Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 16

George left home for good at the age of sixteen. In the next five years he and his father saw each other only once. Occasionally they exchanged stiff letters. Their estrangement deepened. Somehow things had gone wrong. There is a variety of opinion as to why.

One Princeton colleague: “Freeman had a rough time. He had Sir George and his boy George at both ends—two male figures who have something he doesn’t. Or thinks he doesn’t. Freeman imagines he’s a more timid soul.”

Another Princeton colleague: “I have a hunch it was entirely George. The same thing happened with a lot of families in the late sixties and early seventies—during the Vietnam War. It’s similar to difficulties I’ve had with two of my own children. I can’t shed any light on it, because I never understood what happened between me and my own son and daughter. Pretty much a total disconnect.”

A former Princeton resident: “Freeman is a very sentimental person, like many mathematicians. He lives by his fantasies, but he executes them. He dresses like Einstein now—a little sloppy. He doesn’t grasp George. Freeman’s an Establishment baby. He’s an Establishment person who has sold out and is trying to retrieve his soul through George.”

Verena Huber-Dyson: “Freeman couldn’t really enjoy the animal warmth of his one and only son, because of the necessity to mold him. He felt a tremendous obligation, which was paralyzing.”

George Dyson: “I felt completely molded into my undertakings by him. By his preconceptions of what his son should be. It was like I was his proxy. The atmosphere at home was cold, but any outward trip was reinforced. Like camping. I didn’t particularly enjoy those first adventures. I felt I had to do them. It’s not what you want as a kid at all.”

Katrina (when I asked her how it was that her stepfather, who had been so good with her, could have had so much trouble with his son): “He’s good with little girls. George was not a make-believe child. He was a real boy, with a strong spirit.”

Freeman himself says little about the separation, aside from taking the blame. “These five years have been me. It’s been my fault. He’s been on the other side of the country. There was the expense and . . . and I thought it was important for George to get away, to be on his own.”

But it is possible to find more about George between the lines of what Freeman writes. Freeman’s confessional piece on his days with the RAF, published in 1971, during the Vietnam War and shortly after George had left the U.S. for Canada, seems addressed in part to his pacifist son. If the confession rings a little false, or rings at least peculiar—and certain of Freeman’s acquaintances think it does—then the fault may lie in its undercover polemicism. George appears too, of all places, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 1969, the year George left home, Freeman enumerated for that journal several facts of modern life:

“ . . . A third fact of life is drugs. By this I mean not the harmless legal drugs like aspirin and penicillin, but the illegal ones, LSD, marijuana, and so forth. Many people no doubt have more experience with these than I do, but at least I have not brought up a couple of teen-agers without realizing that drugs are an important part of the landscape.

“ . . . I find the underlying pattern to be the propensity of human beings to function best in rather small groups. Our pot-smoking teen-agers are unanimous in saying that the great thing about pot is not the drug itself but the comradeship which it creates. And to make the comradeship real, there must not only be a group of friends inside the circle but enemies outside, police and parents and authorities to be defied. This is human life the way it is: my son wearing his hair odiously long just because I dislike to be seen together with it in public, and we of the older generation fulfilling our duty as parents by keeping our hair short and marijuana illegal.”

Freeman’s solution was dramatic. The answer was in the new frontier of space. Out there, he wrote, “Man’s tribal instincts will move back from the destructive channels of nationalism, racism, and youthful alienation, and find satisfaction in the dangerous life of a frontier society.”

This, for someone searching for George between the lines, is startling. The generation gap suddenly becomes an interplanetary void. Freeman seems to have contemplated shooting his odiously long-haired son entirely off this globe.

In 1972, at Birkbeck College in London, Freeman gave a lecture he called “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” He had borrowed the title from a book by the physicist J. D. Bernal, whom the occasion in London was honoring. Freeman acknowledged Bernal’s influence on his own ideas, conceded that their shared view of the future was as unpopular now as in 1928, when Bernal first advanced it, and then roughly paraphrased it: Man would defeat the World, its limited resources and living space, by leaving the planet for free-floating colonies in space. Man would defeat the Flesh, its various diseases and infirmities, with the aid of bionic organs, biological engineering, and self-reproducing machinery. Man would defeat the Devil—the irrational in his nature—by reorganizing society along scientific lines and by learning intellectual control over his emotions. “Bernal understood,” said Freeman, “that his proposals for the remaking of man and society flew in the teeth of deeply entrenched human instincts. He did not on that account weaken or compromise his statement. He believed that a rational soul would ultimately come to accept his vision of the future as reasonable, and that for him was enough. He foresaw that mankind might split into two species, one following the technological path which he described, the other holding on as best it could to the ancient folkways of natural living. And he recognized that the dispersion of mankind into the vastness of space is precisely what is required for such a split of the species to occur without intolerable strife and social disruption.”

But did Bernal foresee that the split might appear between one generation and the next? Did it occur to Freeman, as he paraphrased in London, that this speciation might already have come to pass—that he and his son were different animals?