Smythe was one of the rare scientists to gain popular appeal and acclaim; Time magazine even featured a drawing of him on the cover of its April 18, 1949, issue with the headline “Harvard University’s Gregory Smythe: ‘We could see the end of cancer in our lifetime.’ ”
15 Norton is being a little sarcastic here. Several cancers are in fact highly associated with viral infections (most notably, human papillomavirus and hepatitis B and C); what he mocks here is Smythe’s insistence that all cancers can be directly attributed to viral infections.
16 After his work was discredited, Smythe fell into disgrace, but it is difficult not to hold him at least partly responsible for his humiliation. Smythe had a reputation for arrogance and had many enemies within the academic world; when the tide began to turn against him, he fought back and insulted his critics instead of simply allowing himself to step into the more dignified shadows of obscurity. Because Smythe was a tenured professor, he remained at Harvard until his death in 1979 of—ironically—liver cancer, although he was less and less present and was placed on what amounted to permanent probation in 1968.
As Norton suspected, Smythe did in fact have a family—a wife and two
I read this in the encyclopedia, but I could not believe all of it: the wooden palace, the king with thirty children, the wild boar killing—they all seemed somehow familiar, like something I had once read in, say, a Kipling story about some faraway, allegorical land. But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.
12 Hamilton College, summa cum laude, 1946; Harvard Medical School, cum laude, 1950. Both Norton and Owen received medical deferments from the armed forces in 1944, Norton on the grounds of his flat feet and mild but recurring sciatica and Owen for his asthma and extreme astigmatism.
13 A well-known professor might pick one, or at the most two, of his most promising medical or undergraduate students to work in his lab for anything from one to four terms. These students are usually chosen on the basis of their grades, test scores, dedication, and diligence.
14 It is difficult to overstate Gregory Smythe’s influence and importance to the scientific community in the 1940s and ’50s. Until his theories fell out of favor, Smythe was one of the rare scientists to gain popular appeal and acclaim; Time magazine even featured a drawing of him on the cover of its April 18, 1949, issue with the headline “Harvard University’s Gregory Smythe: ‘We could see the end of cancer in our lifetime.’ ”
15 Norton is being a little sarcastic here. Several cancers are in fact highly associated with viral infections (most notably, human papillomavirus and hepatitis B and C); what he mocks here is Smythe’s insistence that all cancers can be directly attributed to viral infections.
16 After his work was discredited, Smythe fell into disgrace, but it is difficult not to hold him at least partly responsible for his humiliation. Smythe had a reputation for arrogance and had many enemies within the academic world; when the tide began to turn against him, he fought back and insulted his critics instead of simply allowing himself to step into the more dignified shadows of obscurity. Because Smythe was a tenured professor, he remained at Harvard until his death in 1979 of—ironically—liver cancer, although he was less and less present and was placed on what amounted to permanent probation in 1968.
As Norton suspected, Smythe did in fact have a family—a wife and two
Similar Books
