On New Year's Day, I took out my frustration on my office, engaging in a frenzied fit of cleaning in some effort to overcome my sense of creeping entropy. Toward the end of the day, I found, atop a bookcase, a small poster I had created years ago. It was a quote from T. H. White's Once and Future King. In that book, Merlin says to the young Arthur:

“The best thing for being sad...is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

This could have been my father talking.

My father loved to do things, and to reflect on the doing. To teach and ask how we should teach; to do research, and ask how experiments should be designed; to learn and ask how any organism can learn; to live and parent his children, and to ask how life evolved through uncounted generations of such relationships.

Learning was a kind of courage that came naturally, for him — an antidote to fear, discouragement, and uncertainty. When I was in college in the early 1980s, I received the sort of call that all children dread, "Your father is in the hospital," my mother said, "He's had a stroke." Despite her reassurances that the stroke had been a minor one, I imagined the worst as I rushed to the hospital.

As I hurried down a corridor toward his room, I heard my father's far-reaching professor's voice explaining to my mother where the stroke must have occurred, given the symptoms. Minutes later, he related to me his inability, earlier in the day, to realize he had suffered a stroke; how it had taken students and colleagues in the department to spot the problem and get him to the hospital (something for which my family will always be grateful). This showed, he said, the fallibility of introspection as a form of psychological inquiry. As I soon realized, his brain was in fine shape, and he made a full recovery.

My father's ability, to both do and to reflect on the doing, is one of his finest legacies to his children. When I was very young, this approach to life could be aggravating. "Can't we just have fun," I would sometimes think. "Do we have to talk about it?" But his approach to life was infectious. This was tremendous fun, for him and ultimately for me. Understanding is a joy unto itself, and it can make the doing more enjoyable, too. My brother, sister, and I do as he did, finding ourselves both better able to do the things we love, and to delight more in doing them.

One of the only things that my father did unreflectively was to love his children. The clear and unmitigated satisfaction he took in his children was, and always will be, a source of great strength for each of us. If we told him of a success, he would nearly burst with pride; told of a failure, he would remind us what a great life we had and of his certainty we could overcome it.

In the weeks since my father's death, the world has seemed a seemed a smaller and more meager place. If he were here, he would no doubt remind me that the world is largely the same, and that I carry within myself the ability to view it in the same fascinating way that he could.

I doubt that, but to honor my father's memory, I will try. I am resolved to create more broadly, to inquire more courageously, and to love more deeply — remembering to delight in both the doing and the reflecting.

Thank you.

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