Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

The Statue Within

The Statue Within Sigmund Freud wrote: “Every night human beings lay aside the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin, as well as anything which they may use as a supplement to their bodily organs, for instance, their spectacles, their false hair and teeth. When they go to sleep they carry out an entirely analogous undressing of their minds and lay aside most of their psychical acquisitions. Thus on both counts they approach remarkably close to the situation in which they began life. The psychical state of a sleeping person is characterized by an almost complete withdrawal from the surrounding world and a cessation of all interest in it.”11 François Jacob in his autobiography, The Statue Within, describes the reconstruction of his world each morning upon awakening: “Before I could perceive the world around me, see it, hear it, I had to reinvent it and set it in place, as much by imagination as by memory . . . To begin with, I reconstructed my room: it organized itself around my bed, a sort of impregnable citadel, a refuge from violence . . . The window had to be placed first . . . Before putting the ceiling on the box I had constructed, I might arrange the furniture in it.” The parents’ voices gave him the location of their room; horses’ feet, the whereabouts of the 1 2 6 street below. Beyond that, the greater world. And finally the recreation of the universe. Now, only now, could the child open his eyes. Such a strenuous labor faced him each morning. The obverse of Freud’s account: how the self and its world is put back on once it is removed. In the recollections and memories and early notions about the world of those who would later become scientists, one looks for clues. How are early curiosities and means of investigating the world manifested in the later work? How is that work determined by a particular orientation to the world established in childhood? On a train traveling to Dijon to spend Christmas with grandparents, once again we encounter the child’s need to reconstruct the world as though it does not exist with any permanence: “This whole landscape . . . was set up as the train approached and will be taken down once it has passed . . . besides the officially real, the everyday, the recognized, there existed another world that . . . duplicated this one but remained in the dark.” Jacob describes it as a kind of “antechamber of the world.” At the age of fourteen, during religious services, he asks himself about the existence of God and considers a world devoid of a deity, “an empty heaven left an earth to fill.” Once again he is required to construct the world. This notion is reinforced by his grandfather’s words shortly before his death: “There’s nothing. Nothing. The void. So my only hope is you.” School served to compartmentalize areas of knowledge, creating enormous barriers between history and mathematics, between the natural sciences and geography, offering closed systems. Once again, he set about constructing a synthesis, a coherent vision of what he was learning. Having little sense of a vocation, Jacob completes a portion of medical training when the war begins. “Constructing a world around myself. Erecting piece by piece . . . first the milieu around me, the world of the everyday, with my room and house, city, the lycée, the university, their pasts and histories. Then understanding the country, the Republic with its institutions and its laws, it army and its justice. And suddenly the whole edifice has caved in.” All that had seemed the basis of his existence crumbled in an instant. The deconstruction of the previous synthesis . He shipped out to England, joining the Free French and sailed for Senegal, serving as auxiliary medical officer. The year, 1940. Four years’ service in North Africa and a long recovery in France following mortar wounds. Unable to walk, Jacob calls once more upon his old habit of constructing the world, taking long imaginary walks across Paris. LIFE, THE UNFINISHED EXPERIMENT 1 2 7 “Proceed down to the Seine. Walk as far as the Louvre . . .” He stops before the door to his family home. He had no news of his father or other family members in several years. At the age of twenty-six years, Jacob had no earnings and no profession. In an effort to obtain a post, having decided on biological research, Jacob...