shhh, peaceful

My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research." This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded—and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else—I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy. I tried research one summer. I got interested in the role of the acid-base balance in the formation of renal calculi; really, it's quite an interesting problem. I had a hunch you might get pigs to form oxalate stones by manipulating the pH of the blood, and maybe even to dissolve them. A friend of mine, a boy from Pittsburgh named Harry Stern, and I read up the literature and presented the problem to Minor. He was enthusiastic, gave us everything we wanted and turned us loose for the summer. But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry's attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o'clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don't care about anything but the problem in their heads—now here is a fellow who does have a "flair for research" and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery that surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. By the middle of August I could not see what difference it made whether the pigs got kidney stones or not (they didn't, incidentally), compared to the mystery of those summer afternoons. I asked Harry if he would excuse me. He was glad enough to, since I was not much use to him sitting on the floor. I moved down to the Quarter where I spent the rest of the vacation in the quest of the spirit of summer and in the company of an attractive and confused girl from Bennington who fancied herself a poet.

This was maybe the first big clue to Percy's style. In clumsier hands the portrait of a man too engrossed in the beauty of a quiet summer afternoon to focus on science could easily be hackneyed. But, remarkably, it's not—partly because the writing is vivid enough to be convincing ("The old building ticked and creaked in the heat"), partly because the self-deprecation is bland and pointed and funny ("My mother and aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded") and partly because the tone is so carefully modulated.

The tone. That's possibly the main draw here. The whole book's written in a bright, almost happy voice that can bend into dark foreboding but never errs on the side of slapstick or sarcasm. 

Then there are the bits where Bolling creates his own terms for experiencing the world:

Nothing had changed. There we sat, I in the same seat I think, and afterwards came out into the smell of privet. Camphor berries popped underfoot on the same section of broken pavement.

A successful repetition.

What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. Last week, for example, I experienced an accidental repetition. I picked up a German-language weekly in the library. In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Crème, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun. Then I remembered that twenty years ago I saw the same advertisement in a magazine on my father's desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Crème. The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Crème was exactly as it was before. There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.

Or this quietly devastating portrait of the gulf in understanding between his mother and father:

My mother… had a way of summing up his doings in a phrase that took the heart out of him. He dreamed, I know, of a place of quiet breathing and a deep sleep under the stars and next to the sweet earth. She agreed. "Honey, I'm all for it. I think we all ought to get back to nature and I'd be right with you, Honey, if it wasn't for the chiggers. I'm chigger bait." She made him out to be another Edgar Kennedy (who was making shorts then) thrashing around in the bushes with his newfangled camping equipment. To her it was better to make a joke of it than be defeated by these chilly dawns. But after that nothing more was said about getting back to nature.

Or on why a person like Bolling so highly attuned to his surroundings can't easily travel to other cities:

Chicago. Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. Not in a thousand years could I explain it to Uncle Jules, but it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere. Great day in the morning. What will it mean to go moseying down Michigan Avenue in the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray? How can I deal with five million personal rays?

The mere fact that there were ever dinosaurs at all is shocking, when you really ponder it. They lived on Earth for an unfathomably long period: Humans are actually closer in time to Tyrannosaurus rex (which lived about 65 million years ago) than T. Rex was to Apatosaurus (about 85 million years between them). And dinosaurs assumed a staggering number of diverse forms. Some of them grew so large they pressed the limits of biology. Evolution went wild.

And we still have only a very crude understanding of that diversity. Fossils are relatively few and hard to interpret. That confusion occasionally spills over into pop culture: Most dino-enthusiasts know that the popular Brontosaurus species turned out to be a fake, based on an incorrectly assembled skeleton. But there are plenty of similar stories.

For example: Scientists once thought that tiny Oviraptor was a sneaky egg thief, after finding a skeleton of one in Mongolia on top of what appeared to be large Protoceratops eggs. But that's a rather thin clue, and subsequent evidence suggests that those might have actually been Oviraptor eggs—the species was framed! The mother was protecting her own, refusing to leave in a deadly sandstorm. Yet the name, which literally means "egg seizer," stuck.

Or: Scientists used to suspect that Deinonychus hunted in packs — the way they did in Jurassic Park. (Michael Crichton mislabeled the charismatic creatures Velociraptors after reading an outdated scientific text.) But this was largely based on a some fossil evidence that suggested a pack of them had taken down a Tentosaurus. In fact, the Deinonychus may have most frequently killed each other in competition for food.

Or: Scientists used to think there were two distinct species of horned, frilled dinosaurs: Triceratops and Torosaurus. The latter had holes in its frill and a less-distinct nose horn. But now some scientists think Torosaurus might just be a fully mature Triceratops — its bone structure simply changed as it grew older. Some of the creatures we think of as distinct species may, in fact, be the same species at different phases of their lives.

Occasionally, our cognitive biases get in the way of our ability to interpret dinosaur fossils. For a long time, scientists thought Pachycephelosaurus used the hard dome on top of its head to butt rival males. Why did they think this? Well, big-horned rams do this. But why should dinosaurs be similar to the animals we happen to be familiar with? And if Pachycephelosaurus was head-butting each other all the time, shouldn't there be signs of trauma? Flaws emerged in the story, and paleontologists began to revise the picture as new evidence poured in. The domes may have been used to identify each other, and only occasionally used for defense.

There's lots of that in the book. Paleontology is hard detective work, sussing out theories from extremely limited clues. Often scientists have to be extremely creative. They'll build 3-D models to try and figure out how two spiky stegosaurs could possibly have sex without impaling each other (we still don't know). They'll search through coprolite (fossilized dinosaur shit) for evidence of parasites. They'll pore over skull trauma to find evidence that T. Rex fought by biting each other in the face.

Even the final snuffing out of the dinosaurs remains a mystery. For a long time, paleontologists assumed that climate change and outsized volcanic eruptions had killed off the dinosaurs once and for all. Some scientists even offered additional theories—a horde of caterpillars destroyed the vegetation, or maybe the dinosaurs eventually ate each other. Perhaps they just weren't up to evolutionary snuff.

Then evidence emerged of a massive meteor hitting the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Breakthrough! But even now the case isn't closed. Exactly how did the meteor kill off all the dinosaurs all over the world? What was the precise mechanism? Dinosaurs in North America would have been "flash fried" by the fierce impact, but what about those in Asia?

Paleontologists don't just speculate, of course. They search for evidence. (The clues of a meteor impact came from an examination of deposits of iridium in geological layers.) But imagination has to play a large role here. And the way we've imagined dinosaurs has changed dramatically over time, driven by fresh evidence, new fossil finds, our own biases, and our shifting ability to conceive of a world so drastically unlike our own.