Apply for the Summer School

We are very happy today to be able to publish this exclusive excerpt from Jessica Riskin’s new book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Riverhead Books, March 2026). Jessica teaches history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Many of us are in agreement that her previous book, The Restless Clock (Chicago, 2016) is among the best treatments of the natural-philosophical problem of life in early modern Europe ever written, and deserves to be considered a new classic. It is fitting that she should turn her attention next to Lamarck (1744-1829) — amply memorialized in statues and lecture halls in France and widely characterized here as the “founder of the theory of evolution”, even as his role in the history of science is mostly downplayed or dismissed in the Anglosphere. This dismissiveness is especially regrettable, given that some of Lamarck’s ideas have been positively reassessed in recent years by scientists working in such fields as epigenetics and developmental plasticity theory. It is to be hoped that Jessica’s book will help to bring about a deeper and more complete picture of this crucial figure. Jill Lepore has said of The Power of Life that it is a “truly remarkable achievement, at once a delightfully wry and wildly entertaining biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and a riveting intellectual history.” Order your copy today. —The Editors

Order The Power of Life!

From THE POWER OF LIFE by Jessica Riskin. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Jessica Riskin.

*

From the garret window of the room where Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lived when he first moved to Paris in his mid-twenties, around 1770, he could see nothing but clouds and sky. The clouds therefore became his companions and source of entertainment. Watching them, he began to notice how they formed, gathered and dispersed. They didn’t behave randomly, he observed, but exhibited types and patterns. He began to watch more carefully, and in this way, he became the first person to classify the clouds, producing a veritable cloud atlas for his first presentation to the Academy of Sciences in 1777. He divided clouds into five types: (1) veiled (en voile), (2) gathered (attroupés), (3) dappled (pommelés), (4) sweeping (en balayures), and (5) grouped (groupé). But Lamarck became busy, first with the study of botany and then with his new position at the National Museum of Natural History, created during the French Revolution, the wonderfully named Chair in Insects and Worms. He waited twenty-five years before actually publishing his classification of clouds, finally including it in his meteorological yearbook for Year Ten of the Revolution (1802) – the same year in which he coined the word “Biologie.”

The following year, a young English chemist named Luke Howard introduced the basic categories of the current taxonomy: “cirrus” (made of parallel fibers, from the Latin word for a tendril of hair), “cumulus” (conical heaps, from the Latin word for a heap or pile), and “stratus” (horizontal sheets, from the Latin word for a “spread”). Lamarck and Howard apparently never heard of one another, which is a shame since they might have had a lot to talk about. On the other hand, they would probably have disagreed about some things too. For instance, Howard said he used Latin terms to name the types of clouds because he intended his system to be adopted by the “learned of different nations.” This strategy was successful: Howard’s terminology established itself internationally and is still in use today.

Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms, not because he wanted to speak only to French people – after all, he drew people from all over the world to his legendary classes on invertebrate zoology – but because he hoped to create a participatory community of meteorologists that would include the non- “learned.” Only an educated minority would have understood Latin terms; and Latin names would have indicated that meteorology was an elite, scholarly pursuit, which was exactly the opposite of what Lamarck intended. To be sure, when he named plants and invertebrates, he often used Latin roots, but in those cases, he was working within traditions that had existed for centuries before him. The clouds, in contrast, had no traditional nomenclature; no one had ever named them. Embarking on an entirely new science, Lamarck was free to define its terms as he liked. And, just as he boasted that he could turn any passerby in the Garden of Plants into a botanist, he also meant to turn everyone in France, and beyond, into a meteorologist. He addressed his readers fondly and familiarly as “friends of nature.”

In September 1799, two months before Napoleon declared himself First Consul of France in a coup d’état, Lamarck published the first in his decade-long series of meteorological yearbooks, offering forecasts for the year 1800, the first year of the nineteenth century. In this inaugural yearbook, he issued a special “invitation to amateurs of meteorology” encouraging readers to annotate their copies of the book by recording their own observations in them, and to send him their annotated yearbooks at the end of the year. He offered careful instructions for how to make these annotations.

In order to understand how you’d have annotated your yearbook if you’d been one of Lamarck’s participatory readers at the turn of the nineteenth century, you first have to know that each book includes a calendar arranged in columns. From left to right, there’s a column for the day; then the month; then for “natural periods useful to observe” such as the migratory arrivals and departures of certain birds, the blooming of particular plants, and the fall of leaves from various species of tree. Next comes the most important column, which is somewhat mysteriously labeled “epochs of changes of constitution.” This column in fact contains the positions of the moon: its apogees, perigees, and the northern and southern extremes of its orbit. In the course of a lunar month, the moon’s orbit carries it not only around the earth, but also north and south, above and below the equator. Lamarck explained that when the moon was traveling through the six northern signs of the zodiac, he called this period the moon’s “boreal constitution”; and when it was traveling through the six southern signs, he called it the moon’s “austral constitution.”

The column containing the moon’s constitutions is the crucial one because Lamarck’s central meteorological principle was that the moon imposes cyclical effects upon the weather by exerting a gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere: pulling to the north, causing south winds to prevail, or to the south, bringing north winds. (Lamarck’s essential idea remains present in current meteorological science; today, meteorologists refer to the effects of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere as “atmospheric tides.”)1

After the column of lunar constitutions comes one for the “meteorological season,” and here Lamarck divides each of the four regular seasons into two parts: the winter and summer into “solstitial” and “median” phases, and the spring and fall into “equinoctial” and “median” phases. Next comes a column for the time of the moon’s passage over the meridian line through Paris, where Lamarck was conducting his observations; and finally, one for its declination (its angular distance above or below the equator) at noon. A second calendar, arranged in paragraphs rather than columns, describes what the weather will probably be like for each successive “constitution” of the moon. According to Lamarck’s theory, boreal constitutions, pulling to the north, bring south winds and therefore warmer temperatures, lower pressures, humidity, rain, storms and tempests; in contrast, austral constitutions, pulling to the south, bring north winds and therefore colder temperatures, higher pressures, and clear, dry weather.

In his invitation to his readers, Lamarck explains how to record their observations of the weather day by day in the column containing lunar constitutions. He also offers detailed instructions for “how to judge the state of the atmosphere.” First, he says, you have to examine whether the weather is “simple” or “mixed.” Simple weather is either calm or has wind blowing only in one direction; mixed weather has upper and lower winds blowing in different directions. The lower winds are the familiar ones that turn weathervanes and windmills and fill the sails of ships; the upper winds are those we can see through gaps in the lower clouds as they blow around the upper clouds. Sometimes, even when the sky is heavily overcast and you can’t see its upper regions, you can still discern that the weather is mixed. For instance, if a south wind is blowing the clouds northward, and yet the barometer is steady or rising, there must be a cold north wind up above bringing the higher pressures; and if it’s rainy even though a north wind is driving the lower clouds southward, you can be sure there’s a warm south wind up above.

Having explained how to observe the atmosphere and how to annotate the yearbooks, Lamarck encouraged his readers to send him their marked up books at year’s end and said he’d be especially grateful to hear from any whose observations differed significantly from the probabilities he described. He also included a thorough explanation of the new metric system of weights and measures that the National Convention had introduced in April 1795, even though the system had no immediate use for annotating the yearbooks. The metric system was provoking widespread exasperation and resentment, but Lamarck believed in it; here was a further expression of his purpose to spread scientific literacy and a participatory feeling among his readers.

* * *

True to Lamarck’s romantic nature, he really loved storms. The participatory feeling wasn’t all about measurement systems, charts and tables: he wanted his readers to pay attention to the weather not only by recording it but also by relishing it. Storms, he said, were “the most imposing and the most beautiful” of meteorological phenomena. One summer while he was up at Beauregard, his country house in Héricourt, he observed a hurricane, which he described rapturously in the following yearbook in a special section entitled “Observations on the Hurricane of July 31, 1808, and on a large rotating cloud.” The storm’s great diversity of cloud shapes and colors had fascinated him, their rapid dance across the sky so “magnificent” that “I couldn’t tire of admiring the beautiful spectacle before my eyes.”

Science and the appreciation of beauty were inseparable, since it was while he stood rapt in the midst of the storm, watching the drama unfold, that Lamarck made a surprising observation: “suddenly I perceived in a large cloud placed to the southwest, a singular movement that I had never noticed.” The cloud in question took up much of the horizon and was oddly shaped, resembling “an enormous pyramid” with its summit pointing downward toward the earth. “Soon the sides of this pyramid were torn into shreds” while its base took on “a gyratory movement,” turning on its axis “with great slowness.” This stately, circular motion was portentous: “a most violent wind” and squall soon followed, so powerful that Lamarck was obliged to flee back to the shelter of Beauregard and “abandon my observations.”

