Dear James by R. O. Blechman

Author:R. O. Blechman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

July 1, 1984

Dear James,

I’m returning your cartoon with a gold star. Only one? I could plaster it with dozens, I like your drawing so much. But I don’t dare do anything to distract from your drawing.

What a concept! Isaac Newton reclining beneath that legendary tree, only to have the apple fall, unseen, on the other side. Brilliant!

Your drawing so perfectly comments on the arbitrariness of life, how one event, so small in itself, can be world-altering. If Charles Darwin had not voyaged on the Beagle and not stopped at the Galápagos, could he have conceived his theory of evolution? If Alexander Fleming’s window had not been left open one night, and if a passing spore had not happened to land on a culture of bacteria and killed them, could he have gone on to discover penicillin? In fact, it was pure chance that Fleming even enrolled in the hospital where his research was conducted. Saint Mary’s Hospital had a water polo team that Fleming wanted to join. Later he changed his branch of research to bacteriology because Saint Mary’s had an opening on its rifle team and Fleming was a crack rifleman. Talk of happenstance!

These and other instances of fateful accidents—the discoveries of photography, X-rays, and pasteurization—they come to mind when I look at your wonderful drawing. History is rife with instances of apples just happening to fall on a tree’s “right” side. Your concept is so brilliant, so funny and insightful in equal measure. But I am tempted to clip an edge off the star I put on your cartoon. The drawing is not quite worthy of your concept. Your Newton is perfect. Your apple as well—even having a single leaf on the right side of the apple to emphasize that something is happening only on one side (the wrong side!) of the tree. And how nice that the leaf is bending with the direction of the fall. I’ll bet that you acted out the situation while drawing it (my wife says that when I draw, I often laugh, grimace, or groan as I experience the emotion I’m trying to express). But the leaves of the tree could have been a little fuller, the foliage a little higher. The tree looks shorn. But this is a quibble, and now that I think about it, a silly one, so forget what I just wrote.

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