5
THE PERSONAL CHOICE
Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew.
• GEORGE ELIOT, MIDDLEMARCH
I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life. Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?
• FROM THE DIARY OF SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD MARY ANN EVANS
Sometime in January 1851, Darwin pulled out the notebook where he had been recording his water cure treatments, opened it to a new page, and scrawled out a headline: “Annie.” After years of being the member of his household with the most health complaints, Darwin now found himself shifting his role from patient to physician, tending this time to Annie, his beloved ten-year-old daughter. Annie and her sisters had suffered from scarlet fever in 1849, and while the other two girls had made a full recovery, Annie remained frail in the months that followed. In late 1850 she came down with a severe fever and began vomiting. (“She inherits I fear with grief my wretched indigestion,” Darwin wrote in his diary.) Dr. Gully at the Malvern spa was consulted, and the Darwins began applying a home version of the water cure to their daughter, with Charles recording the results in his notebook daily.
By March 1851, Annie’s health had deteriorated to the point where a more dramatic intervention seemed necessary, and so the Darwins made the fateful decision to send their daughter to Malvern to be treated directly by Dr. Gully. Darwin accompanied her and wrote back regular dispatches to Emma, who was then in the third trimester of a pregnancy. Gully’s treatments ranged from useless (a poultice of mustard was regularly applied to her stomach) to downright toxic (she was prescribed a “medicine” of camphor and ammonia, the latter a deadly poison). More troublingly, she developed symptoms that resembled those of typhoid, suggesting perhaps that the constant immersion in water at Malvern may not have been as sanitary as Gully claimed. When she finally died on April 23, Gully wrote an evasive cause of death on the death certificate: “bilious fever with typhoid character.”
Annie’s death would prove to be the great tragedy of Darwin’s life. “She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly at 12 oclock today,” he wrote Emma from Malvern. “Our poor dear child has had a very short life but I trust happy. I cannot remember ever seeing the dear child naughty. God bless her. We must be more & more to each other my dear wife.” Later, in his journals, he wrote, “We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & shall ever love her dear joyous face.”
Her death turned Darwin from a religious skeptic into a hardened nonbeliever. “The doctrines of the Bible that Emma took comfort in were hurdles he could not jump,” his biographer Janet Browne writes, “not even with an overwhelming desire to believe in an afterlife for Anne.” He stopped attending formal church services, choosing instead to accompany Emma and the children to the local chapel’s front door on Sunday morning and then walk through the neighborhood during the service.
But if Annie’s death intensified Darwin’s nonbelief, it added a devastating new complication to the decision he had been wrestling with for more than a decade: whether to publish his radical theory of evolution. The concept of natural selection had always had a mercurial power over Darwin. From the very beginning, he was torn between the desire to sing it from the rooftops and the desire to keep it locked away in a drawer. But Annie’s death pulled him in even more directions, with greater force. Having spent more than a decade exploring the parameters of his theory—writing down all the objections he could come up with and, one by one, knocking them down—Darwin was even more convinced that he was sitting on one of the most important ideas of the century, if not the millennium. That made him eager to share it, both because it was true and because he would invariably be recognized for the achievement. He was driven by both a superhuman drive to understand the world and an all-too-human desire for vindication.
But he was also driven by his attachment to Emma and his children, not to mention the memory of Annie. This was the double edge of meaning in the whole notion of being “recognized” for your work. He would become the Darwin, the one with the dangerous idea. It was not implausible that he would receive some kind of formal denunciation from the church. The gulf in religious belief that had always separated Charles and Emma grew even wider and more turbulent after Annie’s death. Faith in salvation and the afterlife kept Emma afloat in the wake of losing her child. Releasing his heretical ideas into the world would have been the equivalent of Darwin putting stones in Emma’s pockets. He might have been ready to suffer the public shame of condemnation, but he was not ready to suffer the private guilt of challenging his grieving wife’s faith.
It is hard to imagine a decision that spanned such a wide spectrum, from the most intimate feelings of love and loss shared with your spouse all the way out to the tectonic shifts of a society’s religious beliefs. Sketching out the impact pathways alone required a vast canvas. Natural selection happened to be one of those rare ideas that reverberate for centuries. Amplified by Darwin’s later argument for a common ancestor shared by humans and apes, it would deliver the most empirical of the three Victorian-era renunciations of God that made nonbelief part of the mainstream of popular opinion. Marx made the political case. Nietzsche made the philosophical case. But Darwin did it with evidence.
