It’s been 10 weeks of o chem, 5 days a week, plus one day of lab, and the final exam is 12 days away. A classmate with a metal stud embedded over her cheekbone and an elaborate rose tattoo on her forearm said, “I’m so over o chem. I don’t really care about carbon.” I gasped inwardly but said nothing. But the reality is my lab partners and I are getting befuddled and punchy from the avalanche of new reactions pouring down on us. Acetone, 2.6-dimethylcyclohexanone, and 5-hydroxy-1,3-dioxane, start looking like adorable little aliens to me. There they are below.
This is how know I need to take a break, and taking a break usually means dancing. But there is a problem, and it’s called winter in Seattle. Today the sun rose at 7:38 am and set at 4:18 pm, which is less than 9 hours of gray, cloudy light. It’s enervating, and makes me want to hibernate in fuzzy slippers. The darkness reminds me of working on a project in St. Petersburg one late November with a man named Volodya.
St. Petersburg is at 59.9 degrees latitude, and Seattle is at 47.6, so those northern Russian winters are very dark indeed. I asked Volodya how he and his friends survived the winter, and he said, “We simply endure.” And the people of St. Petersburg are famous for their endurance—they survived an almost 900 day siege of their gorgeous city courtesy of Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944 at the cost of about a million and half lives. I had a hard time imaging the horrors of the siege while wandering around the canals of the city at night, quiet and beautiful and sparkling with snow.
The house of my favorite Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov, is in St. Petersburg at 47 Great Morskaya Street. That house so filled his heart and mind that he was unwilling to buy another house for the rest of his life though he lived in Germany, France, and America. I love that though he was a brilliant writer and teacher, his real passion was lepidopterology.
In his autobiography, Speak Memory, Nabokov describes butterfly hunting and how he completely lost track of time, or maybe more accurately felt outside the constraints of time, when engaged in his passion. He said, “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Another great quote, “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”
Nonutilitarian delights, what a phrase! For me, that’s what dancing is, reducing the world to two people and music and movement.
Successive Approximation 