Staying Intoxicated

Always be drunk! That is paramount; that is the sole issue.

To avoid the appalling burden of Time that breaks your shoulders

and bends you to the ground, you must be drunk without pause.

With what?

With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you prefer.

But be intoxicated!

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch,

in the dreary solitude of your room,

You awaken and the intoxication abates or disappears,

Ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, ask all that is fleeting,

all that groans, all that travels, all that sings, all that speaks:

“What is the time?”

And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will answer:

“It is the time for intoxication. If you do not want to be the tormented

slaves of Time,

be drunk without pause!

With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you prefer.”

Charles Baudelaire, “Enivrez-vous” from Le Spleen de Paris, 1869

(Translation by Mitch Cohen)

It was a very unsettling feeling. After completing years of grueling coursework and passing several terrifying comprehensive examinations, I had spent additional years of 14-hour days in the laboratory and the library working on my research topic. With great effort I had finished my investigation, completed the analysis and interpretation, and had written the thesis. I had then submitted the thesis and successfully defended it in a formal oral review, and a few days later I was told that it had been accepted, so that I would be awarded my PhD. Of course this news filled me with elation and enormous relief since I had at long last achieved my objective after stressful, seemingly endless toil. But these pleasant feelings were soon overtaken by a strange, disturbing feeling of bewilderment and emptiness.

For years there had not been the slightest question of how to fill each day. I had a seemingly endless mental list of pressing tasks to complete, and each day flew by at astonishing speed as I tried to cram it with as many accomplishments as possible. But now suddenly there was no difficult challenge to confront, no requirement to satisfy, and no deadline to meet. I felt profoundly disoriented. My conscience told me that I must have overlooked some urgent tasks and that there must be yet more elusive goals I should be striving toward. But if so, I could not find these tasks and goals. I therefore felt like a powerful engine running at a dangerously high speed simply because it was not linked to its usual workload.

Fortunately this dilemma was of only short duration because a few weeks later I began my first job. The new job was the beginning of a very long professional career in research and development in the field of applied physics. This career brought me into several world-class industrial research laboratories, where I was privileged to work on important, exciting projects and was able to interact with vital, innovative colleagues and recognized experts in various fields. While I changed the focus of my research several times during my career, every problem that I worked on rewarded me with immense gratification, even though each problem required my full concentration and energy. I was able to publish a large number of papers on my work in professional journals, file a good many patents, and present my results at many international conferences. My career was both intensely absorbing and fully satisfying.

In due course I married, and my wife and I had two children. I did find time for family and friends, as well as for some hobbies. But as was the case for many of my co-workers, the division of time between laboratory and family always presented a challenging problem. There was, for example, many an evening when I heard the exasperated voice of my wife on the telephone pleading with me to finally come home for supper. I always found it difficult to tear myself away from the engrossing problems that I was attacking at the moment, and re-enter the non-professional world.

The years went by, and I began to recognize that my colleagues seemed gradually to be getting younger and younger. I was becoming one of the oldtimers of the laboratory, a circumstance that finally forced me to ponder my own mortality. How much more time did I want to spend in my career? If I continued to work at my usual breakneck pace indefinitely, would I miss out on the many aspects of life that I had been neglecting? Would I miss a comfortable, fun-filled retirement? Wasn’t it high time to take the plunge?

It was after much soul searching that I decided to retire from the IBM Research Laboratory in December 2000. The first problem that thereupon faced my wife and myself was the choice of a location for the retirement years. We did not want to continue living in Westchester County in a house now much larger than our needs required. But where should we go? After some deliberation we decided to return to the Boston area, where each of us had started our careers. There we knew that we would find the cultural and intellectual atmosphere we enjoyed, and that we would also have easy access to areas of great natural beauty.

However, some months before my final workday, I suffered an intense bout of anxiety. What, in fact, would I do during retirement? I would get up each morning and … and then what? I would have no laboratory to rush to, no challenging problem to work on, no brilliant colleagues to consult, and no structure in my life. Was I exchanging a meaningful life for one of profound emptiness and boredom? Fortunately, I found a solution to this quandary.

Some months before, at a specialists’ conference, I had buttonholed a senior manager of research in a large international firm and had inquired about job opportunities at a subsidiary of his company in the Boston area. Through his good offices I was offered a part-time position that required only a three-day workweek. I was confident that such a part-time arrangement would provide an easy, gradual transition into the full retirement that had to come.

This plan seemed successful. I found that I fully enjoyed my four-day weekends and the opportunity to pursue hobbies and contacts with a wide variety of people. However, I began to get more and more absorbed in my job, and soon began to work four days a week. I was again becoming completely captivated by the work, which I again found both challenging and rewarding. However, this interregnum came to a sudden halt when the technology bubble started to burst and the parent company first downsized, then closed its Boston subsidiary. Perhaps I should have taken that opportunity to make the transition to full retirement then and there, but I still felt unready, and secured yet another job, this time with a small start-up company, but again on a three-day/week basis. Nevertheless, once again I soon found myself working four days a week.

