James Baquet

    Of the many fine educational series aired in the 1970s and 80s, one of my favorites was “The Ascent of Man” with an unlikely host: Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974).

    A quiet man, he would pause so long in mid-sentence that we thought the TV was broken. But what he said was so deep, so thought-provoking, that we needed those pauses in order to process what he had said. His topic was nothing less than the development of Western civilization through science and technology. It was designed as a balance to 1969’s “Civilization,” Sir Kenneth Clark’s “personal view” of Western civ through art.

    “The Ascent of Man” started out with the evolution of humans from ape-like creatures, and went on at a stately pace through the development of tools and agriculture, metallurgy, and mathematics; the work of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Darwin; and genetics and atomic physics. Though it was aired in 1973 (the year I graduated high school) — meaning some of the later episodes are a bit dated — I’m still watching and learning from it today, and browsing the accompanying book.

    Dr. Bronowski was born in Poland, and lived as an “enemy alien” in German during World War I. His family moved to England when he was 12. In a television interview, he explained that his schooling there had given him his lifelong dual interests in science and literature. Because he was learning English at the same time as all his other subjects, he said, he learned that the word “water” and the symbol “H20” meant the same thing, and came to realize that “literature and science… were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.”

    He took a PhD in mathematics at Cambridge — where he edited a literary magazine. His first two books were on the lives of poets, while at the same time he worked as a scientist in the British war effort. After a growing interest in the life sciences, he became a founding consultant to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California — but he wrote a poem at Christmas every year, circulated only to friends and never published.

    He was truly a Renaissance Man.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. causing one to think

    2. slow and elegant

    3. double

    4. old-fashioned, out-of-date

    5. in the middle of saying something

    6. the science of producing metals

    7. played on television

    8. distributed, shared

    9. looking through

    10. one who lives in a country at war with his homeland