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Questions, Anyone?
By Brian Kennedy, PDS Bibliographer
Upon being selected for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Laureate Herta Müller (as is required by the Nobel Foundation statutes) delivered a lecture before the Swedish Academy “on a subject relevant to the work for which the prize has been awarded.” Since Müller had been chosen as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the language of the dispossessed,” it was only fitting that she speak about her own efforts, confronted by the absurdities of an authoritarian system, to cultivate and maintain her sanity and dignity.
Her lecture centered upon a question remembered from childhood, asked by her mother each morning before Müller left their house: DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF? Seemingly innocuous, it becomes, in Müller’s treatment, emblematic of the ability of literature to make the unwieldy and unendurable manageable and bearable, for “nothing but the whirl of words,” she relates, “could grasp my condition.”
The answer to the question, of course, was always “no”. Each day Müller would deliberately attempt to leave the house without a handkerchief, knowing her mother would stop her:
“I didn't have a handkerchief. And because I didn't, I would go back inside and get one. I never had a handkerchief because I would always wait for her question. The handkerchief was proof that my mother was looking after me in the morning. For the rest of the day I was on my own. The question DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was an indirect display of affection. Anything more direct would have been embarrassing and not something the farmers practiced. Love disguised itself as a question. That was the only way it could be spoken: matter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or the deft maneuvers used for work. The brusqueness of the voice even emphasized the tenderness. Every morning I went to the gate once without a handkerchief and a second time with a handkerchief. Only then would I go out onto the street, as if having the handkerchief meant having my mother there, too.”
“Can it be,” she concludes, “that the question about the handkerchief was never about the handkerchief at all, but rather about the acute solitude of a human being?” I can only assume that the answer to this question is “yes”, for if it were “no”, the entire rhetorical structure collapses. Writers are always doing this sort of thing – asking questions that aren’t really questions, proposing answers that may or may not be real answers. That, of course, is part of literature’s joy. Getting angry about it would be to miss the point entirely – like a man I once met on a train who got flustered when someone tried to show him a card trick, heatedly arguing that it wasn’t right to try and “trick” people. You can’t argue with that sort of thinking.
After reading Müller’s lecture, though, I found myself wondering what sorts of questions other Nobel Laureates were asking, and stumbled upon the work of Charles K. Kao, awarded one-half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics (the other half being shared between Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith) “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.” Reading his Nobel Lecture, I was delighted to find not one question ( à la Müller) but two, for in the course of his work in the early 1960s on improving telecommunications systems, Dr. Kao took stock and:
“…asked himself the obvious questions:
1. Is the ruby laser a suitable source for optical communication?
2. What material has sufficiently high transparency at such wavelengths?”
I chuckled when I read this, for it illustrates the great divide between a Nobel Laureate in Physics and a fellow like me, for whom questions like these are far from “obvious.” I’m much more comfortable with mundane questions about handkerchiefs (or the lack thereof), even if called upon to conflate said handkerchiefs with the human condition in general. In fact, wracking my memory, I can recall only one instance in which I, in all seriousness, put to myself a similar question – why does a tea kettle seem to get quieter right before the water boils? Even then, though, I had no idea how I might figure out the answer myself. Instead, I had to ask a friend, an engineer, who told me it’s related to something known as “cavitation.” He might as easily have told me the kettle gets quieter because the tiny devil-snakes hissing inside are all pacified when the water boils – who am I to contradict an engineer?
But I digress. The answer to Dr. Kao’s first question is “yes”, and the second is “glass.” Pointed questions with empirical answers, but how these played out would dramatically change the nature of the world, for:
“In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.
Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.
If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25,000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.”
The mind boggles. A world of information and connection at our fingertips, for which we can thank Charles K. Kao and his “obvious questions.”
Even Dr. Kao, though, admits that the questioning didn’t start with him alone. For instance, he once received a letter from a Chinese farmer, asking if there yet existed “a means to allow him to pass a message to his distant wife to bring his lunch.” A question as innocuous as that of Müller’s mother, for which the most immediate and simplest answer was, of course, “no.” But one can also imagine, in the mind of Charles K. Kao, that “no” quickly transforming into “not yet.” In that switch, of course, a new world was born, a path of questions set upon, arriving eventually at a “yes” much more profound in its ramifications than any farmer and his lunch, or any Nobel Laureate and his (or her) prize.
Which are the harder questions to ask? Which are the harder to answer?
If I were the sort of writer in contention for the Nobel Prize in Literature (only slightly more possible than a Nobel Prize in Physics), I might construct some grand piece of prose comparing Dr. Kao’s search for the ultra-pure glass that might put his theories to the test to Herta Müller’s own search for ultra-pure words which might perfectly describe and ennoble the sufferings of herself and her people, conflating all as part and parcel of the same human condition. I could pull everything together and ask, finally, something like:
Can it be that the question about the ruby laser was never about ruby lasers at all, but rather about handkerchiefs and farmers, husbands and wives, writers and scientists, and ultimately about you and me and the simple delight of being human?
No?
Herta Müller’s Nobel Lecture (translated by Philip Boehm) can be accessed here
Charles K. Kao’s Nobel Lecture can be accessed here
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