Café Chats

Abstract

Café Chats Santiago Ramón y Cajal (bio) Translated by Benjamin Ehrlich (bio) TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was the Spanish physician and scientist who discovered the individual nature of the nerve cell (later termed the neuron). He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906 for his groundbreaking work on the structure of the nervous system and is considered to be the founder of modern neuroscience. His masterpiece, Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados [Histology of the Nervous System of Man and Vertebrates] (1899–1904), is a summary of twenty years spent looking through a microscope at “the world of the infinitely small.” It features more than a thousand original illustrations and is still cited frequently in the scientific literature. Cajal had a lifelong relationship with the literature of the arts as well. As an adolescent, he enjoyed reading lyric poetry and tales of knight-errantry. Although his father did not allow such distracting books at home, his mother secretly gave him cheap romance novels. Cajal found Dumas (père), Hugo, Cervantes, and Defoe while trespassing in the library of a neighbor. Deeply affected by Robinson Crusoe, he wrote and illustrated his own novel about a shipwreck survivor. In medical school, inspired by Jules Verne, he composed a novel about a miniature man on Jupiter. Both these works were lost—along with seven of twelve science fiction stories. The remaining five stories were published as Cuentos de vacaciones [Vacation Stories] in 1905. That year, in honor of the tricentennial of the publication of Don Quixote, he delivered a memorable speech at the University of Madrid. Cajal’s personal library included ten thousand volumes. Two years before his death, he published El mundo visto a los ochenta años [The World as Seen by an Eighty-Year-Old], in which he reflects at length on a life of reading and writing. “Of all our friends,” he remarks, “[books] are the only ones who stop talking after they say their piece.” This is not to say that Cajal avoided conversation. Throughout his career, he liked to participate in tertulias, intellectual circles that gathered at clubs or cafés. This Spanish tradition was especially popular in Madrid, where Cajal held a prestigious university chair for thirty years. Every day, at four in the afternoon, he would walk from his home to the Café Suizo, where aristocrats, bankers, bullfighters, and artists were known to assemble. A rule of his table was that one was not permitted to talk about one’s area of expertise; to prevent overexcitement, conversations were limited to one hour. In 1920, when the Café Suizo was demolished, Cajal wrote Chácharas de café [Café Chitchats], a “partly serious, partly humorous” booklet of aphorisms and meditations reconstructed from his past tertulia conversations. The title was changed to Charlas de café [Café Chats] in the 1921 edition; twelve editions have been published in the original Spanish. The following selections are excerpted from four of the eleven chapters that comprise this delightful and stimulating little book: Café Chats. [End Page 168] Café Chats I. On Glory, Death, and Immortality Glory is nothing but delayed oblivion. . . . . . . In the effort to defend ourselves against attacking microbes and perpetuate our existence, millions of our own cells (such as glandular, blood, and phagocytic corpuscles) must be destroyed continuously. Without noticing it, without even suspecting it, we are consuming our own bodies. . . . Thus, nothing seems more natural than death, given that we kill ourselves regularly. Yet, nevertheless . . . Man, it has been said, is the favorite of Providence. It would be equally right to declare that he is the darling of microbes. Beginning at birth, his trajectory proves to be a mad dash across a battlefield, where missiles rain down from the sky. . . . . . . In reality, the idea of death frightens us because of the terrible pain and agony that usually precedes it and, above all, because once our earthly consciousness is extinguished all that we love is gone forever: family, homeland, fame, etc. . . . . . . When death finally arrives, what remains to be killed? Still a great deal: a brain tenaciously stubborn in its thinking, despite the fact that it may feel...