I think it’s fair to say that most of us will never face a decision of that magnitude. And so we can probably forgive Darwin that he never actually managed to make the decision. He opted to stall, until Alfred Russel Wallace threatened—in the most civil way possible—to publish his own independent discovery of the principles that Darwin had been privately mulling for two decades. The decision that Darwin had considered up until that point was not hard because the forecast was murky. Darwin had the predictive part right: evolution would change everything. It was hard because the deep values at stake were fundamentally irreconcilable. There was no third way to release evolution into the wild and not challenge the doctrines of Christianity, not announce to the world that your wife’s solace was nothing more than a myth.
Or perhaps, in a semiconscious way, Darwin did figure out a third option: to stay in a state of suspended distraction—researching his barnacles and pigeons, and revising his drafts—until someone forced his hand. By the time he finally published On the Origin of Species, Emma had long reconciled herself to her husband’s lack of faith, and he could hardly be blamed for wanting to put his theory into circulation under his own name first.
What I find so arresting—and tragic—about Darwin’s decision is that it somehow managed to be both achingly intimate and immensely public at the same time. Its downstream ripples shaped both the love and faith of his wife and our collective understanding of humanity’s place in the universe. And yet for all the scope of it, the decision was not one that could be made by a charrette or a democratic vote or a jury; it was a decision that largely had to be adjudicated in Darwin’s own mind, with the help of his wife and closest friends. And while it is true that very few of us will ever confront a decision with such a wide spectrum of consequences, it is also true that most of the important personal decisions we make in our lives do require some kind of full-spectrum deliberation. Their half-life may be measured in years or decades—and not centuries, as in Darwin’s choice, or the choice to bury Collect Pond—but they share the same fundamental challenges that exist in many of the decisions we have explored over the preceding chapters: how to take a complex, multivariable situation shaped by many “threadlike pressures” and chart a path into the future.
GO WEST, MIDDLE-AGED MAN
This book itself dates back to a personal decision in my own life, one that is still reverberating as I write, seven years after I first started wrestlin
g with it. At some point in the winter of 2011, as I was climbing over the three feet of snow that stayed piled on our Brooklyn sidewalk from late December to February, it occurred to me that it was time to move to California. I had lived half my life in New York: spent my grad school years up in Morningside Heights; moved in with my wife and had our first child in the West Village; and then, like so many of my New York friends, moved to Brooklyn when our second son was on the way. It was a thrilling two decades, but as I grew older, each February my internal arguments for California would roll in, as predictable as the frigid weather itself, and then retreat with the arrival of spring. But eventually they dropped anchor.
I spent a lot of time justifying the move to myself before I even floated the idea to my wife. Our children were the perfect age for the adventure, I told myself: old enough to appreciate it, but not so old that they would refuse to make the move because they couldn’t bear to leave their pals behind. To not take advantage of that opportunity, even for a few years, seemed like a terrible waste. And as much as I still loved New York, and especially Brooklyn, there were things to love about California, too, particularly the Bay Area—its epic natural beauty, its long history as a driver of cultural change and new ideas.
There was a philosophical argument for the move as well: I had come to think that this kind of change was intrinsically good, wherever you happened to move. An old friend who had done a similar westward migration a few years before told me that the great thing about moving is that the changed context helps you understand yourself and your family more deeply: you get to see all the things that you really loved about your old home—and the things that always bothered you without you fully recognizing it. Like a good control study in a science experiment, the contrast allowed you to see what really mattered. Changing the background scenery helped you see the foreground more clearly.
And then there was the passage of time. Another old friend—who had been in New York with me for two decades, both of us watching our kids grow up at lightning speed—sent me an email weighing in on the decision to move west. “Change like this slows down time,” he wrote. When you’re in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate—was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving—figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment—means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, are suddenly thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you more acutely aware of the passing days and months. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.
So that was why we should move, I preached to my own internal choir: for the positive effect it would have on our kids, the natural beauty, the climate, the Bay Area tech scene, the many friends out there who I hadn’t seen enough of over the past twenty years. And on top of all that, the move would help us slow down time.
I felt, to be honest, as though I had built a fairly solid—perhaps even poetic—case for the move. Beyond the simple demography of the move itself—five new residents added to the California state population tally, and five deducted from the New York rolls—it was not a public decision at all. And yet even my initial list of arguments in favor of the move took up a lot of the spectrum. The cost-benefit analysis was a multilayered one, even if I mostly saw benefits. Deciding to move to California was partly an economic decision about the cost of living in a city versus a suburb, but it also raised psychological questions about how important the presence of nature is to your life and the lives of your children. For me, it was also a decision about the arc I wanted for my life: Was I going to be the kind of person who lived in one place for most of his adult life, or was I going to be someone who spent meaningful amounts of time in different places? There were other more quantifiable factors to consider as well: the schools, the weather, the practical implications of selling our place in Brooklyn.
