Are we nurtured or is it nature?
Stars are not important. There is nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important, because they’re so rare. As far as we know, there’s only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys. – Terry Pratchett
I’ve always been a version of the person I am today. There is a portion of matter, roughly Jim-shaped, that moves through the universe. I am a happenstance collision of events that became a person, fully-formed and one of the most improbable things in the universe. I am, as is every human, Dr. Manhattan’s thermodynamic miracle.
That’s how the story begins, but how much of the story that follows was determined at the beginning, and how much developed as I grew? Is everything I was ever going to think or do written down in my genes when the cell division started and I’ve just been acting out the script? I’m going to answer the question definitively, so warm up that Nobel Prize.
“But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen
If you follow me on my other social media, you might have seen me promise to tell the story behind this image. I interviewed my mother, the writer of those words, about what I was like as a baby, and will distribute the audio to you all via this newsletter’s capabilities. I liked talking to my mom and I think it’ll be fun to try it out, but I also know that I need to make good on my promise to show the photo itself. The audio is in the can and ready to roll so expect that in your inboxes soon.
I think that’s my father handing it to me, and one of my older brothers in the background. It’s a standard Christmas morning photograph. A little kid gets a new toy. Big deal.
But the “then cries” part is what I want to talk about, because it’s a tantalizing look into what kind of baby I was, and maybe what kind of grown up I am.
It’s Nature, Dummy
Little details about my childhood pop out at me as emblematic of who I am today.
If I believe that a large part of who we are is determined by our genes, then this can be explained by a certain kind of bias that has a name I don’t know, but the kind of bias where you only remember certain events because they reinforce your prejudices. My mother sees the man I became and the times I acted in a way consistent with that man are the events she remembers. There are two events that are canonically the Extremely Jim Things That Happened to me, one of which is mentioned in the short interview I did with my mom but I’ll mention here because I always talk about it and it’s very much me.
This is what’s supposed to happen when you’re a certain age: you try to get out of your crib. It’s a totally normal part of childhood development. But here’s the thing about me: I never did. Ever. Of the six children my mom had, I’m the only one who was satisfied to stay where he was until the arrival of the next brother in sequence, when I was around 4 years old. I stayed in my crib because I had to make room for the next baby, and I probably hated it.
This is exactly like me today. I get complacent and comfortable and I don’t like change. I also have a tendency to follow rules and respect the authority of those who expect me to stay where they put me. They say that the real test of a person’s character is what they do when unobserved, and when I was at the age that most kids try to leave the bosom of their comfortable beds and explore the tantalizing world beyond the bars of their crib, I stayed put.
Hobbity
The ultimate defining characteristic of any person is what they name their wifi network. It’s more reliable than tea leaves, more true than horoscopes. The name of my wifi network is Bag End. I describe myself as a hobbit when given the chance to talk about myself and Tolkien (two of my favorite subjects).
I am happy in the exact scenarios that make a hobbit happy. I like good food, good drink, a good smoke (well, I used to), the easy company of good friends and the certainty that tomorrow is going to largely resemble today. In the furry feet of Bilbo Baggins, I would have the exact same reaction to Gandalf in this scene, which is a truncated but mostly unmolested scene from the book, because it was perfect and even Peter Jackson knew not to tinker with a perfect scene:
“Sorry! I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!”
J.R.R. Tolkien – The Hobbit
Or maybe it’s nurture
We can’t really study it in a laboratory, because it would be wildly unethical to intentionally subject a human being to a less ideal life. It would be like a dystopian Truman Show where one person is given advantages and the same person a complimentary set of disadvantages, and we see how similar those people are when they come out the other end.
This is fertile ground for thought experiments, for sure, but also an entire genre called alternate history (usually classified as science fiction). Some alternate history is a wild revision using time machines to alter the course of an entire war, while some is simply a look at what would happen if a regular person missed a train.
Evel Knievel shot up from dead grass.
I loved him better each time that he crashed.
– Tin Foil by The Handsome Family
My own alternate history
There are clear markers in my life when things could have gone differently. Here are two:
1. When I was twelve or so, I steered a go-cart off a cliff and into the Ohio River, though I hit a mound of dirt at the edge which stopped me from careening off the ridge and into the water, some 30 feet below. I don’t think I would have survived it.
2. When I was in college, and about to graduate, I was on the verge of going to graduate school and suddenly balked. I saw the path I was on and didn’t like where it was going, so I went to live with my Aunt Posy in Washington DC and discovered that the anxiety which had been my constant companion over the years was keeping me from enjoying the life before me and I retreated back to live with my parents and started taking Zoloft and going to therapy and got a job and a girlfriend.
