재밌을 것 같아 읽다 보면: 'Brave Genius'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

사다 놓고서 아직 읽어야 할 책들이 산더미 같은데도 종종 들르는 동네 도서관에서 '새(로 구입한) 비소설' 서가를 살펴보는 적이 가끔 있다. 그러다가 재밌을 것 같아 빌려온 책이 Sean B. Carroll 의 'Brave Genius'(2013)다.

 

나치 점령 당시의 프랑스에서 제가끔 목숨을 걸고 저항운동에 참여하고, 전후에 서로 친구가 되고, 그리고 각각 문학과 의학(Physiology or Medicine)에서 노벨상을 수상하게 된, Albert Camus 와 Jacques Monod 의 이야기이다. 저자는 위스콘신대학의 분자생물학 및 유전학 교수인데 2차대전이며 까뮈의 저작들에 관한 이야기를, 다른 책에서 보기 어려울 많은 자료들을 인용하면서, 참 잘 썼다는 생각이 든다.

 

500쪽쯤 되는 책의 반을 넘어섰는데, 읽고 있던 부분의 몇 줄을 여기 옮겨 놓을 생각이 들었다. 하필 왜 이 부분에서 였을까? 아마 아래가 대답이 될 것 같다: (전에 어딘가에 댓글로도 같은 내용을 쓴 적이 있었지 싶다.) 

 

   전혀 모르거나 이름이나 들은 적 있는, 사람 좋아 보이는 사람과의 우연한 첫 만남은 즐거움이다. 뿐더러, 그에게서

   내가 아는 사람 이름이 나오면 그 즐거움은 더 커진다. 서로 몰랐지만 우린 친구였다는 그런 느낌이 되면서 말이다.

   책과의 만남에서도 마찬가지다.

 

(도서관에 돌려주고 말 책이라 또 펼쳐보게 안 될 거고, 그래서도 본문의 몇 줄을 적어 놓는 건 괜찮을 것 같은데 스스로를 번거롭게 하고 싶지는 않아서 번역은 안 생각 한다.)

 

 

      Handsome, an experienced sailor, and a talented musician, Monod lacked focus,

      not confidence. ... The question in the Monod household was not whether Jacques

      would achieve great things, but whether he would be the next Beethoven or the

      next Pasteur. (p 36)

 

      Camus was put in charge of a cast that included de Beauvoir and Sartre and that

      was invited to stage a public reading of a surrealist play that Picasso had written in

      the 1920s. Performed in a mutual friend's living room, the standing-room-only

      audience for Le Desir attrape par la queue (Desire caught by the tail) included

      Picasso himself, as well as the painter Georges Braque, and a vareity of poets,

      directers, and actors. In appreciation for their efforts, Picasso invited the illustrious

      cast back to his apartment. (p 191-192)

     

      The first thing for a writer to learn is the art of transposing what he feels into what

      he wants to make others feel.

                                                  -- Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-1951 (p 253)

 

       There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is to

      meditate not on death but on life.

                                                                                         -- Spinoza, Ethics

                      (Quoted by Erwin Schrodinger in the preface to What is Life?) (p262)

                                                                                                           

      He[Jacques Monod] hasd learned of one major advance while still in the Amy.

      Before his release, he happened across several back issues of the scientific

      journal Genetics in, of all places, an American Army bookmobile. (p 263)

 

      Schrodinger speculated that genes were some kind of "aperiodic solid" that

      contained some version of an "elaborate code-script" that specified all of the

      future developement of the organism. (p 264)

 

      Schrodinger's book would help convince a number of physicists to turn to biology,

      Francis Crick among them, and a number of young biologists -- including James

      Watson -- to pursue genetics ...  (p 265)

 

      She[Madeleine Vuillet] admitted that she knew very little organic chemistry, let alone

      microbial physiology. Monod was not discouraged. He told her, "At any rate, I prefer

      that you know nothing, because no school could teach you what we are going to

      need: I am in search of the secret of life."  (p 265)

 

      For Camus, meaning came from struggle, from revolt. He had already put this

      philosophy into words in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Revolt gives life its value."