Darwin had his private pros-vs.-cons list. I turned my argument, embarrassingly enough, into a PowerPoint deck, sat my wife down in front of my computer one snowy day in February, and walked her through the reasons. Later, I turned to writing letters, three or four pages single-spaced, walking through the logic as I saw it at the time.
But as comprehensive as I thought my map was, my wife’s response to the initial argument made me realize that I had only begun to inventory all the threads. Her map was both more social and more political. We had many friends in our neighborhood in Brooklyn whom we’d known for twenty years or more; how severe was the cost of losing our day-to-day connection to those people, and giving up the whole “it takes a village” experience of raising kids with a tight-knit group of old friends who live within walking distance? And what did it mean to give up the pedestrian density of Brooklyn for the car-centric lifestyle of suburban California?
We tugged back and forth at the problem for a few months, and ultimately found an undiscovered path, another option that took the decision beyond the simple “whether or not” choice that I had originally proposed: We decided to move to California for two years, but also agreed that after that experiment, if my wife wanted to return to Brooklyn, we would move back, no questions asked. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and with the hindsight of seven years I think both my wife and I would agree that it was. But the actual experience of moving was, hands down, the most traumatic episode in our marriage. We dropped down into a neighborhood where my wife knew almost no one; she felt tragically disconnected from her friends back east. I ended up having to travel to promote a new book for the first few months after we arrived, and so every time I crawled off a plane, the beauty of the Bay Area seemed like an impossible refuge, a new life. The gap between our perspectives was immense. She was miserable; I was liberated.
Over time, the gap narrowed. She learned to appreciate the Bay Area’s many charms; I began to miss the friends I’d left behind in New York and the ambulatory pleasures of a sidewalk city. We eventually hit upon an additional option that we’d barely considered when I first proposed the move: that we would try to carve out a life on both coasts, spending part of our time in Brooklyn and part in California. But I have often looked back at that decision and wondered if we could have approached it in a way that would have done a better job of reconciling our different values from the beginning. Of course, some of the specific practices we have explored might seem a little comical when used in confronting a personal decision. Conducting a multidisciplinary charrette, for instance, or designing a war game to simulate your move to California probably wouldn’t make the choice any clearer. But the general principles of seeking out diverse perspectives on the choice, challenging your assumptions, making an explicit effort to map the variables—all these techniques would almost certainly help you make a more informed decision, and would certainly be a step up from the moral algebra of Ben Franklin’s pros-vs.-cons list.
But the science on these kinds of personal choices is necessarily murky. We know a great deal about deliberative group decisions because we have run multiple simulations in the form of controlled experiments with mock juries and war games and fictitious crime investigations. But it is much harder to simulate an intimate decision in a lab experiment—whether it involves moving to California or getting married or any of the other personal choices that define the path of our private lives. For those kinds of decisions, we can learn instead from a different kind of simulation.
DOROTHEA’S CHOICE
Sometime right around when I first began making the argument for the California move, shortly after I turned forty, I began reading novels again. I had gone to grad school to study English lit, so I had spent most of my twenties poring—and, truth be told, sometimes laboring—over the triple-decker narratives of Eliot, Dickens, Balzac, and Zola. But in my mid-twenties I had developed a late-blooming intere
st in the history of science, so I spent a decade or so catching up, reading almost exclusively nonfiction. But turning forty changed all that: I found myself needing the companionship of novels. Something about beginning to see the longer arc of my life made that kind of narrative increasingly important to me. And one of the first novels I returned to was the one that had made the most vivid impression on me in my twenties: Middlemarch.
Middlemarch is many things to many readers, but when reading it in my early forties—as I was contemplating a major decision in my own life—it became clear to me, in a way that had eluded me in my twenties, that the novel offered a remarkably vivid and nuanced portrait of the deciding mind at work. I didn’t have the metaphor yet, but what I was responding to then was Eliot’s capacity for full-spectrum mapping, showing the many scales of experience that are activated by a complex decision, even one that largely revolves around private concerns. Think of the buzzing intensity of the interior monologue as the high end of the spectrum; the shifting alliances of friends and extended family and town gossip as the midrange; and the slow, sometimes invisible churn of technological or moral history as the low end of the spectrum. Some novels thrive in the narrowband. They home in on the interior monologue or the public sphere. But some novels are full spectrum. They show how those private moments of emotional intensity are inevitably linked to a broader political context; how technological changes rippling through society can impact a marriage; how the chattering of small-town gossip can weigh on one’s personal finances. That full-spectrum analysis can make for compelling art, as it does in Middlemarch, but it also serves a more instructive purpose, because the complex decisions that we confront in our own lives are almost by definition full-spectrum affairs.
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