He had witnessed a similar phenomenon in Paris just a couple years earlier, in 1806, which he had also reported in the following yearbook. “On the 16th of May at about one hour thirty-five minutes in the afternoon, the sky being loaded with various clouds on the point of becoming stormy, the barometer being at 28 inches three quarters and the thermometer … at 17 degrees, I heard a rather loud clap of thunder, which had been preceded by a flash of lightning.” Turning to look toward the southwest, where he reckoned the storm would be coming from, he saw “a large blackish cloud,” and beneath it, “a whitish and hanging portion of the same cloud having the shape of an inverted cone or imitating that of a funnel.” It seemed a bit like a waterspout, except that the funnel-shaped part was quite small compared to the rest of the giant cloud above it. As he watched, he became most interested “to see the misty parts of the waterspout in a continual movement. Those of the funnel or the inverted cone turned very distinctly as if around an axis but rising and forming a spiral.” As with the other sorts of cloud-forms, so too for funnel clouds, Lamarck seems to have been the first to assign them a name.

Lamarck also loved the “spectacle of the sky” in all its myriad moods – majestic, sublime, terrible, magnificent – at sunrises and sunsets with “the clouds adorned successively in the most beautiful tints, like the tender pink, the fiery red, the most brilliant purple, finally the beautiful violet,” or else at other times when the clouds were “grouped into mountains, their faces shining, illuminated with the brilliance of silver or purest gold.” The “meteorologist’s sky,” he explained, was the portion of the atmosphere that generated the weather, an “immense laboratory” overhead.

The emotional, the lyrical and the scientific were all one sky, one weather system, one world. And the observer – Lamarck himself and each of his readers – was right there in the thick of it, not outside looking in. He emphasized the direct action that the atmosphere exerted – and the moon through its action upon the atmosphere – upon all living beings: “the intimate relations that each particular state of the sky exercises on us, as well as on all the bodies on the surface of the globe.” Anyone who has experienced a total solar eclipse has learned viscerally and dramatically just what Lamarck meant. During totality, as the moon moves across the face of the sun, the awesome thing is that you feel the astronomical event viscerally, directly in your body: the chill, the darkness, the spreading hush. Even if we only notice it at certain moments, especially during extreme experiences like eclipses or storms, we’re always being acted upon by the atmosphere, which is always being acted upon by the sun and the moon. Rather than lifting the observer out of the world into a position of external, objective witness, Lamarck’s science resided in the thick of the storm: it was all about the intimacy of witness with world.

Share

* * *

Lamarck’s yearbooks generated lots of interest and commentary. In the dailies, they were announced, attacked, defended, and their probabilities compared to the actual weather as it came to pass, by Lamarck himself and by others.2 With all the attention they attracted, they often sold well enough to require a second printing.

One particularly dashing defender of Lamarck’s was the Parisian balloonist and parachutist André-Jacques Garnerin. Captured by the British during the Revolutionary wars, then handed over to the Austrians, Garnerin had spent three years as a prisoner of war in Buda (the now-Hungarian city directly across the Danube from Pest) passing the time by dreaming up designs for parachutes with the idea of escape. After his release, on the clear autumn evening of October 22^nd, 1797, in a park in Paris (the Jardin de Mousseau, which is now the Parc Monceau), Garnerin made the world’s first descent by parachute. He first rose to a height of 900 meters and then audaciously cut the cords attaching his basket to his balloon. The crowd craned its collective neck and held its collective breath as Garnerin initially plummeted like a rock, then when his parachute opened, he began to pitch about violently in the wind, finally dropping out of view. Aghast, the spectators rushed together in the direction of Garnerin’s fall, then cheered riotously when they saw him come galloping back into the garden on horseback, perfectly intact except for a mildly sprained ankle.[iii]3

A young woman in the crowd named Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse was especially inspired by the performance. She made her way to Garnerin to introduce herself, and soon became his pupil, then his wife, and the first woman parachutist. Before starting her lessons, Garnerin had to persuade the authorities that women should be allowed to go up in balloons alongside men. This had been disallowed for a couple reasons: first, the members of the Academy of Sciences warned that women’s fragile organs might not tolerate air travel; and then the government authorities had judged it unseemly for men and women to occupy the same balloon basket.

Garnerin’s arguments prevailed, however, and he soon received the following remarkably considerate response from the city government: “Citizen, according to the complaint that you have addressed against the order of the central office, which forbids you from traveling in an aerostat with a young citoyenne, we have consulted the Minister of the Interior and that of the general police… . [We all] think that there is no more scandal in seeing two persons of different sexes rise together into the air, than in seeing them get into the same carriage, and that moreover one cannot prevent an adult woman from doing in this respect what one allows men to do, and from giving, by rising into the air, a proof both of her confidence in the practice and of her intrepidity.”4

In the autumn of 1805, on the occasion of Garnerin’s thirty-ninth aerostatic ascent and fifth descent by parachute, he cited Lamarck’s yearbooks as the most useful thing to him in his aerial adventures. Since his balloons were ungovernable, leaving him entirely at the mercy of the weather, he said the best he could do was to know as much as possible about the forecast. “Never oars nor rudder, wings nor sails, bird’s flight nor carp’s leap, will direct a balloon,” waxed Garnerin poetically. “Mr. Lamarck’s meteorological directory is worth more … than all the calculations of modern Icaruses.”

But Lamarck’s colleagues were less enthusiastic. Once again, when he tried to read his meteorological theory to the members of the First Class of the National Institute in 1802, as had happened five years earlier with his work on the composition of matter, he encountered vehement opposition, particularly from Laplace.5 To Lamarck’s chagrin, his adversaries cast his meteorological work as outdated, superstitious nonsense: they constantly referred to the yearbooks as “almanacs,” and to the probabilistic reasoning they contained as “predictions,” insinuating that Lamarck’s meteorology was essentially astrology. As with Lamarck’s other struggles with his critics, this dispute with Laplace was fundamental, having to do with the nature of science, and even of the world itself. What counts as a scientific explanation? Is it legitimate science if you acknowledge, as Lamarck did, that the causes are not absolutely determinative of certain outcomes? Is the world deterministic?

Lamarck didn’t see the world as deterministic, or science as the description of deterministic mechanisms. In the case of the moon’s influence on the weather, he emphasized that many different factors affected it, rendering its effects uncertain. Lamarck identified two sorts of complicating factors: those that acted in a regular and predictable manner, and those that acted irregularly. The regular complications included the fact that the moon’s elliptical orbit carries it away from and back toward the earth during each lunar month. From its farthest point, its apogee, its gravitational pull is weakest, while from its closest point, its perigee, the influence is strongest. There are also the lunar “syzygies” – its “oppositions” with the sun, when it is on the opposite side of the earth, and its “conjunctions” with the sun, when it is on the same side.

Solstices and equinoxes – and in general, the positions of the earth relative to the sun – were also regularly occurring situations that affected the influence of the moon on the atmosphere. Finally, in terms of complicating factors that act irregularly, Lamarck mentioned clouds and storms – in other words, the weather has a feedback effect upon itself. Added to all this complexity was the fact that the earth itself was in a state of continual transformation: according to Lamarck, nothing in nature remained the same even “for two seconds in a row.” The oceans were always modifying the surface of the globe; the moon was continually moving the sea basin and the earth’s center of gravity; and the planet was always absorbing solar light, which transformed its matter, mass and volume. All in all, the earth’s landscape, atmosphere and climate were a great commotion of interacting elements.

Others who had sought connections between the moon and the weather had tended to simplify the situation by focusing on certain points in the moon’s orbit such as full moons, new moons, apogees, perigees, oppositions and conjunctions. For instance, in 1770 – while Lamarck had been garrisoned with his regiment in Provence admiring the wildflowers – an Italian priest and professor of geography and astronomy at the University of Padua named Giuseppe Toaldo had published a “Meteorological essay on the true influence of the stars upon the seasons and changes of weather.” Toaldo wrote that the moon acted upon the earth and its inhabitants by means of its light, heat, and gravitational attraction and that its influence became important at certain points such as perigees and syzygies. Lamarck drew upon and appreciatively cited Toaldo’s observations in developing his own theory but, he said, it was a mistake to focus upon certain points of the moon’s orbit: the moon acts upon the earth’s atmosphere all the time, in a continuous way, and always all mixed up with many other influences, not “in indivisible and determinable instants.”

