[ Civilisation ]
by Kenneth Barnes
Sunday Evening Talk July 4th 1954
Extracts from Madame Curie
by Eve Curie
The room gave on to a courtyard, on the other side of which was a wooden shack, an abandoned shed, with a skylight roof in such bad condition that it admitted rain. The Faculty of Medicine had formerly used the place as a dissecting room, but for a long time now it had not even been considered fit for a mortuary. It was furnished with some worn kitchen tables, a blackboard which had landed there for no known reason, and an old cast iron stove with a rusty pipe.
A workman would not willingly have worked in such a place: Pierre and Marie, nevertheless, resigned themselves to it.
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One morning a heavy wagon, like those which deliver coal drew up in the Rue Lhomond before the School of Physics. Pierre and Marie were notified ….. Full of curiosity and impatience, she wanted to open one of the sacks and contemplate her treasure without further waiting. She cut the strings, undid the coarse sacking and plunged her two hands into the dull brown ore, still mixed with pine needles from Bohemia.
That was where radium was hidden. It was from there that Marie must extract it, even if she had to treat a mountain of this inert stuff like dust on the road.
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We had no money, no laboratory and no help … I may say without exaggeration that this period was, for my husband and myself, the heroic period of our common existence.
……. It was in this miserable shed that the best and happiest years of our life were spent, entirely consecrated to work. I sometimes passed the whole day stirring a boiling mass with an iron rod nearly as big as myself. In the evening I was broken with fatigue.
I came to treat as many as twenty kilograms of matter at a time, which had the effect of filling the shed with great jars of precipitates and liquids. It was killing work to carry the receivers, to pour off the liquids and to stir, for hours at a stretch, the boiling matter in a smelting basin.
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In 1902, forty-five months after the day on which the Curies announced the probable existence of Radium …. Marie Curie succeeded in preparing a decigramme of pure radium … The incredulous chemists – of whom there were still a few – could only bow before the facts, before the superhuman obstinacy of a woman.
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“Don’t light the lamps!” Marie said in the darkness. Then she added with a little laugh: “Do you remember the day when you said to me: ‘I should like radium to have a beautiful colour’?
The reality was more entrancing than the simple wish of long ago. Radium had something better than “a beautiful colour”; it was spontaneously luminous. And in the sombre shed, where, in the absence of cupboards, the precious particles in their tiny glass receivers were placed on tables or on shelves nailed to the wall, their phosphorescent bluish outlines gleamed, suspended in the night.
Sunday Evening Talk. July 4th 1954
This story of the isolation of radium by Marie Curie is one of the most moving and dramatic stories in the history of science. Think of the four years of unceasing patient labour, the vast quantities of raw material used, and the tiny quantity of radium finally isolated. Only those who know what fractional crystallisation involves in sheer hard repetitive work will appreciate the discipline to which Marie Curie submitted herself – continual dissolving and crystallising, day after day, month after month, year after year, without any dramatic or exciting occurrence to stimulate her determination; only the hope of the distant final result. And at the end she obtained how much radium? Perhaps one ten millionth of the total quantity of ore used. When I read in Eve Curie’s book about Marie plunging her hands into the sack and lifting out the dull brown ore from which she had to start, I thought how like life itself her work during those four years was to be. The amount of radioactive material that she isolated in the end was so infinitesimally small, yet when it was fully understood it completely transformed our understanding of all matter. When we understood radium we understood all the rest.
In all life we are presented with a great mass of material. Experiences come at us jumbled, in no ordered sequence, often too rapidly for us to understand them or even sort them out. Slowly, sometimes painfully and laboriously, we do begin to sort them out, to discover what little there is that has a permanent meaning and significance for us, the little that we can hold on to and make our own. But as that little becomes clearer and purer it begins to transform our whole approach to life, as radium did our understanding of matter.
A boy or girl looking at the world of nature can often appreciate beauty in an immediate way and know that he or she is in the presence of something unmixed and eternal it its meaning; but this is not true of “civilization”. Civilization is all too like the dull brown ore. How can we see through its vast unattractive bulk to imagine anything that is pure and lovely? Indeed civilization often seems like a great spreading corruption. Often when I visit London, I watch people hurrying between offices and shops, sitting dully in buses or tube trains, or serving behind endless counters. For a moment I see nothing but a mad scramble that enslaves everyone – a scramble for money or possessions or power. I have to exercise all my imagination to recognise that there is still something essentially human in all these people driven to and fro, strained and bewildered, or just dumb. Civilization batters at people with every kind of mental and emotional assault. Every impulse and interest is played upon unscrupulously by cheap literature and advertisements, so that if people are not careful they become the unwitting victims of the most cynical forces, demanding their money and their allegiance and indeed their very integrity as a sacrifice. We have continuously to ask ourselves whether we understand what all the forces of civilization are trying to do to us, whether we are exercising all our judgement is the way we allow ourselves to be influenced, or are simply allowing ourselves to be carried along by the tide.
