12.0 Childhood
As a boy, I used to carry along a small loose-leaf notebook. It had been a prize in a holiday beach contest, and it constantly reminded me of my success as a sand sculptor. I have always been a timid boy, and this prized talisman helped to bolster my weak identity. Equally significant to me was the fact that my grandfather, according to my mother, had taken notes in a similar little book. By my standards Cornelis Harm Wind, my grandfather, was a legendary figure. My mother was only 15 when he died at the age of 43; my two sisters and I never had the pleasure of knowing him. Yet I felt a great reverence for my unknown grandpa. He was a great experimenter. After the discovery of X-rays he had been the first to determine the wavelength of the new form of radiation. He served as Director of the National Institute of Meteorology at De Bilt (just imagine: my grandfather the chief weather forecaster!) before he became a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Utrecht. He participated in conferences in Copenhagen and Brussels and knew such celebrities as Lorentz, Curie, Rutherford and Einstein. He ardently took part in debates on issues that were later to be resolved by Lorentz's and Einstein's magnificent discoveries (about C.H.Wind in Dutch).
My grandfather's notes have not been preserved. Neither have mine, but I remember some of the notes I took when I was about 18 years old: thoughts about the nature of life, sketches of both practical and useless inventions, and many aphorisms. "Themes in a musical fugue reflect the forms in nature: modifications in space and time". "Beauty is implicit logic". "Consciousness is sparked by incongruence". Thoughts like these have remained precious to me as leading lights that never lost their meaning. When episodes of anguish and turmoil had shattered my confidence, I was always able to fall back on an early formed fundamental and reassuring understanding of the world around me. Now I realise with some awe that these early aphorisms have evolved from their limited beginnings into a comprehensive reflection on my world, on its inhabitants and their actions. Apparently, a few well springs of thinking, activated early in life, can expand and eventually feed a fully developed mind.
The Dutch novelist, Harry Mulisch, has described the far-reaching effect of thoughts budding at an early age. He remembers a 'mystical' realisation in his youth: the sudden awareness that the two tones of an octave interval are the same and yet not the same (a universal phenomenon according to E.G.McClain, 1978). This enlightened insight led to his philosophical novel The composition of the world (1980). Artistic inspiration and insight illuminate essential aspects of our time and our world. Since Boethius in the 6th century AD we have learnt much about the periodicity of planetary movement, the seasonal cycles, the spiral of evolution. With expanding knowledge, the language and metaphors in which we think have changed. No longer do we listen to the harmony of spheres, we now look at them. Our image of the universe has become more a visual than an auditory one. The way in which music reflects the properties of the universe was still apparent to the cultured people of Babylon (1800 BC) and to Boethius, but has lost its meaning in our technological age.