If I had gone to graduate school, I don’t think I would have found the source of my suffering as soon. Academia, specifically the environment of Morgantown, would have sheltered me from the world for at least another few years, and it was that shelter that kept me from facing the demons crouched over me.
Those are only two divergences, but I could name a dozen more that happened between my birth and today. I have no regrets about the way I navigated those incidents, or those jobs I said yes to or those decisions I made that seemed right at the time. No, all my regrets are in how I occasionally treated other people, and the times I was selfish or unkind. I try to be better, now, and sometimes fall short, but I have a target that I always aim for.
Who cares about all that, what Harry Potter house would you be in?
It’s fun to pick yourself up and plop yourself down in another time. We like to do the same with fictional worlds, which is a common source of online quizzes like Which Harry Potter House Would You Be In? The online quizzes all like to sort me into Hufflepuff, probably because I’m so hobbity.
Think about it for a while and you can entertain yourself for hours. What would my life had been like if I had been born fifty years earlier? A hundred years earlier? If I had the same parents, I likely would never have been born at all, since my mother required the RhoGAM shot when she had me. I was a very sick child, so any time before antibiotics would have been dicey. Even if I had lived through all of those infections, I would have been easily taken out by my brain tumor, though the cause of it is unknown so maybe under different circumstances I might never have developed it.
Time Travel
Going back across my family’s timeline and placing myself into the different eras is a fun experiment for me, because my family has a solid thread of wealth and privilege going back at least to the Scottish royalty that I am allegedly descended from. This makes time travel along my family’s history a fun diversion rather than a terrifying exploration of the depravities of slavery, institutional misogyny and poverty that so many others faced, that face still today. As a white man with an education, I would have been fine in nearly any era of western civilization. This is privilege and I acknowledge it.
Even so, intersecting with that thread are Irish peasants and starving immigrants who married into my family and contributed to the line of heredity that led to me, so an arbitrary toss of a beanbag on my family tree would have seen me either as in the family of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence or an incompetent Captain who likely led his fellow impoverished riverside men into an ambush during the days of the eastern American frontier. Another toss and I’m either in the company of a mechanic in New Cumberland or a physician in Wheeling. Yet another toss, and I’m in a mental hospital and getting the occasional letters from my family in Tarentum.
Even a privileged lineage like mine is fraught with eddies and backwaters and other water-related metaphors. What I mean to say is this: the unbroken thread that led from those first cells to me didn’t always make a straight line, and sometimes it doubled back, and sometimes it nearly didn’t make it at all.
Here I go, being maudlin again
It’s this tendency I have, to be maudlin and sincere in my optimism, that keeps me from being a great writer instead of a good one. I don’t have the killer instinct of a good salesman or great writer. I am too easily enchanted. Having said that, here I go:
To be alive is a privilege. This year, so terrible for so many, has seen me reconnect with my capacity for joy that I have not known for many, many years. Though I was an unhappy adolescent, and a mostly miserable adult, my middle age is marked by a nearly constant state of excessive, annoying joy. I sometimes have difficulty falling asleep because I’m so excited about all of the things I’m going to do tomorrow, and sometimes I have no plans for tomorrow beyond nailing a painting to a wall. I am thankful and happy to simply be alive, and I expect nothing more from myself than to remain that way.
I measure my mood every day. This is a snapshot of the last 27 days:
The unbroken thread through misery and hardship have at least resulted in this happy, slightly fat, slightly hobbity, slightly gray, slightly wrinkly man with a cat and a computer and socks that keep my feet warm. If this is all I ever have, then I have more than enough.
Songs I listened to while I wrote this, that have nothing to do with what I wrote (except the first one):
I love this for two reasons: it, also, is largely unchanged from the book. One failing of the movie versions of the books is the leaving out of almost all of the music, which is unfortunate, because people in these books are constantly singing. The Hobbit is an exception, keeping a couple of great songs by the dwarves, like this one.
It has a monastic quality, heavily reliant on the deeper parts of the audio spectrum, because Tolkien’s dwarves are an (entirely intentional) examination of a society made from a single gender. All dwarves are male, though not all dwarves have the corresponding genitals of a man. One could encounter a female dwarf and never know it, because they all present as male. They have beards, deep voices, wear armor, fight in wars, everything the dwarves do. Indeed, any dwarf in the books could be female, but we would never know. They all have a single gender. Tolkien was ahead of his time in ways he could never have predicted.