There are giants in the sky! There are big tall terrible giants in the sky!
Stephen Sondheim
The day I met Ray Bradbury, he gave it as his life’s dream that there might one day be a museum on every street corner.
“Perspective is everything, you see. We come to this planet with a sacred obligation to preserve for the future the record of every success and failure of the past.”
A quarter-century later, after being kept up all night by the re-enactment of a catastrophic explosion Guy Fawkes never came close to igniting, I was zombie-marching the City of Dreaming Spires when stopped short on the High Street by a square-foot, eye-level proclamation.
“On the very spot your feet are touching ROBERT HOOKE first identified the LIVING CELL.”
In that tiniest of street museums, Bradbury’s procession of giants echoed the inevitable if quirkily circuitous moment of scientific enlightenment:
- HOOKE was apprenticed to BOYLE.
- A hundred paces away, NEWTON graduated Oxford the same year BOYLE left the High Street but not before tossing out ARISTOTLE’s initial supposition that the entire universe comprised only a handful of household objects. (Think earth, air, water, fire, and a quinta essentia whose mysterious properties EINSTEIN would later dub Dark Matter.)
- Ten years his junior, ARISTOTLE would have scraped it straight from HIPPOCRATES’ lips that living tissue differentiated itself long before organs did.
- Two millennia after that, HOOKE proved HIPPOCRATES’ hypothesis on the very spot I began stacking street museums.
At that moment, I understood that we are all of us giants if only by the grace of the giants on whose shoulders we gaze into our own, recursively cascaded worldviews.
For a host of reasons, I rarely talk about the white fleck of Pennsylvania Avenue paint that scraped briefly onto my CV out of a particular necessity that arose in my career. But as I now observe at two or three removes the current comings and goings in Washington, between my first and second sleep last night, I zombie-traced the genealogy of my career stop-over in DC all the way back to the Bardd. To inspire this post, I’m sure of it, Shakespeare titled his blockbuster template for what would one day be known as the ‘rom-com,’ the same way I’d summarize the following bullets: Much Ado About Nothing.
- If I never hear of Shakespeare, I never meet Anne Golightly in the cast and Orson Scott Card in the Green Room of a high school production of Nothing.
- No CARD, no college courses in playwriting.
- No playwriting degree, and when ED JOHNSON asks me during an ambush job interview–I ambushed him–if I could write an award-winning rom-com to snap his ten-year losing streak at IBM’s annual skit competition, I get no job offer.
- No IBM, and I don’t ambush Dr. Richard Schroth across the street, whose name I get from ANNE and whose only interview question–we’ve never met and he isn’t hiring–is How I made my way from writing for the stage to writing for the COBOL compiler.
- No 30-year collaboration with RICH, and I’m never asked to write a LinkedIn recommendation for his pal, Israel Martinez.
- No friendship with ISRAEL, and when the White House fires my boss and threatens to replace him with the devil, for want of an unsolicited phone recommendation, my ambush never makes it past security.
Let me wrap up with a more politically neutral stack.
- If ‘Dark Matter’ doesn’t lead me to plop down in the only available seat in a packed auditorium waiting to hear from Ray Bradbury, I don’t unwittingly plop down next to Bradbury himself.
- If I never meet Bradbury, I don’t hear him describe how he forces himself to write one short story each week, writer’s block or not.
- If when I sit down to write my first post, I don’t tell myself, “If Bradbury can write weekly, I can at least try,” then three weeks later, I’m all out of gas.
- If I stop writing, we’re not having this conversation.
- And if we’re not talking, I don’t get to sing you the last words of the song that–Fawkeslike?–just woke me up in the middle of the night:
There are giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible awesome scary
Wonderful giants in the sky!
Who are your giants?
Whose giant are you?
This post is from a LinkedIn Newsletter called The Indirections. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
