The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(11)

But our plans were about to be disrupted.

Late that night, my cell phone rang. It was my wife, Rachel. My father had been rushed to the hospital, and the situation looked serious. I booked the next flight to New York and called Jane to tell her that I would need to postpone our talks until my father was stable. For me, hope and hopelessness were no longer intellectual. They were everything.





(CATALIN AND DANIELA MITRACHE)





II


Jane’s Four Reasons for Hope





REASON 1: THE AMAZING HUMAN INTELLECT



Freud was the alpha male at this time. Intelligent and an excellent boss. Will we ever know what they are thinking? (MICHAEL NEUGEBAUER/WWW .MINEPHOTO.COM)



“I was so sorry to hear about your father,” Jane said four months later when we met in the Netherlands.

What had originally been diagnosed as routine aging and increasing infirmity in my father’s legs turned out to be aggressive T-cell lymphoma of the central nervous system attacking his spinal cord and then his brain. I spent the months after I flew back from Dar es Salaam visiting him at the hospital in New York as he heroically attempted to hold on to hope and his consciousness until both ultimately succumbed to the cancer. I will never forget the bravery and equanimity with which he met the news that his cancer was incurable and that he only had weeks or possibly months to live. “I guess it’s time to face the inevitable,” he said.

When he was in excruciating pain and on the precipice of death, I asked him how long he thought he would stay around. “Just as long as it takes to get landing instructions,” he said, “or to leap into eternity.” I was seeing that there were limits to hope, and I was still deep in grief. Jane’s kindness and understanding meant a great deal during the brutal months of my dad’s illness and death.

Jane and I were meeting now in a renovated forester’s cabin in the middle of the woods in a nature preserve near Utrecht. The cottage was cozy and well insulated against the bone-chilling cold and wind that blows across much of the Netherlands in the winter. We sat across from each other as slanted sunlight filtered through the windows and a log fire crackled.

Jane had just spent four days at her family home in England after a long trip to Beijing, Chengdu, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Singapore. Despite her almost constant travels around the world, she seemed energetic and eager to begin. She wore a blue turtleneck and a green jacket, and her hands were clasped across a gray wool blanket.

“Thank you for your condolences,” I said. Jane had written when my father finally passed. “I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly.”


Doug’s father, Richard Abrams, several years before his diagnosis. (MICHAEL GARBER)



“The sad part was the reason you had to go.”

“It’s been a difficult few months,” I admitted.

“You don’t really get over it. It is such a great loss,” Jane said. “I guess the depth of our grief is a reminder of the depth of our love.”

I smiled, touched by her words. “He was a wonderful father.”

On his deathbed it was his heart and his love even more than his head and his reason that seemed most important to him, so I wondered why the human intellect was one of Jane’s reasons for hope. If anything, as my father’s neurons fired together and then unraveled into delirium, I’d been struck by how fragile our consciousness is. Our mind seemed so delicate and so fallible.

We sat for a moment, honoring the memory of my father and all the people we had lost. And then we began.

“Why is the human intellect one of your reasons for hope?” I asked.





From Prehistoric Ape to Master of the World



“Well, it is what makes us most different from chimpanzees and other animals,” Jane said, “the explosive development of our intellect.”

“What exactly do you mean by the human intellect?”

“The part of our brain that reasons and solves problems.”

At one time scientists said that these characteristics were confined to humans, and Jane was one of the people most responsible for showing that intelligence is on a continuum across all animals, including humans. I mentioned this to Jane.

“Yes, today we know that animals are way, way more intelligent than people used to think,” she said. “Chimpanzees and the other great apes can learn four hundred or more words of American Sign Language; work out complex problems on a computer; and, like some other animals including pigs, love painting and drawing. Crows are amazingly intelligent, as are parrots. Rats are incredibly smart.”

“I remember you also telling me in Tanzania that octopuses are extraordinarily clever and can solve all sorts of problems even though their brains are structured so differently from mammalian brains,” I said.

Jane laughed. “They actually have brains in each of their eight arms! Here’s something else you’ll like—apparently you can teach bumblebees to roll a little ball into a hole for the reward of a drop of nectar. And even more remarkably—other bees, who have not been trained, can perform the same task after merely watching the trained bees. We are learning new things all the time and I always tell students that this is a wonderful time to study animal intelligence.”