The Art of Letter Writing

Letters from the Soul: Review of Don’t You Have Time to Think? by Richard P. Feynman (London: Penguin, 2006)

Letter writing is a dying art since the advent of mobile phones, texting and indeed email. Ease of access to another human is now instantaneous. However, I would question in how far real communication has improved using these modern methods. Sitting down to physically write a letter was/is an art and a craft in itself – indeed a hugely symbolic act or ritual. Indeed, a love letter was, and still is, for those who write them and for those who receive them, an action of the heart or of the soul, both of which terms I use interchangeably here. These thoughts were occasioned by reading of Richard P. Feynman’s collection of letters which cover the greater part of his 70 years of life (1918-1988). This book is called Don’t You Have Time to Think? It is edited by his adopted daughter Michelle and published by Penguin Books, 2006.

It was, quite obviously, a labour of love for Michelle, and the personality of her father sings clear and true throughout this book. There are other wonderful books of letters: one of my favourite would be the collected letters of the young Romantic poet John Keats who died at the early age of 24. However, that latter book is for a review at a later stage in these blog entries.

Some months before his first wife Arline had died of TB on June 16, 1945, the young Feynman (only 27 years old at the time) wrote the following carefully expressed words: “I love you. You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as at other times but it rises and falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a reservoir for your strength – without you I would be empty and weak like I was before I knew you – but your moments of strength make me strong and thus I am able to comfort you with your own strength when your stream is low.” (April 3rd, 1945) (p. 48).

What hits home to me is not alone had R.P. Feynman such a beautiful and wonderful mind (he was a theoretical physicist), but that also he was blessed with a beautiful and wonderful soul. It’s not often that the two go together in any one human being, but in Feynman they interwove in a seamless garment.

Another interesting fact, though totally understandable, is that Richard did not manage to get over the death of his beautiful wife for a good number of years. In this collection of letters we find him writing a letter dated October 17th, 1946 to his wife Arline. Remember that she has been dead for over a year at this stage. What interests me here is that this action of writing a letter to a dead friend or relative has in more recent years been advised quite widely by counsellors working in the area of grief. Here we have Feynman doing this automatically as it were. To write a letter to a dead friend or relative is a really healing action. His daughter notes that this letter was well-worn given the appearance of being reread often. Here is a brief quote from this healing letter: "I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love - but I still want to comfort and take care of you - and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you - I want to do little projects with you ... you dead are so much better than anyone else alive ... My darling wife, I do adore you.  I love my wife. My wife is dead." (p. 68-69)

And so, there was soul-work as well as mind-work at play in the personality of this great Nobel scientist. I’m not so sure that the physicist and mathematician, Richard Feynman, would use these terms. I don’t know if he was aware of Right Brain and Left Brain theories of how our personalities work. He was not as such a religious man. Anyway, the answer to this question is inconsequential really. Suffice it to say that within these covers of this small book we get to meet a really deep and spiritual (in the widest sense of the use of that term) human being.

An interesting fact we learn from this collection of letters is that he refused honorary doctorates too many times to be counted because he felt they were not earned and trivialized the real ones.  Also his sheer humanity and love of others shines through in these authentic and honest letters – his dedication to his first wife until she died; his simple approach to living; his lack of snobbery and sophistication; for his dining with students in the Grease (the student restaurant) rather than in the Athenaeum restaurant on the Caltech Campus; for his answering letters from everyone, not just scientists; for his brilliant ability to communicate; for his witty sense of humour which could be so self-deprecating; for his insights into psychology (especially the psychology of creativity) which he said he despised; for being the first person to allow me love not hate physics – the inheritance of having a very bad physics teacher at school; for his sheer enthusiasm for his subject as well as for life.

These letters, while they reveal scientific insights, also reveal a man who had suffered much but who had learned to laugh and cry at the appropriate times, and to adopt a philosophic and open approach to life and to all people whom he met, no matter what their station in life was.  He was truly a great scientist for the world and for our human progress; he was also a great humanitarian; but, more than that, he was a great son, a great father and grandfather.

