“[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They’re one way when they’re by themselves, and another when they’re surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves and grow more appealing, and funnier. You wouldn’t want all of intellectual life to be that social—we couldn’t make progress that way. But there’s a special atmosphere that develops whenever truly different ideas congregate, and, on the whole, it’s too rare.”

**

josh rothman’s description of his linguistics seminar at harvard, and what he will attempt to do in his new blog for the new yorker leaves me enamoured, wistful, and with a slight pang remembering how when julian and i used to travel home after work on the same train line we had about 7 minutes together before he had to alight. we took turns: each day he gave a flash presentation on something new in his field, explained to me a concept in neuroscience, or described the findings of a recent psychology paper he had been reading; and i would talk about something i was researching, the history of a word i’d been looking up in the OED, an interesting notion from literary theory, a piece of historical information about reading cultures, and we had only seven minutes to do it in. it got so that even when we were not on trains we sometimes on meeting said: “what have you got for me? give me a seven minute lecture” and knew exactly what that meant. these off-the-cuff teaching interactions were gratifying, like impromptu and compressed ted talks, and all the more so for the improbability of where they were taking place (we would like to think that had one of our fellow passengers been listening in they would have enjoyed these mini-talks too.)

long ago in graduate school, when i lived in perkins hall, i enjoyed those one-off exchanges of field snapshots in communal spaces: you saunter into the kitchen in the morning in your dressing gown to make a cup of tea and while the water is boiling you have these random 3-minute conversations with whoever happened to be in the kitchen. the casual collision of ideas as you cadge tidbits of information and ideas about their work, which pea-like, rattle around your brain for a bit, pinballing off other ideas already within, though it was the utter nonchalance and incidental nature of these exchanges that was so wonderful. (conversations with the physicist down the hall, who plays the banjo and talks about force; and the irish biologist (whom i once caught putting a test tube full of poisonous red ants into the common kitchen fridge “to slow them down a bit”); and the chinese anthropologist who tells of the persecution of gay people in china; and the americanist who tells me about treasure troves of 19th century american naturist watercolours… i even once found myself explaining to someone from the school of education (i was cooking rice, he was eating dinner, so this went on rather longer than 3 minutes) about the concept of every word being a poem in relation to its own history (why historic linguistics is exciting to me) which he then connected to some education theory he was reading, about nodes and cognition and student learning. it is, you know, wormhole writing, and wormhole thinking. i’d never have thought of visualising historic linguistics in terms of nodality, and he had not thought of the genealogy of words outside their modern meanings. the bell has rung on my grad school times, but not yet on the social life of my ideas.