The Advantage Of Dual Identities (And The Paradox Of Intellectual Promiscuity)
February 6th, 2011
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Here’s an interesting article about the advantage of dual identities. (Thanks, @introvertzone!)
Vladimir Nabokov is best known as the author of Lolita and other works of fiction. But he had a dual identity as a lepidopterist. He frequently described his life pleasures as “the two most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”
The article is about what Stephen Jay Gould called “the paradox of intellectual promiscuity.” Nabokov had proven himself as a writer, and he couldn’t have gone wrong by sticking with that. So did his interest in butterflies have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on him?
Some possibilities:
- He wasted all this time on butterflies instead of writing another Lolita.
- Don’t worry, he didn’t waste too much time on butterflies.
- Lolita was great only because he studied butterflies.
- His work on butterflies was more important than his fiction. Lolita was the time waster.
To Nabokov, these two fields weren’t even all that different. They were just two puzzles he solved in the same way, using his deep passion for detail and precision.
His crazy hypothesis about the migration of a particular group of butterflies didn’t earn him much credit as a scientist in his lifetime, but modern technology recently proved him right. So in this case, we can score a win for lepidoptery and intellectual promiscuity, though more than 30 years after Nabokov’s death.
I think the right answer can only be decided on a case by case basis. I don’t know if there’s any hard and fast rule as to whether we should be chasing our butterflies.
February 8th, 2011 at 5:38 am
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February 21st, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Dammit, Hunter. I thought you were going to write about personality disorder.
February 21st, 2011 at 7:18 pm
@ Ari, I thought about it, but the voices in my head told me not to.
January 11th, 2012 at 8:05 am
I think it’s far too limiting to focus on one or even two occupations as the definition of a human. Perhaps lepidoptery and writing were two occupations Nabokov became known for on a mass scale, but for all I know, he might have been an excellent pie maker, expert at child-rearing, and an impressive calligraphist as well. For that matter, occupations themselves are too limiting. Was he honest and open-minded in his personal relations? Did he pray? Was he a generous man?
All aspects of a person influence one’s success in any given venture, so much so that the venture itself is an almost irrelevant, yet inevitable, byproduct of a human whose influences in life defined him or her up until the point of creating the work in question. To quote an obscure song from the obscure band Shriekback, “Every force evolves a form.”