The final end of my working life came after a few years when I was told that the company had found my four-day workweek unacceptable, and that I was needed for a full five-day workweek. In my circumstances I felt unable to give the company more time than four days each week, and therefore tendered my resignation. Even though the management then relented and offered a resumption of my shortened schedule, I decided that the time had finally come for full retirement—after all, I was nearly ten years beyond the traditional retirement age of 65.

But just after ending my career I began to relive the very same anxiety, the same withdrawal symptoms that I had experienced more than 45 years before upon finishing my thesis prior to the start of my career. How was I going to spend each and every day? Would I again become a purposeless runaway machine? How could I find meaning in life after such an intense, totally engrossing career? I had immensely enjoyed a liquor that provided the

intoxication prescribed by the poet to “avoid the appalling burden of Time.” If I had to forego that particular liquor, where could I find a substitute?

The traditional pursuits of retirees seemed wholly inadequate to me. To lie on a beach, to sit in front of a television, to gossip idly with the neighbors, to passively watch sporting events, or to shop for items I did not need could not possibly offer the fulfillment I craved. To be sure, I did have several hobbies. I liked the outdoors and enjoyed hiking, bicycling,

boating, and cross-country skiing. I liked photography, book collecting, and reading. I found pleasure in the company of family and friends, and liked the shared activities of play going, dining, and group discussions on the topics of the day. I also enjoyed travel to far-off places—but only for a limited time, because being a voyeur and not a participant was to me ultimately unsatisfying. But the pursuit of these pastimes, however pleasurable, would

not be enough for me.

Realizing that I needed something more, I purposefully analyzed my emotional attachment to my past career. I asked myself, what was the fundamental basis of the enormous gratification that I had derived from my profession during all these years? What was the elemental ingredient that underlay my pleasure in penetrating the frontiers of science and technology? If I could identify that factor, perhaps I could find a substitute liquor that contained the magic ingredient, and that could thus serve to keep me in the same state of intoxication during my retirement years as I had enjoyed while working. It did not take me very long to understand that the key was my lifelong, undiminished curiosity about the world I was living in.

I believe that every child is born with an overwhelming sense of wonder and curiosity that impels him to explore the fresh, strange world that surrounds him. As the child grows older some of this wonder and freshness is inevitably lost as his world becomes more predictable and more familiar. There are some unfortunates who eventually lose their precious sense of wonder altogether, and who consequently live in a humdrum world of stale routine. However, I was one of the lucky ones who kept his childlike sense of wonder and curiosity ablaze, and hence I have always found intense satisfaction in perpetually learning something that was entirely new to me. Learning was what I craved—learning either from others by means of the spoken or written word, or learning from nature by means of experiment and reasoning. Learning was that fundamental ingredient I was seeking.

In actuality, my love of learning had started in kindergarten and had continued for seventy years. After all, learning a subject, discussing the topic with colleagues, being questioned and tested on my understanding, and writing papers based on my knowledge was what I had done from primary school through the university years, and was in fact also exactly what I had done throughout my professional career. In truth, I had always been a student, starting from childhood and continuing to mature age! If this was the case, why should I stop my ingrained habit simply because I had retired?

I had no concrete plan for furthering my learning experience upon moving to the Boston area. I simply assumed that somehow I could partake of the area’s renowned cultural opportunities—museums, libraries, concerts, lectures, and by some means also take advantage of opportunities at its universities. I had never heard of the special classes offered for seniors at several universities, but when friends described these programs I realized that such classes could help me achieve my goals—through such a program perhaps I could indeed continue my role as a lifelong student, and thus experience again the intoxication of learning.

I have not been disappointed in this hope. At HILR I am trying to satisfy my ravenous appetite for knowledge, particularly in those areas that I was forced to neglect during my past concentration on science and technology. I have delved into languages, literature, history, music, and those fields of science unfamiliar to me, and have even tried my hand at writing fiction. I have also found great satisfaction in leading a course in a field totally alien to my professional background, and hope to lead more courses. Some of the greatest satisfaction has come from intense discussions with classmates on intellectually challenging topics, both pertinent to our courses and of broader interest. But have I thereby succeeded in fully replacing my busy career with alternative pursuits that I now find just as satisfying?

My answer is, almost! I do find myself intensely involved in the subject matter of the HILR courses, and as a result am amply rewarded by the gratification of acquiring new knowledge and understanding. However, I cannot honestly say that I have found complete fulfillment because I cannot suppress my hankering after the pleasures of the laboratory; I still yearn for the lively interchanges with technical people in my specialty, and miss the excitement of international conferences.

On the other hand, I can say that my adventures in learning at HILR have certainly prevented the “abating and disappearing” of the state of intoxication that the poet warned against, so that I have experienced none of the withdrawal symptoms that I had feared upon retiring. I shall continue my search for ever more rewarding ventures during my retirement through activities both inside and outside of HILR. I am encouraged by the knowledge that many others at HILR are engaged in the same quest, and are also striving to drink ever more deeply the intoxicating liquor of learning.

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