By the time you read this, I should be well out of cell range, happily ensconced in an internet-free cabin in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The plan is to hole up for two nights and crank out a big chunk my next chapter. My research is done and I feel full to the brim with scientific facts, entertaining anecdotes, and weighty themes. All I need now is to free myself from other obligations (except walking the dog among ancient Doug Firs) and let it all come spilling out. Wish me luck!
Before I go, however, I want to share a recent realization I’ve had about historical research—not least because it follows neatly on my last post about when to read and when to call.
For the chapter I’m about to write, I spent a lot of time researching a long-dead scientist, which meant a lot of reading. I read their work, and I read work about their work. But in the end, I still didn’t understand their most famous scientific concept as well as I wanted to. So I went back to the material and read it again, feeling frustrated, panicked, and a little bit stupid.
Then, after digesting Rosanna and Michelle’s advice about when to pick up the phone, I finally decided to reach out to an expert—the author of some of the secondary sources I was studying. This person happily agreed to talk and we spoke for over an hour. It was, I think, a fascinating conversation for both of us. (Yet more evidence that it’s always worth talking to someone who lives and breathes your subject—and that doing so can be mutually edifying!)
Early in the interview, I asked for clarification about the long-dead scientist and their famous scientific theory, explaining that despite my best efforts, I still wasn’t totally clear on whether it meant X or Y. “I think it’s sort of both,” my source replied. There was genuine ambiguity.
I felt shocked, then chagrined.
I realized that I had completely misapprehended the problem. It wasn’t that I was incapable of understanding the dead scientist’s thinking, it was that his thinking was hard to understand. He was, in other words, human. A messy, contradictory person whose written work raised as many questions as it answered. I just had to accept that there are limits to what a researcher can know.1
Historians probably have a term for the opacity of the past and the fundamental inscrutability of certain historical actors. To me, it seems like an obvious but powerful truth: Dead people—like the living people I’ve interviewed for countless stories—have complex motivations, their thinking can be flawed, and it can change over time in subtle, hard to understand ways. We cannot always solve our characters’ inner mysteries.
Which is all to say that my conversation with this expert taught me to trust myself. And make more phone calls.
In the span of a few minutes, they validated my research and freed me to move forward with writing. Without that interview, I would probably still be cycling frantically between the same set of primary and secondary materials, excoriating myself for missing some crucial clue.
Now, it was clear that I understood this scientist reasonably well. I asked the right questions. I struggled to find answers. History just wasn’t as simple as I naively expected it to be.
Somewhat surprisingly, no one has written a biography of this influential scientist, which means that no one has probed his mind enough to fully resolve these uncertainties. I wish I could be the one to do so, however, it feels like too much for a character who will appear in one section of one chapter of my book...