“I didn’t have a sense of purpose.”
“You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door. So I started to live as if I could die any day.” [Our emphasis, not hers]
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t live as if she had no purpose. It wasn’t in her nature.
So she had started her search, not knowing why or how, or even where. She didn’t even know that she was searching.
Be Beautiful, Brilliant, and Bold
Frequenzsprungverfahren
“I’m a sworn enemy of the convention. I despise the conventional in anything, even the arts”
Hedwig Kiesler, was declared the “most beautiful women in the world,” but she quickly got bored of the sobriquet. She did not play the Hollywood game. She spent many of her evenings creating. But few would know, what she was creating for it was classified as secret for 40 years.
“Any girl can be glamorous — all you have to do is stand still and look stupid”
Six different husbands. All married her for different reasons. But not any like her father. He loved his daughter for her intelligence, not for her beauty. It was he, who encouraged her to ask how things work, which gave her a supreme self confidence even by the tender age of 15. “I must make my own decisions. Mould my own character, think my own thoughts.”
No ashes, no coal can burn with such glow.
As a secretive love of which no one must know.
She was.
But, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” [Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities]
She began her dark journey into light at the age of seventeen.
In that darkness, he had beaten her ‘on her bare buttocks’ in a ‘special room’ away from the family. In the light, she eventually confessed that she had felt sexual excitement when her father beat her. Her mother had raised her ‘in complete sexual ignorance.’
Suffering – both physical and emotional – with love.
He stood apart.
He stood tall.
A towering man. Both in physical and intellectual presence.
He was a clever man.
He had problem, however. He had won the Presidency.
“On the back of the slip was written ‘Read 5.25.34’ and the signature of my father. The file — indeed the whole ‘case’ — gave me a heavy sinking feeling. I kept leafing through the documents trying to understand. Shouldn’t there have been some kind of logic to these stories? Did the Chekists’ machinery really so senselessly gobble up people? Perhaps my life would have taken a different turn if been able to see my father’s file earlier. If I could have been convinced without a doubt of what ordinary, banal horror our industry, our powerful Soviet reality was steeped in.”
“My father never spoke about any of this with me. He blanked this piece of his life out of his memory as if it had never existed. It is forbidden to speak of this subject in our family.”
“I was only three years old at the time of my father’s arrest, but I remember to this day all the horror and fear. One night people came into our barracks room. I remember my mother shouting and crying. I woke up and also began to cry. I was crying not because my father was going away (I was still too young to “understand” what was happening to him). I was crying because I saw my mother and saw how frightened she was. Her fear and her tears were transferred to me. My father was taken away, and my mother threw herself at me, hugging me until I calmed down and fell asleep.” Continue reading A Child's Memory
Gaia is a tough bitch.
Hot Cold Passion: a passion for science.
She was a Scientist, first.
And she was a Character — a very interesting, and complex character.
Having entered the science community as a woman, when men still dominated science, and being charmed by a huge scientific ego, Carl, she luckily had to explore the backwaters of evolutionary biology at the time, bacteria, not getting much support from him or her male contemporaries. Of course, like all good science, that estuary of knowledge contained biological riches totally ignored by well established conventional scientific community. Like Darwin before, she was sui generis: a driven, feisty, no holds barred, idea brawler — an intellectual maverick — by necessity and choice. Initially ignored, she generated a fair amount of hostility from the conventional scientific community when they were challenged.
And intellectual mavericks, with persistence, are the only type to challenge the major ideas of conventional science, and win — somewhat.
And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind.
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in.
I´d have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid.
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did.
Candle in the Wind, Elton John & Bernie Taupin
She is an icon of modern culture. A legend.
She had been in foster care most of her childhood. She wasn’t wanted, her mother was too unreliable to take care of her. She was convinced to marry young for that way her guardians could go to Florida without her.
“My marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.”
He is grateful for a second chance. And he is doing well with it – at least for now.
Yes, he screwed up before – royally. He knew it. “I had burned bridges”
No, it wasn’t the addiction. No, that wasn’t it.
“It was the anger.”
“I had issues with anger. I wasn’t behaving professionally. I wasn’t accountable, no consequences, no rules.”
As a Viking traveler of books and people, I have occasioned to meet a person from a different place, a different time, and a different world, through the labyrinth of books.
Presumably, this is what Henry Stanley said to Dr. David Livingstone, a missionary who had gone into the “wilds of Africa,” and Stanley was paid to find him which took about six months, a difficult and tortuous expedition.
At last, every hero becomes a bore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He saw himself and the institution he built as one in the same.
He was revered and reviled. He was founder and the builder of an United States Federal institution, that now has over thirty thousand employees and has a budget of eight billion. Once upon a time, famous, and respected, he was idolized by kids in the 1930s, for he was responsible for creating the good feelings about G men (government men), the prototypical hero of law and order, and justice, in an earlier age when government wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. Later, he was hated and reviled, on the top of list of the 1960s conspiracy theorist’s boogie men: he was viewed as a nexus for secrets, power, and repression of free speech.