Movies, Misfortune And The Making Of Roget's Thesaurus

At 14, he went to university and by age 19 he'd earned his medical degree. (You might call him a Georgian-era Doogie Howser.) He went on to teach physiology at the University of London, helped found Manchester Medical School, invented a new type of slide rule, designed a pocket chess board, and arguably invented the first movie camera.

But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was a list.

Maybe you've heard of it?

Roget’s Thesaurus.

I can’t write in my house, I take a hotel room and ask them to take everything off the walls so there’s me, the Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus and some good, dry sherry and I’m at work by 6:30. ~Maya Angelou

The man is not wholly evil – he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. (Captain Hook as described by J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan)

Strictly speaking, Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) doesn't qualify as a late bloomer.

He was a precocious scholar who began his career while in his teens and went on to pursue a challenging medical and scientific career.

At age 55, Roget wrote a paper entitled “Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures.” In it, he described an odd phenomena -- that if a person observes a moving wheel through a series of vertical slits (such as a picket fence), the spokes of the wheel seem to curve. Roget devised a shutter-and-aperture device to study this observation -- a movie camera prototype.

But it was when Roget retired from medicine in 1840 to pursue his true passion -- the classification of words through their synonyms and antonyms -- that he achieved his ultimate accomplishment. Roget published his Thesaurus in 1853, at age 74.

Roget's Thesaurus is so comprehensive and useful, that during the 1960s, '70s and even the '80s, two reference volumes could be found on every student bookshelf in America: Webster's Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus.

His list was his life's work.

His list -- Roget's Thesaurus -- has helped millions of people across more than a hundred years.

And it may have saved his life.

A MAN BESET BY HEARTBREAK

Although obviously accomplished, Roget experienced overwhelming heartbreak in his life. His father died of tuberculosis when he was four. His mother suffered from paranoia, often accusing the servants of plotting against her. Both Roget’s sister and daughter experienced mental breakdowns. His wife, 16 years his junior, died of cancer at age 38. His favorite uncle and surrogate father slit his own throat, while Roget fought to take the knife from him.

To cope with this litany of tragedy, Roget developed an abhorrence of dirt and disorder and an obsession with lists and counting. He showed the hallmarks of what we today call obsessive-compulsive disorder, not to mention depression. No wonder.

And so, in his biography of Roget (The Man Who Made Lists), Joshua Kendall concludes that the Thesaurus did much more for Roget than for its millions of users across the centuries. The ultimate book of lists became his salvation and "it enabled Roget to live a vibrant life in the face of overwhelming loss, anxiety, and despair."

Twenty-eight editions of the Thesaurus were published during Roget’s lifetime. He died at age 90.

Obsession served him well.

And Roget's "later blooming" has served all of us well, too.

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM PETER ROGET

• Never discount your passion because it seems too strange or too simple.
  Roget's lists have benefitted millions.
• We each have a personal battle that defines us. Later blooming involves unearthing a creative, individual strategy that increasingly leads us beyond coping into the sublime. Check out Josh Hanagarne, The World’s Strongest Librarian. He will gleefully destroy every stereotype you've harbored about Tourette's Syndrome while bending a grade 5 bolt Ironmind yellow nail. Plus, he loves books.

SOURCES
The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall
New York Times book review of Joshua Kendall’s The Man Who Made Lists by Thomas Mallon
"The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited," Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 1993): 3-12
Download Roget’s Thesaurus for free on the Project Gutenberg Web site

Acknowledgement:  Many thanks to Kelly Diels for providing editing assistance.

How James Michener Derailed My Career

As an archaeology grad student, I decided to reread one of my favorite novels, The Source, to judge its accuracy.

The story takes place in Israel, on a mound (also known as a tel) formed by millennia of habitation. As each artifact comes to light, the story flashes back to its origin. The Source depicts awful excavation standards, even for the 1960s. But the artifacts reveal some incredible human stories.

Of course, you might think. That's what archaeology does.

Not really.

In the early '90s, archaeology still aspired to be a hard science.

The "publish or perish" academic journals preferred articles steeped in the jargon of scientific method. For my masters thesis, I statistically analyzed thousands of flint waste flakes to discover signs of "sickle craft specialization as an indication of increasing social complexity." Not like you see on TV.

I eventually chose storytelling over science, and skipped the Ph.d. program. I blame James Michener (1907-1997), author of The Source.

A CHILDHOOD OUT OF DICKENS

The man who derailed my archaeology career didn’t know where or when he was born, but his best guess was around 1907. He was raised as a Quaker in Doylestown, Pennsylvania by an adoptive mother. They lived in extreme poverty and relocated often.

At Christmas, we rarely had anything. As a boy, I never had a pair of skates, never had a bicycle, never had a little wagon, never had a baseball glove, never had a pair of sneakers. I didn't have anything. And do you know, at about seven or eight, I just decided, "Well, that's the way it is. And I'm not going to beat my brains out about it."

His mother loved literature, however, and often read to Michener from Dickens, Thackeray and Balzac.

Before Michener entered Swathmore College on a full scholarship, he peddled chestnuts, traveled America on a boxcar and did carnival private detective work. During college he was employed as a night watchman.

He graduated Swathmore with honors, and taught English and History for several years. In 1941, he became a textbook editor at Macmillan Publishing.

A QUAKER GOES TO WAR

Later that same year, Japanese military forces attacked Pearl Harbor. Michener waived his Quaker principles and volunteered for service. “I had taught about Hitler, and I had taught about the Japanese war machine, and I knew that this was a battle to the death, so I enlisted.”

The U.S. Navy assigned him to the Solomon Islands as a war historian. Each night, in his Quonset hut, he recorded his impressions of life around him:

Sitting there in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering lamplight, I visualized the aviation scenes in which I had participated, the landing beaches I'd seen, the remote outposts, the exquisite islands with bending palms, and especially the valiant people I'd known: the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and the primitive natives to whose jungle fastnesses I had traveled.

HE MADE HIS OWN RULES

Michener anonymously mailed his manuscript to Macmillan in 1947, since they had a strict policy against accepting employee submissions. He planned to return to his job after the war, but decided he was not technically their employee at the time.

Macmillan found him out, but decided to publish Tales of the South Pacific anyway. Michener was 40.

The following year, in 1948, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The book was not a huge financial success, however, until it became the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, South Pacific.

In 1949, Michener quit Macmillan to write full time.

He penned 40 books over 50 years. Many were epics with evocative settings that spanned several generations. Some required so many years of research that Michener would spend months on location or even move there to finish them -- Hawaii (1959), Iberia (1968), Poland (1983), Texas (1985), Alaska (1988), Mexico (1992).

UNTIL THE VERY END

Even at age 90, he maintained a disciplined writing schedule. He awoke at 7:00 a.m., ate a light breakfast and wrote until 1:00 pm.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Michener underwent kidney dialysis treatment, which confined him to the environs of his clinic in Austin, Texas. "I sit in the TV room and see shows on the big ships I used to travel or areas that I used to wander, and a tear comes to my eye."

In October 1997, he chose to discontinue dialysis and died shortly thereafter of renal failure.

A close friend said,

"He felt he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish in terms of his life's work. He did not want to suffer a long series of complications.''

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM JAMES MICHENER:

• Use your day job to advance your later blooming.
• If you begin at 40, you could have another good 50 years -- over half your life -- to live it.

SOURCES:

• James Michener at Wikipedia
• His New York Times Obituary
• His entry at the Academy of Achievement
• The Grand Times interview

On Blogging, Books and Dug The Dog

Last Christmas, my husband gave me Pixar's animated feature UP. "You remind me of Ellie," he said. "And I want us to grow old together." I almost started crying.

But I secretly feel like Dug the golden retriever, uber-geek among alpha dogs. He tells grouchy Carl, "My name is Dug. I have just met you and I love you."

Dug talks incessantly, except when distracted. And he's easily distracted: "My master made me this collar. He is a good and smart master and he made me this collar so that I may talk – SQUIRREL!!"

Dug stares transfixed at a tree. But it's a false alarm.

1.

Recently I went down like a ton of bricks  –  a chronic pain syndrome that renders me useless from time to time.

After several days, I dragged myself to the computer and checked my email. Then I just sat there. Twitter? Facebook? One of the 40-some blogs I follow? (How do people follow hundreds?)

The screen blurred. My fingers twitched. I felt unfocused and distracted and hadn't even opened a web browser.

I'd put it down to illness, except this wasn't the first time. And it's become more pronounced recently, since I started blogging and following so many blogs. I felt like Dug, when Russell the Boy Scout adjusted his collar:

Hey would you-
(click)
-cuerdo con tigo-
(click)
I use that collar-
(click)
-watashi wa hanashi ma-
(click)
-to talk with, I would be happy if you stopped.

Inspired by Jennifer Louden, I decided to take a digital sabbatical. My conditions of enoughness:

• Abstain from Facebook, Twitter and blogs
• Answer personal email only, once each evening
• Do something creative that doesn't involve a computer or a skillet 

The universe said YES! As my pain subsided, I got the mother of all bladder infections. It lasted over a week. (On my list of liquids to avoid, I now rank unsweetened cranberry juice just above antifreeze.)

But at least it gave me time to reread Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" in the bathroom.

2.

Yup, the bathroom library still holds that 2008 issue of The Atlantic. I reread it now and then for reassurance, though I seldom get past paragraph two:

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain . . . I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. . . Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.

"Excuse me, Igor. Is that one mine?"

This time it didn't work. I didn't need to empathize. I needed to know why my brain feels like a shelf specimen in the lab of Young Frankenstein. . . .

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