Lately in school council meetings we have been considering what newspapers and magazines should be put in the common room, and this has led me to examine a number of popular magazines that I never otherwise have the time or interest to look at. What a vast quantity of printed matter is produced and sold to the public! And how much of permanent value is there in all of it? The proportion would not be more than the proportion of radium in that brown ore, not more than one ten-millionth. Not more than this proportion of all the reading matter produced expresses any sort of truth or beauty or contributes anything of permanent value to our lives. I looked over the glossy covers of row upon row of magazines on a big railway bookstall. What a very large number of them displayed a girl in a state of provocative almost-nakedness! We must ask ourselves what all this means, what it is intended to do to us, what appeal it makes. The naked human body, especially in the young, is a thing of great loveliness and beauty, and need never be a matter for shame. It is not surprising that from the earliest stirrings of man’s desire to draw and paint, the human body has fascinated and inspired the artist. But these provocative nudes have neither humanity nor beauty. They are intended to draw attention to the sexual parts of the body as though the body existed only to carry those parts around. Thus sex is taken right out of its setting in the wholeness and beauty of humanity and made into something foul, like an amputated limb. I looked into one of these magazines, one that ten or fifteen years ago was a rather pleasant and witty little production. Since I last saw it, it had evidently gone sharply down the slope to join the sewer tide of filthy pornography. It now contains articles about crime and sexual depravity written so as to appear like an exposure of what is bad in the world but actually in such a way as to make evil fascinating to the unguarded mind. I thought of writing to the editor to tell him what I thought of this degeneration, but it was easy to guess how such a protest would be treated in the editorial office. It would be treated with cynical contempt by men whose only interest is in selling the paper and increasing the circulation, caring nothing about the depravity they encourage in so doing.
The human body has been called the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Though I do not agree with the sentimental way in which that phrase has been used by some people concerned with the morals of the young, yet there is a sense in which it is profoundly true. The human body and the sex impulse can be used freely to express at the deepest level people’s tenderness for one another. It will be remembered that Jesus one day found the Temple filled with unscrupulous money changers, doing their dirty business within its holy walls. He drove them out saying: “… ye have made it a den of theives (sic) .” If the human body is a temple, then of no temple could it be more truly said that it has been made a den of thieves. Nothing has been more criminally exploited for profit-making purposes than a woman’s body and men’s interest in it.
There is nothing wrong in our interest in the human body or in our sex impulses. It is in the spirit in which these are expressed that makes good or evil. All the blatant, cheap, vulgar propaganda of civilization is at work to degrade this spirit. We have always, therefore, to be on our guard against the degrading influences, and for many young people – precisely because they are all the time surrounded by the appeal of this dangerous rubbish – it is a painful and laborious process to discover what is thoroughly sweet and satisfying.
All that I have just said concerns mainly the world outside the school. But even within a selected and somewhat guarded community like a school it is necessary and often difficult to sort out experiences and discover the good. What does a school look like at a first glance? To an adult whose school days are long past and who is not used to the life of a teacher, a school often seems a quite horrifying place. It seems a place of noise, waste of energy, endless fooling and teasing; a place where there is always teasing, tale telling gossip, spite, destructiveness, greed, envy, and even sometimes theft. That’s the dull brown ore of school life. It is not only like that to a visiting adult, but it is often like that to a child before he has developed any capacity for sorting out experience. Things happen to him one after another with nothing to connect them and give them meaning. We who have been working with children for many years are, like Marie Curie was when she began working on her mass of ore, convinced of the precious quality of the material hidden below the surface, and we know that we can eventually reach it. We have seen it year after year making itself more clearly known to us. But how much is each boy and girl in the school doing to discover this “radium”? Although it does not need always to be conscious, it should be an unceasing process.
The search of radium is like the search for the Kingdom of Heaven. There is a very close parallel between the experiences of Marie Curie and the ways in which Jesus tried to illustrate the way we discover the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is like something very tiny – a seed of a pearl – yet of immense value, and once we recognise its value we are prepared to give up everything else to secure it. Like a seed, though small it can grow to a great size. It can become so significant that it completely transforms our feeling about life. Radium, as I have said, once it was isolated and understood, completely transformed our whole attitude to matter; even the structure (sic) of the atoms in the waste material from the ore took on an entirely new aspect when radium was understood. In a similar way when we have understood the Kingdom of Heaven we are no longer reduced to hopelessness and defeat by the sight of the dull brown ore of civilization; we can even believe that there is hope and possibilities of inspiration in the dingy town streets or the blank faces of people going home from their work in the crowded tube train. We have seen into the structure of the human spirit, and what we see is encouraging. We have seen something of the meaning of beauty, truth and love, which are aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven. Again, when radium was isolated, it glowed with its own energy and the sight of it carried complete conviction. The sceptical scientist could no longer doubt its reality and its uniqueness. In the same way, when we penetrate to the heart of experience and discover the Kingdom of Heaven, when we know beauty, truth and love, we have found something that glows with its own energy from within, that carries complete conviction
There is yet another parallel that has just occurred to me. Until fairly recently it was thought that the earth was steadily cooling down; it was like a mass of iron that we had heated in a furnace and put aside to cool; it could not remain warm. But now we have a quite different picture. It is probable that the earth is being heated from within, continuously supplied with energy from the small quantities of radioactive materials like radium, distributed all through its crust. The total amount of this radioactive material is extremely small, infinitesimal in comparison with the whole weight of the earths crust, yet it is an immense source of energy – and it keeps us warm, it prevents the earth from cooling into something utterly inert and lifeless. The Kingdom of Heaven has the same significance for living humanity. Remember that in using this phrase I am using the phrase that Jesus used – a mysterious and picturesque one – for something that cannot in fact be described because it is so significant and yet in a sense so elusive. If we look at humanity as a whole we often see a terrifying picture of evil and destruction, something that surely must eventually degenerate, waste all its energy and become extinct. But it does not and it will not. The mysterious source of life and hope that is expressed in the concept of the Kingdom of Heaven keeps humanity warmed from within, continually keeps it supplied with energy to make up for what is dissipates. Goodness seems as tenuous, as diluted, in relation to the weight of evil in the world, as does radium in relation to the earth’s mass, yet it is enough to keep humanity everlastingly renewed.
