And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity. I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers – are dabblers in many different areas. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director, and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leonardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. But even his critics would admit that he really is more than “a scientist who writes.” I enjoy Djerassi’s writing, though not everyone will. Sitting down with the book the next day, I found it sharp, funny, mannered, and dazzlingly erudite – sometimes, like a bumptious student, too erudite for its own good. At a reading in the Austrian Cultural Forum in London this summer, complete with Schönberg’s songs and four actors, including Djerassi himself, it drew a good crowd and bewitched them for an hour and a half. In itself, the book is an exercise in polymathy.
#See polymath program p8 6 a.pol. series#
His latest book, Four Jews on Parnassus, is an imagined series of debates between Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schönberg, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, which touches on art, music, philosophy, and Jewish identity. As a chemist (synthesizing cortisone and helping invent the Pill) an art collector (he assembled one of the world’s largest collections of works by Paul Klee) and an author (19 books and plays), he has accomplished more than enough for one lifetime. But Djerassi also passes a sterner test: he can do a lot, too.
Strictly speaking, that means he is someone who knows a lot about a lot.
Barth, in Convergence of Libraries and Technology Organizations, 2011 PolymathsĬarl Djerassi is a polymath.
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