Jessa recently shared some more love for Samantha Hunt's brand new The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about Nikola Tesla. This was one of my most anticipated titles as well and after following her link I headed over to Hunt's site to see what else I could find and happened into this recent interview with the author where she writes about the magic of the material world:

SH: Again, I would hate to call it magic. Magic dismisses a lot of wonder due to the material world. Perhaps it is better to speak of curiosity or even love of the world. I think of the TV programs of David Attenborough. When I watch those and he reveals to me the mating habits of the scorpion or the mimicry of the lyrebird, now that inspires me to creativity! Though certainly, in the mind of the inventor, there must also be some capacity for imagining what’s unimaginable.

SH: He claimed it in real life also. Tesla certainly had a very open mind. Rather than thinking of him as a mad scientist (as sadly, many people have), I approached him as one who simply had less of a filter between his thoughts and his words. He said many of the things that everyone thinks. He had enormous powers of intuition that he wisely paid attention to. A highly sensitive man.

It was the bits on pigeons that really intrigued me and checking out Hunt's site further I found that Tesla was certainly a bit of an ornithologist. He invited pigeons into his hotel room where he lived, took care of sick ones and fell in love with one bird in particular. I don't know what Hunt means by "falling in love" although I imagine it was a scientist's heightened fascination with some aspect of the natural world, which for some reason immediately made me think of Vladimir Nabokov and butterflies Here's a bit from an NPR piece on the subject several years ago:

Butterflies were Vladimir Nabokov's transcending passion in life -- just standing among them, he said, was ecstasy and timelessness. He caught the bug as a child, and it infected him until the day he died. Nabokov metamorphosized from amateur collector into real scientist in his six years as the de facto butterfly curator at Harvard. He spent blissful 14-hour days there staring into his microscope, counting rows of wing scales, examining the structure of genitalia.

I wonder about the kind of fascinations/obsessions/enduring curiosities that creative people have for the natural world. I also think sometimes that I treat pilots almost like they were bugs or butterflies - metaphorically pinning them down to the page as I analyze the decisions men like Ben Eielson or Russ Merrill made eighty years ago. They are not struggling against a pin but still - when we second guess (dare I say judge) the actions of real people while pursuing our own literary pursuits, do we treat them like subjects in a biology lab? Was Nabokov drawn to his microscope to understand life more and then to his pen for the same metaphorical examination of humans?

And what did Tesla think when he saw the pigeons fly around him? Did the laws of nature inspire his own experiments in other areas? When you study something that intently does it bleed over into all other aspects of your life and work? Must you be an intent observer in order to be successfully creative?

Alaskan pilots are only my most recent obsession; I could just as easily be fascinated by 19th century women explorers, by dogs, by Joan of Arc, and yes, by birds. See what they do, how they act, the way they move, and then feel your own mind open up.

What was Ben Eielson thinking? I'll never know. But I'm looking forward to seeing what Samantha Hunt imagines for Nikola Tesla.

The world’s a mysterious place. Science and nature are stranger than any sort of magic or trickery. I’m very interested in the experiments being done by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He studies things like why we know when someone is staring at us, or why, when we think of a long lost friend, very often he or she calls. He would like to demonstrate that these phenomena — that we all agree happen — are controlled not by coincidence or magic but by cells, biology. (He also happens to be doing experiments with pigeons and how they know the way home.) I like to think that’s the way I write as well.

[Final quote also from Samantha Hunt's interview. The image is a collage starring the extinct Passenger Pigeon from the Smithsonian.]