There is now another question that we must try to answer. What was it that kept Marie Curie going through all those forty-five months of unremitting toil, kept her both mentally alive and physically capable of the hard labour? It could not have been just obstinacy. It is never wholly possible to answer such a question. We can never presume to enter another person’s spirit or pretend to know just what moved her. But undoubtedly there was something in nature of a faith that kept her at her task. We can see that a number of small observations were building up a conviction of the existence of something elusive but real, and her ideas were beginning to fall into a pattern that seemed to hold together of itself – a pattern that had the quality of truth. Her faith was not just something outside herself – but also in her own intimate self. She once wrote:
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
Marie Curie was undoubtedly “gifted for something” – she was indeed a genius whose staggeringly great ability leaves the rest of us humbled. But Christianity holds firm to the conviction that even the most ordinary man is in a sense gifted; because he is human he is given perception, a measure of sensitiveness, that will enable him to rise above his apparent limitations and achieve greatness, that will enable him to take hold of life and direct it instead of allowing the casual experiences of life to direct him.
Marie Curie’s scientific faith grew out of her belief in herself and her day-to-day laboratory observations until it justified itself in something whole and complete. Our faith in life grows similarly. Most of it is unconscious, certainly to begin with. In fact it begins very simply in the cradle, through the awareness we get of our parents’ love. A few days ago when my train from London stopped at an intervening station, a very young couple got into the compartment with a baby in a carrycot. From their appearance neither of the parents could have been much more than eighteen. They sat opposite each other and supported the cot between them on their knees. It was a delightful and touching sight, and what was most interesting was the relation between the baby and the mother. I suppose it is one of the commonest sights in the world – the expressions and gestures of love from a mother to her baby, but in them we have almost the whole secret, and mystery, of what makes us human. We so often take the most astonishing things in life for granted and cease to wonder at them – and one of those things is the responsiveness of a baby to his mother’s interest and love. It is in this love and this responsiveness that faith grows. It is in this that confidence in life is born and the feeling of belonging to something bigger greater that gives us significance in spite of being so small and in such a big world.
Later on in the process of growing up we can begin quite consciously to add to our faith. It becomes our responsibility to discriminate, to make choces, to build up our faith by search and deliberate observation. There comes a time when the teacher or the parent can say to the child; now is your responsibility. Will you be content to dip your hands into the dull brown ore, playing casually with it, or will you try to see through it to the possibilities that lie within? Will you be content to be swept along into the sewer stream, or will you try to purify experience until you have extracted its “radium”?
The young must first of all learn to enjoy, but then they must learn to sort out the good from the bad, to disentangle what is eternally satisfying from the momentary pleasures. They must learn to weigh up, to value, to discriminate. Discriminate, discriminate, discriminate!
The sorting out is not something we do just with our brains. It isn’t just a matter of sitting down and thinking logically, though there must be something of this in it. Fundamentally we sort things out with our feelings, and logical reasoning comes in to assist the process. We can reflect on our feelings, feel our feelings, so to speak, discover what leaves a lasting satisfaction and what leaves only a hungrier appetite or a bad taste in the mouth.
Prayer comes into the process too; not just prayer in the limited specific sense, but in the sense of longing for understanding and light and the recognition that we can be gifted by God if we have the courage to ask and search. This can be something that goes right through our waking life, not something expressed in a few moments at the end of a day – though there will be moments of intense reflection in which prayer can become conscious and urgent. There is no doubt that Marie Curie was sustained in her scientific work by a longing for understanding and truth. We need not ask where that longing came from; it is in some measure in all of us, precisely because we are human. It is almost a definition of what is human. It is a matter of our responsibility and choice to let that longing take hold of us.
ARchive reference PP KCB 3/7/2 document v04