Old Person Project

Book: Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
Author: John McPhee

This collection is the first of a series on McPhee’s ideas for articles that never ended being published or many times, even written. He’s eighty-eight now, and has been writing for close to seventy years, so there’s plenty to keep him busy for the rest of his life. Which is perfect because that’s exactly what McPhee wants, an old person project. A never ending work to keep oneself busy in the twilight years. “Reading them and cataloguing them was something to do, and do, and do. It beat dying” as he says of another old person project, Thornton Wilder’s attempt at documenting seventeenth century Spanish playwright Lope De Vega’s works. Hence, the Vol. 1 of the title.

McPhee can make interesting even the most common place thing - an interaction, a building, a road - with sheer skill. It's made interesting not just because he is passioante about some subject, but the craft he deploys while at it. I have read plenty of one kind, but not the other. Makes me want to read more McPhee. Makes me want to write, even.

McPhee came on my radar because of his science writing. I have long been under the impression that no one does it better, even though I can't recall ever having read him. Now that I have actually read him and having enjoyed the process, I should do away with the excuses and tackle his longer works.

Rivers that come together to form a common delta, like the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, are extremely rare in the world—the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Kennebec and the Androscoggin at Merrymeeting Bay in Maine. Rivers that come together to form a common delta in a far-inland setting are unique. In the Great Central Valley of California, the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta is fifty miles from the ocean.

This involves—for me, anyway—breaking the fundamental rule of journalism that you never show a manuscript to the subject. I have always adhered to that rule with the consistent exception of pieces about science. It has not been my purpose to write for a scientific audience, but my purpose would be defeated if my work were not acceptable to scientists.

In writing about science, one is always aware that the reader may know a good deal more about the science than the writer does, or a good deal less, and that both categories of reader are always going to be there, in some ratio or other. So, as I’m suggesting, you look for ways to put things that would inform the unknowledgeable while not irritating the knowledgeable.

He was Lewis Thomas and he was telling me that he liked something that I had written about science. I did not need a higher prize. He also told me about an experience he had in the nineteen-thirties when he was an undergraduate at Princeton. He had gone to the campus medical center to report that he was dying. That, at least, was his diagnosis and he had come to the McCosh Infirmary to confirm it. My father, the physician who examined him, listened to his lungs and heart, and shaped a diagnosis of his own. He said, “Thomas, you are hung over. Go back to your room and sleep it off.”