This complex mixture of factors made the moon’s role hard to identify, and Lamarck confessed he had almost given up hope. “For more than twenty years,” he recalled, “I alternately resumed and abandoned this interesting research. I often spoke about it to my friends….” But try as he might, he couldn’t find patterns to confirm his conviction of the moon’s influence on the weather until he finally realized that this influence wasn’t absolute, but rather subject to many complicating factors, and yet it remained perceptible. Overall, he estimated that the weather corresponded with the probabilities derived from his theory about five-eighths of the time. This was far from perfectly predictive, but he thought it was enough to be useful. The probabilities he offered were grounded in theory and observation, he insisted, and therefore, whatever Laplace might say, “[i]t is not an opinion that I am presenting here, it is a fact that I am announcing; it is an order of things.”

To Laplace – whose work in mathematics included pivotal contributions to the field of probability theory – Lamarck’s “probabilities” were no better than astrological prognostications. Lamarck offered descriptive forecasts such as “we have reason to expect strong winds, maybe violent or tempestuous…. [I]t would be imprudent to set out to sea or to engage in any enterprise that requires calm weather.” These were not probabilities in Laplace’s estimation: his probabilities were mathematical expressions, not conversational descriptions. This divergence was connected to a deeper difference between the two. Laplace’s world, even including the most minor and insignificant events, was as deterministic “as the revolutions of the sun.” Humans’ sense of having a free will and of making unconstrained choices were just “illusions of the mind.”6 In Lamarck’s view, in contrast, the world was made up of many small agencies acting in concert, its future open to whatever they might bring about.

To express his idea of an utterly deterministic world, Laplace imagined an infinite intelligence that could comprehend all the interacting forces in the universe. For such a being, he said, nothing would be uncertain “and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” The human mind could gain but a “feeble idea” of such an intelligence. The best sort of approach we could make, Laplace thought, was through astronomy and mathematics, which would lead the mind “back continually to the vast intelligence … from which it will always remain infinitely removed.” I don’t suppose Laplace’s hypothetical omniscient being might be reminding you of anyone?

Isaac Newton, whose science provided Laplace with his starting point, came right out and said it in 1713 in the second edition of his Principia, the magnum opus in which he laid out his physical system of the universe: “it follows, that the true God is a Living, Intelligent and Powerful Being; and … that he is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient.” The “French Newton,” as the popular press reverently nicknamed Laplace, showed Newtonian tendencies not only in his system of celestial mechanics but also in some of the theological ideas he attached to it.

God controlled everything in Newton’s universe: the world operated according to God’s “original perfect idea by the continual uninterrupted exercise of his power and government.” All the parts of the world were God’s “Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will,” and there were “no powers of nature at all that can do anything of themselves.” In fact, according to Newton, the world-machinery functioned only through God’s immediate presence all throughout and would otherwise grind to a halt.7 In Laplace’s cosmology, likewise, nothing enjoyed its own power to act: the deterministic mechanism of the divinely created universe left no room for other agencies.

This might seem like a surprising thing to say about Laplace, who has been often invoked as an early champion of atheism. But in fact, Laplace wasn’t an atheist. While he left behind the Catholic orthodoxy in which he grew up, and especially rejected the possibility of miracles, he consistently expressed belief in a supreme power behind natural processes: he referred to a divine intelligence in his published writings and to God in private letters. According to an often-told story, Napoleon asked Laplace why he made no mention of God in his work on celestial mechanics and Laplace replied that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” The anecdote, a favorite of popular science writers, seems to have originated with Napoleon’s doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi. In Antommarchi’s version, Bonaparte was displeased by the response; but then Antommarchi’s purpose was hagiographic propaganda, and he offered the story as evidence that the emperor was respectably devout.8

According to the astronomer William Herschel, who witnessed Laplace’s and Napoleon’s exchange, Laplace had simply wanted to show that “a chain of natural causes” could account for the “wonderful system” of the heavens. The question of God’s existence didn’t come into it. This is perfectly consistent with what Laplace himself wrote: that the supreme intelligence might well have worked entirely through material causes, with no need for direct supernatural intervention of the sort Newton insisted upon. If indeed Laplace said he had no need of a particular theological hypothesis, it was likely Newton’s idea of constant, direct divine intervention in nature that he rejected, and not the idea of God’s presence behind the world-machine. In fact, Laplace boasted that his own findings regarding the stability of the solar system would have confirmed Newton’s conviction that the universe could only be the work of an intelligent and all-powerful being.9

In short, the deterministic mechanism of the world, in Laplace’s science, was the manifestation of omnipotence: a total consolidation of power, with no room for even minor assertions of choice or will, and no such thing as contingency or uncertainty: these were but figments of human ignorance, illusion and folly. How different a world – how even opposite a world – from Lamarck’s churning commotion of beings and forces in continual self-transformation.

* * *

Share

Soon after publishing his first yearbook, at the end of the year 1800, Lamarck went to see the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, whom Napoleon had just appointed Minister of the Interior. Lamarck wanted to persuade Chaptal to create a government service that would receive meteorological observations and information from all over France: the world’s first national weather bureau. Chaptal was enthusiastic; the very next day, he sent off letters to departmental prefects in every region of the country asking them each to name someone to the new position of government meteorological correspondent. Chaptal charged Lamarck with the welcome task of directing this first government weather agency, which entailed sending out exact instructions to the correspondents regarding how to conduct and record their observations, receiving their responses, and overseeing the process of organizing all the information into general tables. This job brought Lamarck to the Interior Ministry several times a week, as weather information began pouring in from all quarters.10

Alas, the agency was short-lived. In August 1804, three months after Napoleon had had himself crowned Emperor, Chaptal resigned as interior minister. In his letter of resignation, he said he wanted to spend more time with his chemistry. He told a more complicated story in his journal, having to do with the ins and outs of foreign and domestic diplomacy in the wake of Napoleon’s self-promotion to emperor. Meanwhile, a rumor circulated that Napoleon had provoked a falling-out with Chaptal over Chaptal’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Bourgoin, a stage actress at the Comédie Française. According to the rumor, Napoleon had deliberately summoned Bourgoin to his residence one evening while he was working there with Chaptal. When she was announced, Napoleon ordered the servant to have her wait for him, whereupon Chaptal brusquely gathered up his papers and stormed out. This “coup de théâtre,” if it took place, must surely have been designed to provoke Chaptal’s resignation, which at any rate came at a moment when Napoleon was eliminating all the more independent-minded administrators and surrounding himself with absolutely loyal followers.

With Chaptal’s departure, the meteorological correspondence service was abolished. All the records were confiscated and sent to the Bureau of Longitudes (a government agency founded in 1795 by the Revolutionary National Convention to improve astronomy and navigation), which was just coming under the directorship of – you guessed it – Laplace. That was the end of official French meteorology for a time. Only after the passage of several decades and political regimes did a Parisian doctor, botanist, and geologist named Charles Martins, together with two colleagues, re-start the practice of a meteorological correspondence and annual yearbook. That same year, 1848, saw a new revolution: the Second Republic was establishing itself just as Martins and his colleagues were launching their meteorological project. But history repeated itself: by the time they published their third volume, in 1851, the Second Republic was already giving way to the Second Empire under Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III (Napoléon le petit as Victor Hugo devastatingly nicknamed him, or to Karl Marx, the farcical and grotesquely mediocre echo of his formidable uncle.)11

Martins was an admirer of Lamarck: he also published a new edition of Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy to which he added a long biographical introduction, proclaiming grandiosely, “the hour of justice has sounded, and the posthumous glory of Lamarck casts an unexpected glow on France.” In the first of their yearbooks, for 1849, Martins and his colleagues echoed Lamarck by modestly referring to themselves as “three friends of Meteorology” and promised to compile the information gathered by “zealous and disinterested” observers from all over France. In 1852, they co-founded the Meteorological Society of France, which gave rise to the governmental Central Meteorological Bureau in 1878, which developed through various stages into today’s Météo-France.[xii]12

But that was all decades after Lamarck’s death. In his own time, after the self-emperor-ification of Napoleon, the resignation of Chaptal, and the cancellation of the meteorological correspondence, the opposition to Lamarck’s own yearbooks grew ever more concerted. The nastiness of the campaign against him so painful that decades later, following his death, Auguste would express deep bitterness on his father’s behalf. No science could be more useful and important, Auguste reflected, and yet although people had done plenty of observing and recording, no one had embarked on an actual science of meteorology; “my father was the first to try it.” Instead of praising and supporting his pioneering effort, those with power and influence had subjected him to ridicule and “persecution plotted in the shadows.”

Lamarck ignored it for as long as he could, and carried on compiling and publishing annually, but at last, in 1809, as the tenth yearbook appeared, Napoleon himself instructed Lamarck “to immediately cease all publication of his observations on the atmosphere,” as Lamarck later recalled. “What a strange thing,” he lamented, to ban his work even though he wasn’t “writing at all about politics,” and devoted himself exclusively to “studies of nature.” It does seem extraordinary that Napoleon the great modernizer, the mastermind of rational, scientific approaches to governmental administration and authority, should have taken such a hate to meteorology, of all things. But perhaps, upon reflection, it’s not so surprising after all. Meteorology resists a reductive, deterministic model of science. And the weather defies control. Perhaps that’s at least partly why Lamarck found it so fascinating.

At any rate, Lamarck was quite mistaken to suggest that “studies of nature” are separate from “politics.” Lamarck’s natural science was overtly materialist, granted creative agency to the humblest of living beings, combined poetry with observation and measurement, insisted upon the embroilment of the observer – sensory, physical, emotional – in the world observed, and promulgated a participatory model of scientific and governmental authority. To Napoleon and his scientific advisors, that was all plainly subversive.

Order The Power of Life!

Apply for the Summer School

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Main primary sources

Cuvier, “Eloge,” v (cloud-watching). [Cotte], “Mémoire” (Lamarck’s 1777 presentation to the Academy of Sciences, of which nothing remains except Cotte’s description).

Lamarck, “Sur la forme,” 149 (not random), 153 (types of clouds); “Nouvelle définition,” 113 (addition in 1805 of seven more types, brumeux [misty], terminés [terminated], en lambeaux [ragged], boursouflés [puffy], en barres [bar-shaped], coureurs [running], and de tonnerre [thunder]); Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 85-88 (atmospheric constitutions, complicating factors), 93-95 (“invitation to amateurs,” annotation instructions, annotated yearbooks request), 96-113 (metric system), 97 (“two seconds”); Annuaire pour l’an X, 24-25 (calendar columns example), 50-51 (“reason to expect”) 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an 1807, 171-72 (funnel cloud); Annuaire pour l’an 1808, 1 (“friends of nature”), 200 (“most imposing and beautiful”); Annuaire pour l’an 1809, 184-87 (hurricane), 164 (bodily influence of atmosphere); Annuaire de l’an xiii, 97-98 (“spectacle of sky,” “immense laboratory,” “intimate relations”); “Mémoire sur le mode de rédiger … les observations météorologiques”; Météorologie, 451-53, 474 (chagrin at colleagues’ reaction), 475-76 (“what a strange thing”); De l’influence de la lune, 430 (“indivisible and determinable instants”), 431 (twenty years of hesitation); Extrait d’un mémoire, 148 (“not an opinion”). Howard, Essay, 6 (“learned”). Laplace, Philosophical Essay, 3-4 (infinitely intelligent being); “On the Notion of Power” and “On Causality,” in Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 224-232 (contingency a figment). Garnerin, Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 8 October 1805, 59-60 (“modern Icaruses”). Haeghens, et al., Annuaire météorologique, ii-iii (“three friends of Meteorology”). Newton, “General Scholium,” 389-90. Martins, “Introduction,” lxxxiv (posthumous glory). Chaptal, Mes souvenirs, 106-107 and note 1 (Napoleon/Bourgoin episode). A. Lamarck – Cuvier, 8 February 1830, IF GC Ms 3252 / f. 358-359, 3-4 (Auguste’s bitter reflection).

Influence of the moon on the atmosphere, atmospheric constitutions:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an IX, 109 –111; Extrait d’un mémoire; De l’influence de la lune; “Météorologie.” Toaldo, Essai, 89-94.

Government weather agency:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an XI, 85-86, 154; Annuaire pour 1807, 203; Annuaire pour 1810, 150; Météorologie, 469-473, 476. Lalande, “Histoire de l’astronomie pour l’année 1801,” 26.

“French Newton”:

Le Moniteur universel, no. 308, 4 November 1811; Journal de l’Empire, 18 May 1812, 4; Pierre-Josoph-Spiridion Dufey, Nouveau dictionnaire historique des environs de Paris (Paris: Charles Perrotin, 1825), 11.

Secondary sources:

Packard, Lamarck, 79-82. Landrieu, Lamarck, 133-149. Bourdier, “Esquisse,” 34-35. Bange and Corsi, “Chronologie”. Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy.” Alder, The Measure of All Things (resentment of the metric system). Delange, “Phénomènes,” 134 (negative response to Lamarck’s meteorology). Schiavon and Rollet, Pour une histoire du Bureau des longitudes.

Women parachutists:

Noyes, Lady Icarus, 101; Kotar and Gessler, Ballooning, 81-82; Marck, Elles ont conquis le ciel (women’s organs).

Give a gift subscription

12

“Historique,” Météo et Climat; “L’Office national météorologique (1920-1945),” Méteo-France.

Order The Power of Life!

Apply for the Summer School

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

The pure products of America
                   go crazy—
                         —William Carlos Williams

Get 75% off for 1 year

Pocket symphony: a phrase popularized by an ad-man (Derek Taylor)—a press-man, anyway; journalist, publisher, and producer—popularized, that is, by a man who had been press officer for the Fab Four themselves (“The Beatles Are Coming”), and would be again; who through his own public relations company had introduced the Byrds to America and the Beach Boys to England. It was for the Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966) that Taylor revivified the phrase, realizing he needed some way to get across what was nestled inside all the whizbang new studio creations coming from the band’s brilliant-but-fragile composer, Brian Wilson—the rest of the group having become more or less a touring appendage of Wilson’s one-man production laboratory. It was the same advertorial insight that yielded another famous tagline, which several generations since have considered de rigueur, but which didn’t seem quite so publicly obvious in 1966 (unless you were Derek Taylor, or the Fab Four themselves): “Brian Wilson is a genius.”

As influential copy goes, “Pocket Symphony” isn’t at all unfair. Eine kleine Nachtmusik is a “pocket symphony.” Many movie scores have been reducible to just the kind of short movements worthy of the name. Gershwin—a composer Wilson adored, admired, and in some ways succeeded—wrote suites fusing jazz with classical, in a way neither field was prepared to accept as its own: what better word, or pair of words, for that? A miniature of orchestral dimension; a Lilliputian Opus. Either way, une symphonie de poche. What Wilson had done with “Good Vibrations” was nothing short of introducing American Pop—the New Pop, that is, which was really rock, which was really rock n’ roll—to its maturity. Youth Music was now Art Music.

“Good Vibrations” was a true pop mutation, one surprise after another. The opening verse (organ, bass counterpoint) intruded on by cello-and-theremin chorus, which changes keys every four bars—Gb to Ab to Bb—the final key the dominant, bringing us right back into the Eb minor verse again. Then it repeats. Only the second chorus, once done, lingers on the Bb, as the song goes into a half-time. This escalates into the bridge, then it ebbs into another bridge (“Gotta keep those lovegood vibrations a-happenin’ with her. . .”) as Hammond and harmonica digress from California beachfront into brief rustic valley; then the chorus, reprised; then the interruption of that chorus (“na-na-na” and “bah bah bah” and “do do do”); then the fade-out, cello and theremin again. All in 3 ½ minutes. “Pocket Symphony” indeed: after 90 hours of tape and tens of thousands of dollars, “Good Vibrations” (the costliest record ever made, at the time) was released on October 10, 1966, going to #1 on the Billboard charts. But then Wilson had a breakdown (another one), delayed, flailed, and all his former plans for an epoch-making “teenage symphony to God” ended up nowhere. The track stood like a lone mountain on the salvage pile of the next year’s Smiley Smile record. But until all pieces of the infamous Smile Sessions were finally brought to the public, decades later, in fragments (the detritus of Wilson’s ambitions), the narrative was sealed.

In 1967, the Sixties were decided. There was the past, which wouldn’t leave anyone alone (race riots; Elvis; Ronald Reagan). The present, which no one could avoid (“If you’re going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. . .”). There was the future, which no one saw coming (The Velvet Underground & Nico). And there was Sgt. Pepper’s, which was all three. But Brian Wilson? A genius, out of time. In the rear view an innocent California, all adolescence and rock n’ roll; also the Great American Songbook, and the kitsch of the Silent Generation; an ache, a vision. All of which—and none of which—Wilson had already summed up, concluded, and transcended, in the middle of 1966. So too, to be sure, had Dylan and The Beatles. But after a Revolver, or a Blonde on Blonde, there were a thousand places to go: bright new lanes, worlds to pursue (60 years later we are still doing this). After Pet Sounds, what was anyone supposed to do?

* * *

Pocket symphony: the term calls to mind, too, a booming sound-world, the world of Wilson’s lifelong musical idol—Phil Spector, genius, pioneer, psychopath. “Little symphonies for the kids” Spector called his productions: 2- and 3-minute diamonds of teen melodramas, all but buried under the studio rubble of that mammoth legendary “Wall of Sound,” perfectly attuned (sonically, commercially, metaphysically) to the outsized yearnings and consumerist desires of the first generation to be saddled with that savviest and cruelest category ever conceived by modern marketing: “The Teenager.” The American Teenager was a painful creature, painful because gleeful, painful because cursed with an endless innocence, which a global empire’s service economies now bent inward to prolong and prolong, forever, into the unknown American future (ours). Spector’s productions were vaulted cathedrals hewn out of this adolescent emotion, temples to the secular love of these children, whose avatars could sing in one moment, “Baby, I love only you,” and in the next, “He hit me/And it felt like a kiss.” Since nothing is more monstrous than naivety, and no naivety more monstrous than the kind thrust on the American Teenager: a lonely figure on a stage, from which everything else—darkness, adulthood, sex—is always held at bay, stalking around the edges of that impossible innocent dream: a tiger, in the form of Phil Spector.

Set this exquisitely masochistic doll-dream next to the headlong rush of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and suddenly The Beatles appear punk. The old energy of rock n’ roll revived, distilled into pure release. What else could those glorious falsetto “oooohs” mean, except overt sexual ecstasy? What else could, “And when I touch you, I feel happy inside/It’s such a feeling that, my love, I can’t hide/I can’t hide/I can’t hiiiiiide!” (Dylan heard it as “I get high!” and thought the future had finally arrived) mean? The Beatles weren’t coy. By no means were they suggesting a bit of heavy petting at the drive-in. Brian Epstein’s suits were for the adults, after all: a few short years before it had been leather, from head to foot, in Hamburg bordellos. The feral estrogenic screaming that drove them to abandon performing, only three years into their recording career, was all about sex—just as the howls that followed Elvis had been, until The King himself suddenly decided to become a respectable adult (in American terms, that is: first, the Military; then, Hollywood).

But The Beatles flew in on a different kind of sex, too: sex unburdened by Eisenhower mores and the suppressed nightmares of America’s racial castes. For The Beatles, “sex” always meant “love” (and vice-versa), even from the beginning. By the time that “love” changed from the girlfriend-boyfriend kind to the mystical-union kind, the modulation was accomplished smoothly. Certainly both kinds of “love” included (but weren’t limited to) the physical-carnal sort, which so much American pop music had strangled itself trying to deny. Because of this (and the influence of Dylan, who had a beatnik’s sense of sex, more “doomed beauty” than “Free Love”), Lennon and McCartney shifted into more “adult” registers easily. Hence “Yesterday” and “We Can Work it Out” doing in plain language what the Great American Songbook did with elegance and wit—timeless, universal emotions in melancholic colors—all without abandoning their youthful directness. This ability to contain whatever sound, genre, or feeling they could imagine, all within the context of that unparalleled youth-culture upheaval—that was the real alchemy of The Beatles.

But there was one American son who believed that dream of innocence and adolescent clarity. Who, like a boy scout, took those Spector productions at face value, and adored them. So it shouldn’t surprise us that when Brian Wilson first heard The Beatles (in 1964: The Beach Boys had been famous for two years), he reported suffering real panic; was literally, physically overwhelmed—an early version of the schizoaffective tendencies that later had him believing Spector had sent men to kill him while he planned his “teenage symphony to God,” threatening to surpass his idol for good. Brian Wilson was always in earnest: he felt things in bodily waves; heard music from heavenly places; aspired to transform actual human consciousness by delivering the Gospel of Spector to the world. When he said God, Brian Wilson didn’t mean sex, or the Market—he meant God. From Spector’s records, Wilson caught a tincture, a reflected fragment, of sublimity. And as The Beach Boys’ early career went on, Wilson’s evolving creations captured that promise of transcendence—which for Spector had been egoic monuments of pure sound (with a commercial imperative to boot)—expanding it into a vision of Pop Music as a kind of secular redemption.

The story goes that when he first heard The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”—Spector’s monument of monuments—in 1963, Wilson had to pull over the car he was driving, out late with his girlfriend, to take it all in. It was like hearing testament, or discovering the General Theory of Relativity: that keening voice, Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett striking out from the middle of the Spectorite whirlpool (like “a little bee” inside an “enormous sonic picture,” Brian Eno would later put it). For Wilson, it was enough to found a personal religion. He already loved Spector. The Beach Boys had only just done their second album, Surfin’ U.S.A., and the 20-year-old was already receiving producer credits; his songs were fusing doo-wop, Chuck Berry, the Four Freshman, and the whole motoring world of California into a nation-wide phenomenon. But this was the missing element—this swooning, yearning. The collected sentiments of the youth of America, on the heights, trapped forever in amber (or wax). He wore out the grooves on his 45 record, and insisted until the day he died that it was the greatest song ever written. For those 2 minutes 40 seconds that “Be My Baby” lasts, it’s hard to disagree.

In response, Wilson wrote “Don’t Worry Baby” and offered it to Spector for Ronnie to sing. Spector rejected it—apparently well aware of Wilson’s obsessions (and surely paranoid about future wife Bennett). The song ended up on Shut Down Vol. 2, the Boys’ fifth album, in 1964. It was fortuitous. “Don’t Worry Baby” was the first really immortal Beach Boys song, the one in which Wilson finally captured that lustre, beyond just the joy of good harmonies or good waves, that he was hunting: like a snapshot of the racing scene from Rebel Without a Cause, if the Dean character had been a sweet, vulnerable choir boy from Inglewood. It’s hard to imagine Ronnie singing it: even in mono, the song is wider and warmer than Spector’s recording, which is a blistering, depthless vortex. “Be My Baby,” exists in an unreal space (zone of Plato’s Forms, perhaps): its sound is its argument, and also its central lyrical demand (“Say you’ll be my darling. . .”). It’s a Gesamtkunstwerk. But “Don’t Worry Baby” happens in our world, a world of cars and girlfriends, raised to cinematic heights. Nor is there any calculation: it believes in its yearning. It also changes: keys, themes.

And all this the Endless Summer dream through which Wilson’s best, most adventurous songs would drift over the following two years—“Please Let Me Wonder,” “She Knows Me Too Well,” “Let Him Run Wild,” even the show-off “I Get Around” (see again: “The Beatles are coming”). All of them stations of the cross—the cross being that “teenage symphony to God” now lingering at the edge of Wilson’s vision. In the meantime (1965), Bossa Nova was everywhere, James Brown was turning soul music elastic, Dylan was giving The Beatles marijuana, and Lennon was singing “Nowhere Man” about himself, while the Stones rapped about ad-men selling smokes, and The Byrds’ first record took Dylan electric a month before Dylan himself did. As Wilson sat down to make “California Girls” for Summer Days (And Summer Nights), surely he understood his palette was ready? A hazy prelude, the doubled guitars (doubling creates a chorus effect: what else had Wilson seen on LSD?) with their slight, nostalgic delay. Wilson no longer toured with the rest: in performance he’d been supplanted by Bruce Johnston or the young Glen Campbell. Now he stayed back and directed exhausted session musicians to draw their performances from his scrawled notations and gestures. The hours (and the costs) were piling up. Genius meant money, long hours, and breakdowns.

The studio was home, an instrument. Through it, Wilson was commanding tones, keys, combinations no one had ever really put in a “rock” song—not to mention honing that lush reverb, extracted and diffused from Spector’s. Wilson was painting, with mixing-board dials and faders his paintbrushes, studio players his egg-whites and oils. He was 23 years old. Only the themes—the words themselves—“I wish they all could be California Girls. . .”—these were starting to repeat. The sunshine, the bikinis, the kitsch. Wilson wasn’t quite guileless enough to imagine himself another Lennon, running off to study Dylanite ironies; or a McCartney, aspiring to the likes of Rodgers and Hart. He certainly wasn’t going to attempt lyrics like Dylan’s “You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat/Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,” the kind of impossible line that was already knocking off amateurs left and right (the lesson: only Dylan can really sing Dylan). No, he had to look elsewhere. Had to look inward, find some transcriber for what he found there. A receiver can conduct a signal, relaying it outward: it cannot tell you what the signal said. And God lives not in language—unless you’re a Hebrew (like Bob Dylan).

The transcriber was Tony Asher, copy- and jingle-writer (”You can tell it’s Mattel—it’s swell!”). Before Asher, Wilson’s lyrical collaborators had been band member Mike Love, not a transcriber. Now Wilson was looking elsewhere. He met Asher in an L.A. studio, around the same time Asher was wordsmithing for Barbie. In early 1966 the two sat down together for a marathon sprint through 10 days of material-gathering: they called their lyric sketches “feels.” Something to do with the marijuana they were smoking. Nothing could be more Californian, enlisting the words of an ad-man to finally go autobiographical. But Brian Wilson was not really going autobiographical: there would be no references, no personal details, no private detritus. Like any great copy, Pet Sounds would seem equally autobiographical to everyone who heard it. The young man who once wrote “In My Room”— giving the world that historic image of the sensitive adolescent dreamer, alone in their American bedroom—was now aiming his penchant for the universal, the archetypal, towards the central myth of his generation: the first generation of the American Teenager, first to believe in its own innocence, and to lose it.

* * *

To begin with, let us taxonomize. Playing, for a moment, a bedraggled young studio engineer, confronted with the recording of Pet Sounds. The “Wrecking Crew”—filled with studio hands like Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine (of “By My Baby” backbeat fame)—is convened, meant to transmute this music from the head of Brian Wilson to physical reality in wax. A complete list of instruments used in the subsequent recordings would include the following: electric guitar, piano, harpsichord, Hammond organ, tenor voice, baritone voice, countertenor voice, drumset, banjo, vibraphone, ukulele, violins, cellos, flutes, bass flutes, harmonica, accordion, tambourine, guiro, bongos, clarinets, bass clarinets, glockenspiel, French horns, English horns, oboe, saxophones, baritone saxophones, upright bass, electric bass, sleigh bells, timpani, Coca-Cola cans, the sound of train crossings and barking dogs, water jugs, and of course the Electro-Theremin. It’s pointless for the engineer to linger too long on the harmonies, complex key changes, parallel chords, or rhythms—these things are best left to the scrawl of sheet music, and the brain of Brian Wilson. But suffice to say that nothing in the new pop music had ever been this exquisitely peculiar in its sophistication. Attempting a list of genres on the record would lead us to proliferating, hazy descriptors of styles, all blending easily: bossa, muzak, exotica, R&B, psychedelia, surf rock, rock n’ roll. . .

Later critics would be led by this proliferation into even less sensical categorical monstrosities: progressive pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, chamber pop, baroque pop. Anything to make the idiosyncratic Wilson mélange something more than just “pop.” Though of course this was precisely what Wilson was not doing (and in this he shared the Lennon-McCartney strain of pretension, which only seems like pretension because we live in a post-punk world). Instead, he was absorbing all these things into the spectrum of pop, an evangelist calling all comers under the tent. There was nothing to “elevate” here. For Wilson, pop was already the Sublime. His mind didn’t work on hoary music critic metaphors; “elevation” would have meant California aerospace pioneering, or the trajectory to Heaven. The harmonic sophistication of a George Gerswhin; the close vocal texture of doo-wop and barbershop; commercial jingles; easy listening; Nelson Riddle’s string arrangements; Motown; Johann Sebastian Bach—Pet Sounds was a nexus for these sound-worlds and many others: the only node in the whole long string of American pop music where more than one period could meet and blur like that. Consider your Euclid: for any three non-collinear points there exists a unique circle, passing through those points: pick any three major stylings of the era, and Pet Sounds is probably that circle. And if the points are collinear, as in a timeline (of a relationship, say: from “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” to “God Only Knows” to “Caroline, No”), you still get a circle, only one with an infinite radius. An infinite distance from center to circumference. A teenage symphony to God.

Which perhaps explains why “God Only Knows” sounds as if it’s happening in many overlapping times at once, some as old as The Bible. When they weren’t inventing new ones wholecloth, Lennon and McCartney tended to make a Picaresque of Genre: they were collagists; they did bricolage (anything or anyone could be Beatles). Dylan took everything that sounded even faintly old or anonymous in American music, and made a single genre out of it, which might as well be named after him. But Pet Sounds is Modernist in the correct sense—one genre, one era, sits on top of many others, and all are happening simultaneously. Relativity; the Copenhagen interpretation; James Joyce’s Odyssey is also Homer’s Odyssey, the only difference being a slight slippage of time barely registered on the cosmic scale: so the sounds of Pet Sounds break down barriers between decades, as between worlds. They are timeless, in the exact sense with which we rarely wield that word.

They’re filled with a timeless yearning, too—in language so straightforward it shirks poetry completely for stark melancholia:

I keep looking for a place to fit in
Where I can speak my mind
And I’ve been trying hard to find the people
That I won’t leave behind
They say I got brains
But they ain’t doing me no good
I wish they could
Each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good going for myself
But what goes wrong
Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times

“I just wasn’t made for those times”—a remarkable sentiment in an era that tended to believe it was ushering in A Better Future. Yet here is Brian Wilson, recognizing that the plain statements of youth are poetic enough, since no one is more nostalgic than those born yesterday. The record may bounce from joys to loves to breakups—all seemingly innocent—but underneath it thrums that deep melancholy keynote. Lost worlds; lost innocence.

So Pet Sounds commences with distant plucking—“California Girls” again; only briefer, foggier, somehow—before a drum ushers in a different key, and already the voice of endless summer is longing for the bliss of adult married life (another dream: what world is “the kind of world where we belong”?). But just two songs later, we begin to understand this is a record of departures—an actual Odyssey of the American Youth, trying and failing to shed his age of innocence. “I once had a dream, so I packed up and split for the city/I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty.” The Inglewood boy, now in Beverly Hills. “I could try to be big in the eyes of the world/What matters to me is what I could be to just one girl.” After all this, still the same shy boy who lived in his head, and once wrote: “There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to/In my room.” And again, visions of domestic bliss, sanctifying romantic union. Far from Free Love in the Park.

And after that? “Don’t talk, take my hand, and listen to my heartbeat/Listen/Listen. . .” as the bass guitar mimics the heartbeat’s beat, and a string quartet swells like something out of Schubert. And this is what we’re supposed to be listening to. No talk, but two silent bodies, and their body-rhythm, and High Romance beamed in from a different century, and all of it run through a tape-echo so electronically complex it was practically science fiction. The Gospel According to Phil Spector no longer seems so far-fetched. We remember that while Wilson was recording Pet Sounds in Los Angeles in early 1966, Bob Taylor was building the basis of the ARPANET just 6 hours away. Charles Manson was moving to Haight-Ashbury, released from prison for the umpteenth time. Across town from Wilson, L. Ron Hubbard was establishing his Guardian’s Office, to handle public relations and legal issues for the Church of Scientology. Strange religions and cults, world-spanning technologies and pop music, would not be such distant constellations for much longer (60 years later, do we even remember the difference?).

But in the meantime, Wilson was working out his Youth Odyssey as only he could—adding in an old Nassau folk number he called “Sloop John B.” (“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on”); leaving in two instrumentals (“Let’s Go Away For Awhile” and “Pet Sounds”) both worthy of Tom Jobim, or an Italian movie soundtrack; anchoring the record with “God Only Knows.” Or is it that “God Only Knows” anchors the record simply by its own nature? It would almost make sense to call the track gravitational, if it didn’t seem so free from gravity. Few songs are more divine: it’s a tribute to all musicians involved that the recording ended up so sensuous, too. The little clip-clop and sleigh bell auxiliaries; the bouncing bridge; the canon of pre-Raphaelite choir boys in the middle—these funny details simply don’t occur anywhere else in any song of this stature. It is, by some consensus, one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, while for others it’s simply the greatest song of its era, perhaps of its century. It’s certainly one reason why there are now millions more acolytes of the Church of Brian Wilson than there ever were of Phil Spector’s Temple of the Unreal Adolescence. Love songs of this order are beyond commentary, beyond reduction. In its wake, “Be My Baby” could only belong to an older world, however ideal. One wonders whether Spector really did send someone to kill Wilson when he heard the song.

Whoever the Ulysses of Pet Sounds is—whether Brian himself, or some kind of American Everyboy—he is certainly growing up: “They come on like they’re peaceful but inside they’re so uptight/They trip through their day and waste all their thoughts at night/Now how can I come on/And tell them the way that they live could be better?” He has come back from his travels, innocence unraveling (“Sometimes I feel very sad”), but all he knows is he isn’t done searching: “I know there’s an answer/I know now, but I have to find it by myself.” Note the new maturity, though it’s still haunted by the remains of youth (only a 23-year-old knows there’s an answer). He’s still young enough to want to tell everyone what he’s discovered, but old enough to see how pointless that would be. He’s still musing on his old heartbreaks (“Here Today”), and looking forward to future ones (“I’m Waiting for the Day”). He is trying.

So what beautiful obstinancy inspired Wilson to choose “Caroline, No” for the single? To begin with, he loved it. But why? He places it at the end of the album, because the end for him must be an elegy—a love elegy. It’s 1966, and already the youth have received the anthem of their passing (“Where did your long hair go?”). Wilson ends his Odyssey with heartbreak, autumnal and winsome: “How could you lose that happy glow?” “Who took that look away?” No one asks so many questions of a former lover without aiming some of those same questions at himself. On the cusp of manhood, the boy is already tired. And manhood (as the subsequent history tells us) was not something that ever made sense for Brian Wilson, dreamy cherub that he was. It’s hard to hear the long sad sigh of that finale, knowing the difficulties—mental, commercial—that would follow. Harder still to imagine Wilson, after finishing Pet Sounds, believing he had yet to make that “teenage symphony to God” he’d been dreaming of. When he had so clearly done it, so obviously uttered the complete prayer. Again: after Pet Sounds, what was anyone supposed to do?

* * *

Well, it’s been building up inside of me
For, oh, I don’t know how long
I don’t know why, but I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong. . .

It’s my freshman year of high school—spring of 2009—and I’m sitting in my mother’s car, listening to “Don’t Worry Baby” on repeat in my headphones, thinking about a girl I think I love. I don’t yet know Pet Sounds, though I’ll discover it soon, later in the year. The girl feels the same about me, for the first and only time that will ever happen in my life. But I’ll mess it up anyways: too afraid to kiss her, too afraid to be too naive, or too young (“So Young”).

* * *

Right now you think that she’s perfection
This time is really an exception
Well, you know I hate to be a downer
But I’m the guy she left before you found her. . .

It’s two years later—spring of 2011—I’m traveling to St. Louis with the same girl, and her boyfriend, and “Don’t Worry Baby” comes over the speakers in the restaurant we’ve stopped off at. Time slips. Brian Wilson has been the soundtrack to all my high school loneliness, yearning. Nothing else has ever come close to expressing what I’m always wishing for: “the kind of world where we belong.” Pet Sounds has become my version of that world.

* * *

Each time things start to happen again
I think I got somethin’ good goin’ for myself
But what goes wrong. . .

It’s my freshman year of university—spring of 2013—and I’m 18 years old, sitting in a different car, with an older girl I think I love. I play her “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and I tell her this is the song that really represents me, sums up the way I feel about the world. She looks at me: in her eyes I see something I’ve spent 13 years trying never to see again. Since behind that look she was surely realizing just how foolish and besotted I was, resolving to let me go on with the fantasy as long as she reasonably could, until I finally made too much a fool of myself, and was deemed too naive, too young (“So Young”), within weeks exchanged for the only other freshman classical guitar player at our university.

* * *

I once had a dream, so I packed up and split for the city
I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty. . .

It’s 13 years later—spring of 2026—and I live in London, a place I’m still too ill to explore, though I’ve lived here 1 ½ years. I’m listening to Pet Sounds, trying to pretend these old memories don’t affect me anymore. But of course I can’t: Pet Sounds is still here, and for me it holds these old memories—along with many more beautiful and painful ones beside them. Maudlin memories, mostly, but redeemed from complete regret by the presence of this man’s music in them. The music, a repository: in 2009, in 2011, 2013, in 2026, I listen to Brian Wilson’s songs and I see my own innocence, my own loss of innocence, my inability to shake off the weight of the experience that follows.

I don’t exactly encounter these feelings as Brian Wilson’s. Pet Sounds isn’t reportage. It absorbs my feelings, stands for them, measures them, supports and alleviates them. From the earnest testimony of many, many people, it seems to do exactly the same for them, too. We all bring ourselves to Pet Sounds, millions of us, every year, and somehow we all manage to find ourselves in it. Because while we’re in it, we’re still slipping out of time, phasing between worlds old or new or imagined; encountering memories of our own innocence; encountering memories of our own loss of innocence; reckoning with the achievement of one 23-year-old, 60 years ago, and the sense that it really does seem to exist for us—since anyone who has ever been young is always being called under its tent. Pet Sounds necessitates this degree of naked personal response. Nothing less will do. The history of the last 60 years of the record is a history of these personal responses. The next 60 years will be too. So will the next 600. And there are very few pure products of America worth saying that about.

Get 75% off for 1 year

Share

Give a gift subscription

Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances. —Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

Share

I.

A musicology professor once offered my class the only definition of jazz I’ve ever thought truly apt. He said: “Jazz is the music jazz musicians play.”

You are listening to a piece of music. You wonder: is it jazz? You have only to ask yourself: what kind of musician is making it? Is it a jazz musician, or several jazz musicians? Very well, you’re listening to jazz. If it isn’t? Then you’re probably listening to something else.

The circuity is the point. Since it’s an idiom, a tradition, a world mostly to itself, jazz should not really be defined (if that can be helped). And yet—we’re certain that there was, sometimes still is, something called jazz. It was already conscious of itself as different from other kinds of music, early on. There are many moments we could point to as evidence of this difference. So I’ll choose the best I know: that moment when, in 1926, Louis Armstrong dropped the lyrics from the lyric stand while cutting “Heebie Jeebies” with his Hot Seven band, and covered for the mistake with the first official scat-singing on record. So Louie became the first Jazz Singer, not only because he scatted but because as a singer, he understood his voice was no different from his horn—and what both were really meant to do, was to take up all the dim, repetitive variations he’d encountered in his life and spin them into a different plane altogether.

Other jazz musicians played perfectly well. Jelly Roll Morton played, Fletcher Henderson played, and King Oliver played. But Louie sang—with his horn and his own natural instrument alike. And his precise genius for a kind of magical reinterpolation gave every soloist who came after him their own signature difference, too. Not just to play the thing over, with enough variations to scrape by, keeping the attention of the dancers and booze drinkers in the joint, an audience always dangerously ready to get on to the next scene. But to root people to the spot, to show them, to tell them something—to make it about the music itself, music and not decoration. Where others heard “St. Louis Blues,” or “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” or “Stardust,” Louie heard a dozen other things: harmonies, alternate melodies, moods. Your normal popular performer—Al Jolson, for instance, whom Hollywood enshrined as the face of the new talking jazz age—might sing those melodies, embellish them a bit, lean into the words, and be a decent interpreter. But for Louie the words were a pretext, a way to get him into the real thing, which was spinning off from the center and establishing its own free ellipse in orbit around it. Louie made music essentially about music—the same way every great play is really about plays, and every great movie is really about movies.

This is what his singing was, too, with scatting at the abstract extreme. First the words: start the verse, let the meaning of the song come through, establish the center. Then roll outwards, in potentially infinite variations, streams of new melodic and harmonic ideas which in Louie’s hands were as full and complex as whatever original piece he’d picked up and toyed around with. For decades afterward jazz musicians would go on building an unbelievably rich scaffolding on top of these principles—expanding into denser arrangements, more sophisticated harmony, improvisations of dazzling virtuosity and invention. But the basic difference was the same: jazz was music that had somehow built a space, nested within the full tradition of American Song, where the point of the music was to build on music, in a kind of exegesis on its own workings: it was reinterpretation raised to a fine art; a moment of singular, incendiary reinterpretation. It would expand beyond mere genre, develop its own standards and classics, its own idiolect, its own rhythms, yes—but the point of it all would always lie in the way these things were used, to burst wide open the repetitions and limitations of the popular music of their day. To make a new world of music out of it.

For the great jazz singers, the jazz difference is a bit slipperier. And this is for one simple reason: The Great American Songbook, the thousand or so songs in the canon of primarily Jewish and Black songwriters, which emerged just as the new jazz language was becoming the substrate of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, in the Thirties and Forties. Men like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins weren’t jazz musicians. But jazz informed the songs they were writing for the masses. And jazz musicians paid them back in turn for their material, taking those songs and transforming them into sandboxes, little zones of exploration, which would be transposed and re-done by musicians for decades afterwards as if there was no way to really exhaust their essence (since, frequently, there wasn’t).

Here at The Hinternet, we write for our PAID SUBSCRIBERS. We are currently offering a huge discount, in the hope that you will FINALLY decide to become one of them!

Get 75% off for 1 year

We also encourage you to give your friends and family GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS to The Hinternet. You’ll be doubly loved for it!

Give a gift subscription

Read more

Read more

Read more

« J’aime tout ce qui coule », écrivait Henry Miller, avant de recourir à une métaphore graphique — et finalement misogyne — pour appuyer son propos. Parmi les choses qui coulent, il faut assurément c…

Read more

“I love everything that flows,” Henry Miller once wrote, before turning to a graphic and ultimately misogynist metaphor to drive his point home. Among things that flow we must surely count the writin…

Read more

Get 30 day free trial

Read more

1. Readying the tub

In Bulgaria, everyone knows Ivan Vazov (1850 –1921). The National Library in Sofia is named after him (Народна библиотека “Иван Вазов”), as is the National Theater (Народен театър…

Read more

Read more

Read more

And falling, as Erin Endrei shows in her first contribution to The Hinternet, is a variety of motion in space heavy with philosophical significance. Spinoza says somewhere that if a falling stone could contemplate its own plight, it would tell itself it was falling of its own free choice. Do the leaves have a similar thought, we wonder? Or do they recognize the necessity of their circumstances? And if their fall is in fact necessary, why does the word we use to describe it have such a complex historical and conceptual connection to contingency? In her elegant and surprising juxtaposition of Aesop’s fables and of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Erin helps us to go some way towards answering these impossible questions. —The Editors

0.

There are no primary sources for Aesop’s fables, if the emphasis here on the proper name is taken to imply that the name’s supposed referent wrote them down. If he existed, he almost certainly did not do so. Socrates knew the fables attributed to Aesop well enough to versify them in his last days, according to Plato in the Phaedo, but written compilations are not known to have been produced until the following century.1 Of modern editions, it is Ben Edwin Perry’s Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him Or Closely Connected With the Literary Tradition That Bears His Name, Collected and Critically Edited, In Part Translated From Oriental Languages, with a Commentary and Historical Essay (1952) that contains the sources closest to “primary” in this context, being a compilation of the earliest written versions of the fables in Greek and Latin.

Perry was not the first to exercise caution with respect to the fables associated with the subject of the popular ancient biography Vita Aesopi.2 His earlier monograph had devoted considerable scholarly attention to the Vita, presenting one of the earliest codices of it, the Vita G, in edited form.3 According to Lloyd W. Daly in Aesop Without Morals (1961), a work itself heavily indebted to Perry’s scholarship, it was not always assumed in the ancient world that all fables of the kind today called “Aesop’s” originated with the same person.4 They were termed Aesopic, as Perry also approves of calling them in the General Preface to Aesopica and in his earlier work on the subject.5 Both he and Daly avoid applying to them the possessive form of Aesop’s name. To do so without qualification, their scholarship suggests, is to run roughshod over the history of the fables’ formulation, variation, and supplementation down the centuries as tradition.

However we refer to the short tales by which that tradition is composed, most of us today have probably thought about them only rarely since our earliest school days, perhaps turning our attention to such apparently childish stories (or, as Daly puts it, “moralistic pap”) only on the odd occasion when we have witnessed, if not levelled or suffered, accusations involving the phrase “sour grapes”. The most special and important kindergartener of my acquaintance, for her part, has no favourites, as she does not yet abide any of them at all. On the last occasion of my trying to read “The Tortoise and the Hare” to her—quite a while ago indeed now—she was appalled by the ending, despite my attempts to explain its heartening moral. This was because she “wanted the hare to win”, a desire she justified in turn with the claim, entirely true in a sense, that it was he who “was supposed to win”. Neither did the next fable we tackled, “The Vain Jackdaw”, successfully “land”. For once one puts beautiful feathers upon oneself, then how can one fail to be beautiful? And the bird had put beautiful feathers upon herself. In what some may call didactic defeat, others gentle parenting, the volume has since remained in its place on the shelf.

One fable from Aesopic tradition that is less a favourite of mine than something that has burned itself in my memory, like Larkin’s jauntily tetrametric advice about having kids, is indexed 230 in Aesopica: “The Tortoise and the Eagle.” It may be read in several languages on the academic Laura Gibbs’ impressively detailed website, and in early twentieth-century English at Standard Ebooks in a translation by the little-known Cambridge classicist V. S. Vernon Jones. According to the Greek in Perry’s edition, a partial screenshot of a facsimile of which is provided below, the fable shows that “many human beings harm themselves in their rivalries”:

But another lesson appears to me quite clearly deducible: some things are bound to fall.

Beginning this essay with “The Tortoise and the Eagle” was not a purely arbitrary or self-referential choice, but an attempt to clear the way for the reader to see my point about something quite different, something indisputably a matter for adult and perhaps even scholarly consideration.

1.

The thing in question is the translation of the first line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. As Wittgenstein died in 1951, the original text entered the public domain in 2021, and by 2025 three new English translations had appeared. For perspicuity and later reference, below is the first line in its original language, followed by various translations of it, mostly into Indo-European languages.

Wittgenstein:
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

English translations:
Ramsey-Ogden (1922): The world is everything that is the case.
Pears-McGuinness (1961): The world is all that is the case.
Beaney (2023): The world is everything that is the case.
Searls (2024): The world is everything there is.6
Booth (2025): The world is all that happens to be the case.

Other Indo-European translations:
Dutch: De wereld is alles, wat het geval is.
French: 1: Le monde est tout ce qui a lieu.; 2: Le monde est tout ce qui est le cas.; 3: Le monde est tout ce qui se produit là.; 4: Le monde est tout ce qui advient.; 5: Le monde est tout ce qui arrive.
Icelandic: Heimurinn er allt sem er.
Italian: 1: Il mondo è tutto ciò che accade.; 2: Il mondo è tutto ciò che si verifica.
Modern Greek: Ο κόσμος είναι όλα όσα συμβαίνουν.
Portuguese: O mundo é tudo o que ocorre.
Russian: 1: Мир — это все, чему случается быть.; 2: Мир есть всё то, что имеет место.
Spanish: 1: El mundo es todo lo que acaece.; 2: El mundo es todo lo que es el caso.

Non-Indo-European translations:
Hungarian: A világ mindaz, aminek esete fennáll.
Finnish: Maailmaa on kaikki, mikä on niin kuin se on.

It would be interesting to conduct a comparative investigation of the nuances of the various English and non-English renderings. Lacking the relevant expertise, I cannot attempt to do such a thing; the translations are intended to serve mostly as a reminder that there are many more renderings that might be considered than just the various English ones, even without leaving the comfort of our own language family.

That reminder is necessary, because it is the relation between the English and German versions to which I am admittedly concerned to devote my attention in this short essay. In particular, there is a claim concerning the difficulty of translating Wittgenstein’s sentence into English about which it is my aim to raise a question.

Read more

I

If you spoke to the Sun, what would you say?

II

We’re forbidden, as children, from staring up at it. Its power lies beyond safe measure. It dominates our world: all our cultures, all our lives. Every second it generates billions of times more energy than our species uses in a year. We exist as a rounding error in its flow, a tiny after-effect. In that sense, the only concept the Sun resembles, philosophically, is God. And those artists, writers and theorists who’ve tried to deal with the Sun, even to speak back to it, seem haunted by the same sense of incommensurate scale – by the knowledge of their powerlessness and enthrallment to a higher power.

III

We hide from sunlight by making corners. In any city built on a grid, or at monuments from Abu Simbel to Stonehenge, the Sun will twice a year be perfectly framed. Thus, Le Corbusier, in Vers une architecture (1923): “Architecture is the learned, correct, and magnificent game of volumes assembled beneath the light.”

Read more

Read more

It appears we have a proper poetry series going here at The Hinternet — and now my job grows difficult. JSR continues his pressure on me to hunt for interesting new voices, and I am forced to confron…

Read more

With the recent success of The Hinternet’s first feature from an English-language poet, Maria Theresa, our founding editor reached out to me again to see if I might be able to furnish forth any other…

Read more

Read more

Two weeks or so ago, our Founding Editor received a text from one of his —how to put this politely?— one of his overabundance of acquaintances:

This was followed by a series of surprisingly …

Read more

Read more

Read more