March 15, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    Do you envy Genghis Khan? No? Well, you should, for he is the most successful human being in the world. Success, from a biological point of view, is to be judged by the size of the genetic footprint one is able to leave on the human race. By this measure, no one can match Genghis Khan, for he left his Y chromosome, in a direct male line, to 16 million men—almost one in every 200 men alive today—between Afghanistan and northeastern China. He could do this because as "Universal Ruler" he had access to the most fertile and beautiful women in the wide world he conquered, which, in 1241, reached the outskirts of Vienna (Science, vol. 299, 21 February 2003).

    Strange that I, for one, don't envy him, even though I have no progeny. Genghis Khan might be pleased to know that he had spread his genes so effectively. On the other hand, he might just shrug it off as a curiosity. Far more important to him, surely, were the conditions that made the success possible, the most important of which being the availability of women. The Universal Ruler knew luxury as few men did, especially if by "luxury" we mean lust and its indulgence, a meaning that reaches back to Chaucer. Genghis Khan wallowed in soft female flesh, all "bright, milky, soft and rosy," as Keats put it. Most men would find that experience enviable. Not I. For me, luxury is paradoxically a certain hardness and resistance of the sort evoked by D. H. Lawrence when he had his hero clasp not a woman but "the silvery birch-trunk," and feel, to his swooning satisfaction, "its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges" (see Women in Love).

    If this seems a bit perverse—abnormal—what about Albert Camus's claim that, for him, luxury is a certain bareness, apparently because, whereas the one offered him a surfeit of sensations, the other in its bareness allowed his imagination to soar. Imagination levels the playing field, compensating material lack with imagined wealth. A person of lively imagination is thus seldom envious. I say seldom rather than never because imagination has its limits, the most severe of which is its inability to conjure up an individual with whom he can fall passionately in love, or imagine what it is like when that love is reciprocated. A real man or woman has to be there for that experience to happen.

    I envy that experience. I still don't envy Genghis Khan, however, for a fellow with harems of women to choose from couldn't possibly know that kind of individualized and exclusive love. It takes time, after all, to fully appreciate another human being. Genghis Khan's wealth, great as it was, didn't extend to time, his life span being much the same as that of any healthy outdoors man. This rough equality of life span is another reason for not being envious. Think of it this way. I pay $20—for me, a non-negligible sum—to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art and benefit from viewing its treasures. To a billionaire, $20 is just tip money, totally incommensurate with the two hours he has to spend in the museum to do justice to its content. So he dishes out a few million dollars to buy a masterpiece or two, and not being able to afford the time to appreciate them, puts them in a bank vault (S. Lindner, The Harried Leisure Class). Envy him? Envy someone who is condemned to read investment reports rather than enjoy art treasures at the Museum, or read À la recherche du temps perdu ? *

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu

* (Eng.) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust