A Sad Way To Be: Richard Feynman And Frida Kahlo On Becoming Somebody
Unsurprisingly for such a serendipitous moment, I read a letter that the brilliant physicist Richard P. Feynman (May 11, 1918 — February 15, 1988) wrote to his former student Koichi Mano and was certain it should have been addressed to myself. Mano previously wrote to Feynman confiding his dissatisfaction with the type of “humble” problems his professional research centered on. Young and eager, Mano was further upset for yet remaining “a nameless man” in physicist circles. Feynman’s letter in response is both a consolation and correction to the tender and overconfident Mano and everybody else who similarly believes their potential is unrealized only for lack of opportunity, and who begin to emphasize making a name for themselves within their vocation more than the passion that initially drove them to it.
The letter, collected in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard Feynman, is dated February 3, 1966.
“Dear Koichi,
I was very happy to hear from you, and that you have such a position in the Research Laboratories.
Unfortunately your letter made me unhappy for you seem to be truly sad. It seems that the influence of your teacher has been to give you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems. The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make a little headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.
You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods. But at the same time I had another PhD student (Albert Hibbs) whose thesis was on how it is that the winds build up waves blowing over water in the sea. I accepted him as a student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on (namely, those problems you see you may do something about)…
I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I Sometimes could partially succeed…
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.
Best of luck and happiness.
Sincerely,
Richard P. Feynman”
Feynman kindly offers a self-evident reassurance that encompasses the theme of his entire letter. “No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.” Problems shouldn’t be disparaged because they are distanced from ones popularly considered most mysterious and profound. Nor should you expect to solve a complex problem if you haven’t first solved simpler ones. You don’t become an expert without learning all of the elementary stuffs first.
If it wasn’t difficult to become an expert then everybody, and therefore nobody, would be one. No chemist can understand oxidation/reduction reactions if they have not first studied the basic configuration of atoms and their valence electrons (and even those reactions are presented early in a budding chemist’s studies). Nobody goes to bed poor and wakes up the next morning awash in riches (though this is precisely the hope of every person who plays the lottery, conceives of an ill-fated Get Rich Quick scheme, or falls for someone else’s). You do not become a name without first making one.
The naïve ideals of my own youth have fashioned a desire for popularity from a belief that its necessary for my future aspirations in writing to matter. This isn’t entirely inaccurate. What good is a book if no one reads it, even if it is worth every page? But, I frequently feel I ought to be able to achieve that popularity immediately. Having only authored a single chapter of a single published book, this is an embarrassingly naïve ideal indeed.
No one will read your work if you don’t first have something worth writing and, secondly, actually write it and write it well. I trust that some of the ideas I have voiced in writing were well worth sharing, but like many others I am prone to take myself too seriously and occasionally slide into conceit (usually after climbing out of the muck of self-deprecation and before falling back into it).
The desire to be exceptional is very unexceptional. This is especially true in the United States where impossible leaps like those from no-name to celebrity or rags to riches are paved into the roadways of our national mythologies.
Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter whose life was so full of excitement, anguish, physical torment, and playfulness that it is literally extraordinary, noted this pathology in American culture with irritation. She had lived in the United States, which she called Gringolandia, almost consecutively for four years as her impressive, fat, philandering husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, worked on commissions for industrialists like the Fords and Rockefellers. Some years after moving back to Mexico, and a generation before Feynman wrote his letter to Koichi Mano, she recounted her criticisms to her close friend and most trusted medical opinion Dr. Leo Eloesser. In this letter, quoted from Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera, Frida writes with characteristic flow of dictation, as if she was actually speaking.
“Also their system of living seems to be the most repugnant, those damned parties, in which everything from the sale of a painting to a declaration of war is resolved after swallowing many little cocktails (they don’t even know how to get drunk in a spicy way) they always take into account that the seller of the painting or the declarer of war is an “important” personage, otherwise they don’t give one even a nickel’s worth of attention. In the U.S. they only suck up to the “important people” it doesn’t matter to them that they are unos hijos de su mother [Frida wrote “mother” in English] and like this I can give you a few other opinions of those gringo types. You might tell me that you can also live there without little cocktails and without “parties,” but without them one never amounts to anything, and it is irritating that the most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition, to succeed in becoming “somebody,” and frankly I no longer have even the least ambition to be anybody, I despise the conceit and being the gran caca [“big shit”] does not interest me in any way.”
Frida was right. Many facets of American culture reinforce the felt need to become “somebody” in order to be happy or matter, which is painfully evident in celebrity-worship. On the contrary, some popular culture acknowledges this common desire in order to oppose it. I recently watched a superb example of this in the DreamWorks Animation film Shark Tale. Oscar, a small fish voiced by Will Smith, is obsessed with becoming rich and famous so that he can finally be satisfied with life. The movie comes to a redemptive and slightly corny resolution when Oscar realizes the vanity in the fame he acquired as “The Shark Slayer” and proclaims, referring especially to the fish he loves, named Angie and voiced by Renée Zellweger, that what he really wanted was right in front of him all along. He did not find satisfaction in fame because what he needed was meaning and love, which money and popularity can’t provide. Flocking masses of fans cannot really know celebrities of this sort, which means they cannot understand them as individuals, and therefore cannot love them.
The roots of dissatisfaction extend downward from the seed of a bad assumption about what it means to make a name for ourselves. Frida was loved by many of the people she knew and later became widely popular for her artwork so that she was known by her name rather than as the wife of Diego Rivera. That was not a source of her spiritual satisfaction though, and so she never chased after fame. It came as a natural result of her creations, and her greatest concerns remained private ones. She did not fit with the American desire to become la gran caca, nor did she feel reverence or respect for people simply because they had status. (Herrera includes a hilarious example of this in her biography of Frida Kahlo. “Once, when Frida and Diego returned after spending an evening at the home of Henry Ford, whom Frida knew to be an avowed anti-semite, Diego burst into the apartment chortling heartily. Pointing to Frida, he cried, ‘What a girl! Do you know what she said when there was a quiet moment at the dining room table? She turned to Henry Ford, and she said, ‘Mr. Ford, are you Jewish?’”)
Frida’s disdain for the American desire to be “somebody” is complemented by the conclusion of Feynman’s letter to Mano, where he redefines what it means. Mano is assured that he’s not nameless to any of the people whose questions or happiness he could directly affect or be affected by. “Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly,” Feynman implores. When the time comes where we feel nameless even to ourselves, the remedy is to recognize that we are not nameless to those we care about most, and that if everyone wanted to be the bricklayer and never the brick, then no home would ever be built.