We learn also from these letters that Feynman was essentially Socratic in his approach to knowledge, that is, that he first admitted his ignorance in any new specific area and then proceeded by scientific investigation to find out his knowledge from there - a noble starting point, indeed.  Here is the famous mathematician and theoretical physicist showing us not just his humility but rather his Socratic approach to knowledge in a letter to a Venezuelan science teacher:  “...I am sure of nothing and find myself having to say "I don't know" very often.... Good luck to you and your students, teaching each other." (p. 396) This short salutation contains a rather dynamic appreciation of what goes on in the teaching-learning process with its recognition of its being two-way rather than one-way!  That is good salutary advice for teachers of all levels.

Other gems of insight I found in these letters are such as the following: "...when you get older you find nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough." (p. 415) or this for a beautifully sensitive piece of advice to a father: "But the two of you - father and son - should take walks in the evening and talk (without purpose or routes) about this and that." (p. 415) Again there is a deep vein of wisdom in this piece of advice: "Don't think of what "you want to be," but what you "want to do." “(p.415) He finishes this same letter to this worrying father with these marvellous words: "Stop worrying, Papa.  Your kid is wonderful.  Yours from another Papa of another wonderful kid." (416)  That a genius of the status of Richard P. Feynman took time to reply to the many such letters that he received from worried parents and students is a testament to his greatness and compassion as a human being.

In all of these letters there are no poses being struck, no particular party lines being taken up or defended, no appeal to authorities of any rank whatsoever, only appeals to the priority of one's own search for meaning and to the truth or truths of life as they are manifested in one's own lived experience. Indeed, Feynman had absolutely no time for authority qua authority - he followed wherever the lights of his own reason and intuition led him, and if that meant being unpopular so be it.  On point of principle he refused many honours including honorary doctorates as he felt the one he had earned at the early age of 24 was enough for him.  Nor did he believe in racial or territorial boundaries.  His letters show him admonishing in strong but polite terms those who wished to put on exhibitions on either Jewish or American scientists as being racist or discriminatory because science like truth belongs to the whole human race not to a particular race or to a specific country. Feynman, who was full of fun and games in the sense of real games which sought out fun, had no time for the petty psychological games which sought to score points at the expense of another human being.  Let me quote some words from Eric Berne which I believe Feynman managed to encapsulate in his approach to life: “For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy.” (Games People Play, p.162)

A letter Richard P. wrote to a former Ph. D. student of his at Cal Tech, Koichi Mano is worth quoting here before I finish this rather long, rambling and somewhat hagiographic review.  It is also worth studying in depth on the curriculum of any Pedagogy course. I’ll quote the final paragraph which more than captures Feynman’s sheer humanity: “You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come to your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.” (p. 201).

In another letter to a friend, Arnold Phillips, who had written to congratulate him on his award of the Nobel Prize for Physics, he gives this wonderful piece of advice to him on his son’s academic results, and it might be no harm extending the same advice to any relatives awaiting the results of examinations in no matter what subject area: “Do not be too mad at Mike for his C in Physics. I got a C in English. Maybe I would never have received a prize in Physics if I had been better in English.” (p. 185)

In summary, there is much wisdom to be learned by reading, even perusing this book.  Nor does it really help to read the book sequentially: you can dip into anywhere and everywhere as the letters stand, most obviously, as separate entities in themselves. Overall, one learns good lessons in life like (i) think for yourself: there’s no need to swallow everything authorities, academic or otherwise, say (ii) don’t be too quick to judge, (iii) always question things to improve the situation, not to blindly knock things for the sake of knocking them, (iv) have good intentions and motives: typically he took the trouble to reply to amateur scientists, high school students and even “cranks” as long as their enquiries struck him as arising from honest intentions. (v)“truth in physics is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.” (p. 301), (vi) you’re never too late to learn something new and that (vii) truly laughter is the best medicine: His daughter Michelle says in her introduction to her collection of her father’s letters: “He showed us all how to look at the world. He showed me how to laugh. For that and for so much more, I thank him.” (p. xxi)

In short, for anyone interested in good letter writing and most essentially in authenticity in life, this book would provide a very good introduction indeed.