Iron / Sex, Part 4

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
by Leonard Shlain, M.D.

(Page 4 of 6)

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of four children, to first-generation Russian immigrants. My father was an extremely hardworking man who brought with him a distinctly Old World view of the place of men and women in society. My mother was gentle and loving, and laughed easily. Their relationship was a typical patriarchal one. They both taught me many valuable lessons worth emulating, and some that I have striven not to repeat. They remained married for sixty-five years and lived into their nineties.

I made the usual teenager and young-adult explorations into parties and dating, then, at twenty-seven, I married, after a tempestuous and passionate four-year courtship in which each of us experienced the dramatic highs and lows of young love. Following a stint in the army in France and a surgical residency in New York, we settled in northern California, where I finished my surgical training. During this time, we had three children one right after another: a daughter, Kimberly, a son, Jordan, and then another daughter, Tiffany.

After seventeen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced in the same manner as we had courted. I remained single for an equal number of years, during which time I had the opportunity to participate in the "dance" a second time around, but this time as an older, marginally wiser, but more observant "dancer."

I have often contemplated the nature of the persistent longing present in the majority of the hearts of both men and women. Persons of each sex, no matter how old, seem to strive to find their respective soul mates. Four years ago, I found mine. Ina and I married, each for the second time.

A judge and a surgeon some combination. When we cook together, I, in the manner of my professional training, place my hand palm-up without looking away from the slicing and the dicing and bark, "Tomato!" Ina laughingly intones, "Motion overruled." We see ourselves engaged in a grand adventure. We have set out to illustrate that a man and a woman can love each other and mesh both our needs and identities in such a way that the sum of us together is greater than each half alone.

I think of my life as resembling an onion. Each layer symbolizes one of the many roles that I have assumed. Son, brother, lover, husband, teacher, student, father, doctor, writer, surgeon, scholar, and lecturer constitute the main ones. The role I would place at the very core of the onion is the one I have cherished the most: that of a father.

I have known the delicious delight of carrying a freshly bathed, flannel-encased, sweet-smelling, sleepy toddler to his or her bed. I have run alongside three different bicycles each recently divested of training wheels and then...let go, to cringe in anxious anticipation of whether I had judged the moment of my release correctly. And that was just the beginning of a whole series of wincing withdrawals.

The military issues campaign ribbons to personnel who have served in various wars and skirmishes to wear on their chests so that comrades-in-arms can instantly identify each other. I recommend that similar insignia should be displayed by all parents who have survived the harrowing teenage years so that they, too, can acknowledge each other's experience. Happy to say, our unit made it through the guerrilla warfare of those years. Those who had been temporarily missing in action are now all present and accounted for. I have lived long enough to watch proudly as my children have grown into high-spirited, accomplished, interesting people.

My children are adults now, forming their own families. Listening to them tell me about their loves and courtships has afforded me the opportunity to observe how this man-woman thing works once again, but in a different generation. The fight for love and glory, it seems, is still the same old story.

And now, let me tell you of my qualifications to write about death. At the age of thirty-seven, I was diagnosed as having a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I underwent extensive surgery, followed by many months of health-debilitating radiation treatments. The experience shook me to my very core and changed me as a human being. As Samuel Johnson astutely remarked, the prospect of hanging clears a man's mind wonderfully. I spent many dark, sleepless hours contemplating the meaning of life and the consequences of death particularly mine.

After over a year of treatments and their inevitable complications, I recovered sufficiently to resume my surgical career. I began to receive many referrals for surgery of patients in the same dire straits that I had recently passed through. I suspect doctors believed that their patients would relate better to a surgeon who had just endured what they must now suffer.

Treatment for cancer, unfortunately, often fails more so twenty-five years ago than at present. Many times, after I had developed a close connection with a patient, circumstances demanded that I abandon my mission as a healer and assume the role of Charon, the mythical boatman who ferried souls across the River Styx to the other side. My own personal experience and intimate contact with dying patients led me to explore many of the issues I will raise in this book.

All writing, despite authors' best efforts to conceal themselves behind the scrim of objectivity, contains intimations of the autobiographical. Although somewhat unorthodox, I have briefly outlined my personal history so that you, the reader, may know something of the perspective I bring to this work.

I have chosen artwork and other illustrations to accompany my narrative. Please see pages 403-404 for art credits.

Above my writing desk hangs a quote from Franz Kafka urging writers to create books that "can be wielded like a pickax to shatter the frozen sea within the reader's mind." If a book didn't change the way the reader thought about the world, then Kafka deemed it not worth writing. I have taken Kafka's words as my credo. May this book set your mental ice floes grinding against each other.

A well-worn metaphor draws the analogy between an author finishing a book and a woman birthing a newborn. Observing my odd cube-shaped "child" in the form of a neat stack of freshly printed pages sleeping peacefully on my desk this fine morning, I can sense how the Old Testament's Jochebed, the mother of Moses, must have felt.

The moment has arrived to tear my baby from my protective embrace and place it in its basket, preparatory to setting it adrift down the river. Like Jochebed, I, too, fervently hope that the result of my labor will become entangled in the bulrushes and find a hospitable home among accepting strangers.

Enjoy.

Leonard Shlain, 2002
Mill Valley, California

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Leonard Shlain is the author of Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light, and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. He is the chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco.