Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison Read Free Book Online Page A

and sensibilities impelled him to share beauty with those less exposed to it and to proselytize those who felt less acutely than he. His exuberance brought to millions a loveliness that fell from the skies. He saw, he felt, and he captured a tiny gorgeousness for history. No bit of Nature ever had a better Boswell.
    Bentley loved snowflakes above all else, but he also made important contributions to the understanding of other phenomena of nature. He observed and carefully described the date, appearance, and intensities of more thansix hundred auroras and took meticulous measurements of nearly three hundred fifty collections of raindrops. He was a pioneer photographer of clouds, frost, and dew, and his work on cloud physics, in the assessment of Blanchard and other atmospheric scientists, was forty years ahead of its time.
    The people in his New England village, however, regarded him asa little cracked. Being Vermont farmers and less than transfixed by snow, they found Bentley’s intoxication odd. Why take pictures of snowflakes, they asked, when “you can’t sell them and you can’t eat them.” Fortunately, the American Meteorological Society disagreed and awarded the self-educated dairy farmer its first research grant. His photomicrographs of snow crystals made their way into scientific journals—sixty were published in
Nature
alone—as well as into popular newspapers and magazines, and they influenced naturalists, photographers, scientists, and jewelry designers at Tiffany.There is no equivalent of his photographic collection, nor is it likely that there will ever be one.
    When Bentley died in 1931, even his Vermont neighbors had a sense of the importance of his life and passing. “John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing,” wrote his hometown newspaper. “Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.”
    Nor had they his capacity for joy or exuberant pursuit. “So long as eyes shall see and kindle at the beautiful in Nature,” Bentley said, his camera and pen would be there. It was this capacity to be kindled, of course, that set Bentley apart. His urgency and passion ensured that his message would be both seen and heard. The physicist W. J. Humphreys, one of the many eminent scientists who were deeply impressed by his work, wrote the text to accompany Bentley’s photographic masterpiece,
Snow Crystals
. In it, he observed that Bentley had pursued his life’s work with the “insistent ardor of the lover and the tireless patience of the scientist,” that he had “made it possible for others to share at leisure, and by the comfortable fireside, the joys that hour after hour bound him to his microscope and his camera in an ice cold shed.” Bentley brought indoors an otherwise invisible beauty from the skies.
    Bentley’s was a magnificent obsession, plumb-line true and enduring. Just days before he died, he wrote in his weather notebook for the last time. “Cold west wind afternoon,” the entry reads. “Snow flying.”

CHAPTER THREE
     

“Playing Fields of the Mind”
     

    (photo credit 3.1)
    F or most mammals, including ourselves, early exploration of the world is enhanced, indeed often made possible, through the exuberant play of youth. Such play, it has been said, is the business of childhood, but play is more than that: it is a deadly serious business. Much learning must get done in not much time, for youth is, indeed,a stuff which will not endure. The time is short when a young animal, still protected and provided for by its parents and not yet bound to the waiting demands of hunting, mating, and procuring shelter, can run flat out, gambol, and improvise with impunity. “In the sun that is young once only,” wrote Dylan Thomas, “Time let me play and be/Golden in the mercy of his