My Dearest Ce-Ce,
Your graduation from high school is the latest benchmark in your life. Today, as I was considering this benchmark, I was also remembering your previous benchmarks: Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, graduation from various schools, and then there are all the teams you played on and now don’t. If lived well, life is a series of benchmarks creating an arc that rises for a long time before it begins its descent. On this wonderful day of your graduation from high school, I am imagining your arc. I expect you are wondering about it, too.
I am also remembering where you came from, the stories you don’t know about the family who came before you, without any one of whom you would not be here. I expect my italicized words are a thought that has never crossed your mind. It never crossed my mind either when I was your age, nor did I begin to think about all my ancestors, every last one of whom was absolutely necessary to my being born into this world, until, well, I’m not sure when. But I do remember the moment when their necessary presence became clear. It was when I read a passage in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book I much recommend you read for yourself in its entirety. Here is that passage:
If your two parents hadn’t bonded just when they did — possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond — you wouldn’t be here. And if their parents hadn’t bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn’t be here either. And if their parents hadn’t done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn’t be here.
Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower Pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you. . . .
If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. . . . Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or café or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: “me, too!” In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family.
We are also uncannily alike. Compare your genes with any other human being’s and on average they will be about 99.9 percent the same. That is what makes us a species. The tiny differences in that remaining 0.1 percent — “roughly one nucleotide base in every thousand,” to quote the British geneticist and recent Nobel laureate John Sulston — are what endow us with our individuality. Much has been made in recent years of the unraveling of the human genome. In fact there is no such thing as “the” human genome. Every human genome is different. Otherwise we would all be identical. It is the endless recombinations of our genomes — each nearly identical, but not quite — that make us what we are, both as individuals and as a species.
That’s an astonishing passage, but I couldn’t have cited it so easily if I didn’t keep a daybook in which I set down passages from the thoughts of others, as well as my own thoughts. I started keeping that daybook in April 1997: 29 years ago. I’ve lived more lives than I can count since I began keeping that daybook, but the book goes on, now running to 1,650 pages. It is a compendium of my thoughts and the thoughts of others for these last three decades. I deeply value every entry I ever made into this book.
I mention all this at this crucial turning point in your life for a reason. I want you to read this book I wrote, A Life in 52 Questions, from cover to cover. I want you to read the entire book! It’s easy reading, and every page of it can be traced back to that long passage from Bill Bryson because every page of this book is about the family from which you came and without whom — every last one of us — you would not be here. I want that thought to settle in — deeply.
And I want you to do one more thing, far more for yourself than for me: As you read I want you to prepare some notes for a conversation we will have about this book. I have italicized the word conversation because that is what I would like us to have; not merely me asking you questions and you answering as briefly as you can, but a conversation between two people. The ability to converse with another human being in a meaningful and deep way is one of the things a college education — the thing you are about to embark on — is meant to enable you to do.
To help you, here are some prompts:
1) What did you learn about our family from this book that you didn’t know before? I would like you to jot down your answers on a sheet of paper or to mark up the book so that you can turn to the pages as we talk about your answers. Yes, you can mark up books! You should mark up books — underlining, notes in the margins, asterisks, arrows — because books aren’t merely a place where one person tells others what he or she thinks; they are places for a conversation between writer and reader. That’s one of the reasons there are white spaces on all four sides of every page. Let’s you and I have that conversation.
2) What surprises did you encounter as you read this book? Please, list them.
3) As I wrote this book I was keenly aware of how little I knew about some things. That’s because I never asked the questions I should have asked when the people were alive for me to ask them. I would pay an immense amount of money to have a book like the one you are holding in your hand, written by my father and mother and my grandparents, but they are gone, and I will never get the answers to my questions. So: What do you wish you knew that wasn’t in the book? What would you like to know from your mother and father, from me and your other grandparents, and what do you wish you knew from your great-grandparents who aren’t here to be asked anymore? And when do you think you will ask us those questions? Further, where are the gaps in this book, the places where I didn’t know enough? What do you wish you knew that isn’t here? What questions do you have about our family? What you read in A Life in 52 Questions may prompt you to ask these questions. Please write down your thoughts and questions. It could be the beginning of a rich, lifelong conversation.
4) How could this book have been better written? And where and how was it well written? Yes, I want you to critique my writing. That’s something you should be able to do quite well by the end of a college education.
I hope you will bring questions like these to every book you read, both in college and for the rest of your life. One of the ends of an education is a curious mind that asks questions. There are other ends of an education, but a curious, probing mind is the beginning without which little else matters. I am terribly eager to have our conversation.
As you go off to college, I’d like you to think about these other ends of education. What does the word “education” mean at its root? What do you think are the other ends of education? This isn’t a grilling. But it is something I think should be very much on your mind during these next four years. What exactly are you pursuing? And what in fact are you actually getting?
Let’s talk about all this. I don’t expect you to have brilliant, finished answers. When I was your age, I didn’t have any answers, and, even more sadly, I didn’t have good questions, either. Now, in our conversation, I hope together we can think about these questions and answers. I can’t think of a better way for you to begin your university days. And while you are there, I’d love for you to call me and talk about what you are pursuing and what you are getting and what is making you happy and what is detracting from your happiness. And how you imagine the rest of the arc of your life.
With love,
Papa Mel
Mel Livatino lives in Evanston, Illinois. A regular contributor to this magazine, he has published in numerous literary journals. Since 2004, 13 of his pieces have been named notable essays of the year by the series Best American Essays, and he has recorded more than 75 of them for Recorded Recreational Reading for the Blind in Sun City, Arizona.