      Now it was time to finally put that philosophy into images, for, as Camus had noted

      years earlier: "feelings and images multiply a philosophy by ten." His unfinished

      novel The Plague ... would be his vehicle. (p 267)

 

      In the evenings, he[Camus] would socialize with friends such as Sartre and de

      Beauvoir, meeting them for a drink at one of the cafes on Saint-Germain-des-Pres,

      then perhaps going to dinner at a bistro and sometimes to another cafe for a

      nightcap, or more. (p 268)

 

      He[Sartre] clarified the principles of existential philosophy in a speech in the fall of

      1945, the first being "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." Sartre

      explained that existentialism "places the entire responsibility for [man's] existence

      squarely upon his own shoulders." (p268)

 

      Monod drew his conclusions ... "What emerges most clearly from this lamentable

      affair, it is the moral decay into which Socialist thought has fallen in the Soviet

      Union. It is so obvious that nothing like this would have happened if the most

      elementary notions of common sense, of rational thinking, of objective truth were

      not corrupted by the leaders of the regime. (p 287)

 

      The two former resistants [Monod and Camus] discovered an immediate bond in

      their respective condemnation of Soviet regime. Their friendship was cemented over

      drinks and convcersation at La Closerie des Lilas and other Left Bank watering

      holes. (p 290)

 

      Monod's model was wrong -- and he was delighted. Monod knew that progress

      was made when previous ideas, even one's own, were vanquished and new ones

      had to be formulated and tested. And he was very confident in his abilities to come

      up with new ideas ... (p 304)

 

      What Camus could not abide were ideologies that sacrificed life in the present, the

      one fundamental value above all, for some promise of future justice. Christianity

      "postpones to a point beyond the span of history the cure of evil and murder," he

      noted, while Russian Communism justified terror and murder and crushed freedom

      in the promise of some far-off workers' utopia. (p310)

 

      Jeanson suggested that Camus's style in the book[The Rebel] was excessive,

      saying that "his protest is too beautiful." As for the book itself, Jeanson summed

      up The Rebel as "incoherent" -- a "pseudophilosophical pseudohistory of

      'revolutions.'" (p316)

 

      With regard to the criticism of the book[The Rebel], Sartre asked; "Suppose you

      were wrong? Suppose your book simply attested to your philosophical

      incompetence. Suppose it consisted of hastily assembled and secondhand bits

      of knowledge? ... And suppose you did not reason well? And suppose your

      thinking was muddied and banal?" (p 319)

 

      Camus wrote Czapski, "Left intellectuals in particular have chosen to be the

      gravediggers of freedo." (p 320)

 

      Before returning to France, Jacob purchased a Waring blender as a gift for Lise.

      Fewer than three years into the research game, he could not have possibly imagined

      that the next big secrets of life would belong to him and his attic neighbor Monod,

      nor that to get to them, that Waring blender would come in very handy. (p 334)

 

      Sartre deemed the USSR's actions in Hungary criminal, but in no way did he indict

      the Communist system. Camus saw the one-party system as fundamentally

      bankrupt: "None of the evils that totalitarianism (defined by the single party and the

      suppression of all opposition) claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism

      itself." (p368)

 

      Mauriac, who had sometimes been critical of Camus, acknowledged, "This young

      man is one of the most listened-to masters of the young generation ... In a way he

      is its conscience." (p383)

 

      Camus asserted, "The nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments,

      difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to

      oppression." (p 385)

 

      In comparison to the confusion ... Crick's speech was extraordinarily simplifying. He

      brought things into perspective. ... And he was very surprising. (p 392)

 

      Yet she[Agnes Ullmann] was still stunned when Monod told her that he would do

      everything he could to organize her and Tamas's escape from Hungary. ... Ullmann

      asked her host, "Why would you help me?" "It is a question of human dignity,"

      Monod replied. (p 401-402)

 

      [Francois] Jacob now had a new theory with which to work. He was exhilarated, as

      if he "had climed a mountain, attained a summit from which [he] saw in the distance

      a vast panorama." (p 406)

 

      On the first page of the manuscript[The First Man], he[Camus] scabbled his

      dedication to his illiterate mother: "To you who will never be able to read this book."

      (p436)

 

      ... Monod echoed his late friend[Camus]: "The urge, the anguish to understand the

      meaning of our own existence, the demand to rationalize and justify it within some

      coherent framework ahs been, and still is, one of the most powerful motivations of

      the human mind." (p 484)

 

      I[Jacques Monod] prefer to speak of the hatred of lies rather than the love of truth,

      since one is never sure of holding the truth, whereas with lies, one is almost always

      able to detect them, to discover them, and to denounce them. (p 496)