how to be truly engaged with life: Marie Curie and the joy of work

Firstly! Next week we are going to start our ‘COUCH TO 5K’ FOR READING. If you want to get nicely prepared, this is an amazing time to:

• start making a list for yourself of things you really fancy reading in July and August, or things you’ve always felt that you really wanted to read

• have a think about given your life as it is right now, the season of life you’re in, how much reading you would like to be doing every day: what feels to you like “yes, this is me at my good level where I am not feeling constantly frustrated that I’m not reading enough and missing out on stuff, but also you’re not going ‘ugh this is overwhelming, I wake up every day and feel stressed about how I’m going to fit this reading in’?”

• ask yourself the following question: “why is it that I want to read more?” It might be all sorts of reasons, including enjoying it, or wanting to build your focus, or feeling that it is part of a full life, or anything else. I would love if people shared their reasons in the comments below!

I will be suggesting reading plans for three tracks, so good to think about which one you might fit into:

1. easing in (for people who are quite time-poor)

2. building up a reading habit (for people who know they’re scrolling too much and want to refocus their time on reading)

3. deep reading (for people who are reading OK but want to push themselves to tackle some harder material)

There will also be ENRICHMENT activities and extra credit challenges. It is all my reckons for now and quite an experiment. We’ll find out how it works when we try it. If you subscribe now, you’ll get an email about it every week - which will probably be a section of the regular newsletter unless that becomes unwieldy.

Over the summer, the BBC - and the academics I’ve interviewed - have incredibly kindly allowed me to put up a few of the full interviews from my programme, Human Intelligence. Because the BBC is public service, each of the Human Intelligence posts will be free. Out of an hour or so of recording only about five minutes makes it into the programme, so I’m delighted to share these wonderful enriching conversations.

Did you know that the word radium, for the radioactive element that Marie Curie discovered relates to the Polish word RAD, which means joy1? That’s the word Marie Curie, Polish exile, chose for one of the things she discovered, and it represents how she felt about the incredibly hard but tremendously rewarding work that she did with her life. She had had to fight so hard to be able to do this work, and she was motivated throughout her life by a boundless curiosity.

This is something she wrote in a letter to her brother:

“Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted in something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

What an incredible line. It is really worth pausing and reflecting on it. We must believe, she says, that we are gifted in something. It feels like such a hostage to fortune! How dangerous to start believing that you are definitely “gifted” in something. Yet it probably is a good idea to live your life as though your life was supposed to show you something that you are good at, a place in the world where you can be really useful. If you start there, you will probably find something.

Earlier in the letter she says “the days are so short and that they pass so quickly. One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done, and if one didn’t like the work it would be very discouraging.”

She’s giving her brother a beautiful pep talk, about his thesis but she was only 27 when she wrote that letter in 1894 - she hadn’t really achieved anything yet, certainly not the things she would go on to achieve. So she is really talking about how she keeps herself going, the sense of needing to find the things that she excels at and to pursue them however she can. That was how she found joy in her life.

Marie Curie really did not have an easy life in many ways. She did die of sickness caused by her work with radiation but if you have read the Adrienne Rich poem Power2… it’s not true that “her wounds came from the same source as her power”. She didn’t deny that radiation caused sickness, she knew that it burned the skin. But she also knew that she hadn’t ever ingested radium and thought it was more likely that her illness was caused by her work in the fields of WW1 running a mobile x-ray unit. When she was exhumed in the 1990s it was found that, indeed, her body contained only trace amounts of radium. So that poem annoys me in two ways3: it’s making this incredibly brilliant woman much less brilliant than she was, and also your wounds don’t always give you power, these things are separate. Marie Curie’s power was from her determination, her sense of duty, her curiosity, her vast intelligence. She wouldn’t have wanted us to valorise her wounds and it does her a disservice to dwell on them when there was so much more to her life and work. She was interested in what she could do for the world and she… you know… she discovered something that can and does cure cancer.

In the original Human Intelligence programme - for which I did this interview - I opened the programme by talking about the Flying University, which was an organisation in Poland that helped young women get an education, even though the Russian occupying forces had made it illegal to teach women. This is actually one of those things that I find it hard to write or talk about without crying? I think it’s probably quite obvious that I pick some of the subjects for Human Intelligence because I have a personal identification with some part of their story4. I am so incredibly identified with any woman - any person, really, but particularly any woman - who has had to fight for an education against a system that tried to deny it to her.

My own story was not quite as dramatic as the flying university, but I think it was probably still more dramatic than most feminists in the UK have ever experienced. When I was 10 years old in my Orthodox Jewish primary school, the boys were taken out of the room to begin to learn Talmud, the Jewish books of law, whilst we girls were left in the classroom to do other things. I don’t know how the other girls in the class felt about this. I remember it as an absolute moment of sustained horror. By which I mean every time I come back to it in my mind, it still horrifies me. There was a door, and if you could walk through that door, there was education on the other side, but what you needed to walk through that door was a penis.

It’s a proper strangling, choking feeling. If this story about my grandmother is about wanting recognition, I think the story about realising there was education I wasn’t allowed to have is even more visceral. There’s something so Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” about it for me. How are we all standing around and allowing this thing to happen? No, not even just allowing it, actually doing it.

I did eventually manage to learn some Talmud. There is an organisation in Jerusalem called Matan which teaches Orthodox Jewish women Talmud - the first bit you start off learning is the bit in the Talmud which is used to support the view that women aren’t allowed to study it, and they teach you why it’s bullshit. I also went to Talmud classes in New York. In the UK, things are still perhaps a bit backward. I tried to go to a Talmud class in London that was advertised as being open to everyone. When I turned up, they told me that I had come to the wrong place and that the Jewish art class was down the hall. It involved a lot of somewhat humiliating behind-the-scenes negotiation to be allowed to attend that class. (I had to promise I wouldn’t interfere with the men’s learning and wouldn’t turn up in revealing or skimpy clothing...) I went for a term, and then they moved the whole class so that it was not on the night when the educational classes are advertised as being open to everyone.

I know it feels like these stories about women not being able to be educated are from a distant era, but they don’t feel distant to me. I know that they are happening right now in the city that I live in.

So I have a huge amount of empathy with and identification with Marie Curie. Obviously, I am not a scientific genius. But, as you’ll hear in this interview, she was someone who took vast delight in her work. She described working all day in the lab with her husband and then sneaking back at night to take an extra peek at their research. I really understand the feeling that, when you have been denied the ability to be educated or to work, it becomes obvious that work truly is the greatest joy in life. I hoover up education, and I take on challenging work because it became clear to me on the day that the door closed and I was on the wrong side of it, that they were keeping the best thing in the world behind that shut door.

Enjoy this extended interview. I loved talking to Dava Sobel about the wonderful Marie Curie. Let her feelings about learning (and about literature!) inspire you when you’re thinking about what you might like to read this summer.

If you liked this post do give it a like, it helps other people find it. I send out a letter about something that’s interesting me most Sundays, I am wilfully unpredictable but this post will give a sense of what I’m like. Fundamentally, I am in favour of thinking. I know.