One Book: Pre-Graduation Ponderings

Yesterday at 3:50 PM brought to a close the last of nearly 2000 hours I would spend sitting in class as an undergraduate student. (Not that anybody was nerdy enough to calculate that, or anything. But if they were . . .) It was a surreal feeling walking out of that basement classroom, knowing that I was closing a chapter in my life.

A beautiful chapter. A difficult one. One that was tailored specifically to my needs and personality. One that shaped me forever.

And now, after 

195 credit hours,

9 semesters,

4 terms,

3 majors (two of which I kept until graduation),

Hundreds of new friends,

Thousands of pages of literature and textbooks,

Countless hours spent in bio, chem, math, and physics labs,

And who knows how many #2 pencils worn down in the testing center,

I’ve completed my BYU journey.

(Well, okay. I guess if we want to be technical, I still have a handful of final exams to take. But given the distinct lack of chemistry or biology courses I’m in right now, I essentially feel like the hardest part is over. So we’re going with it.)

Often, when I tell people what I spent my time here at BYU studying, they reply, “Well, that’s an interesting combination.”

And that’s true. There aren’t an awful lot of people on campus double-majoring in molecular biology and Russian. But for me, there doesn’t really seem to be a disconnect between the two of them. These widely differing fields have grown close together for me and overlapped in my life. They are part of the whole truth—part of the intelligence which God has commanded us to study.

Osip Mandelstam, a renowned Russian writer of the Soviet era, once made the comment to his wife (also a famous writer) that the ideal reader would be someone who read only one book. Surprised, his wife inquired what he meant. He responded that it’s not that we should limit ourselves to one book throughout our whole lives, but that we need to obtain a «целостное миропонимание », or a complete, whole worldview. Everything we learn should come together in one whole in our minds and our lives. We shouldn’t create walls or divisions between the knowledge that we are obtaining, but incorporate it all together and let that knowledge guide our lives.

And that’s how my undergraduate education has been. While learning how to pick nematode worms from an e.coli-laden plate is slightly different from conjugating Russian verbs, both of these things have shaped my worldview and taught me about life. The principles I have learned of evolution and DNA replication have informed my study of Nabokov. My experiences in computer programming are connected to my reading of poetry.

Because all of this is life.

Mandelstam made another comment that I feel sums up my education pretty succinctly. As an 18-year-old boy, he penned the following words: «Дано мне тело—что мне делать с ним?» (“I have been given a body—what shall I do with it?”)

And that’s what I’ve spent my undergraduate career studying—the body and what to do with the body. In essence, life—in both of its mechanical and its spiritual aspects.

In my biology courses I’ve explored metabolism, body processes, interactions of organisms, evolution, and the many mechanical and biological processes that play into life as we know it. I have sat in awe, looking at lady bugs and thermophiles, amazed at the complexities of these tiny organisms. And, of course, the crowning organism is that of our own bodies, with all of our complexities and nuances. I have studied the perfect intricacies that comprise a single heartbeat, marveling that my heart completed that process hundreds of while I labored to comprehend just a few steps of the entire cycle. Our bodies are miracles—incredible gifts that we could spend our entire mortal lives studying and still not fully comprehend.

And that is where my study of Russian comes in—what do we do with the bodies we have been given? How are we to live? I love the Russian language because of the people it allows me to come to know—both the people who are still alive and can interact with me face-to-face and those who have left behind their wisdom through writing. This gives me countless opportunities to come to understand better a living culture (biology pun unintended . . . but it’s staying). And also come to understand what it means to be a human. Few writers are able to capture with such poignancy what it means to be human and how we ought to live as do Russian writers. I have spent the past couple years being tutored at the feet of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgeniv, Pushkin, Akhmatava, and dozens of others. These great men and women have left behind their gems of wisdom for me. They understand the need for compassion, the need to stand up for truth and right, even in the face of incredible opposition. They take my biology one step further so that I grasp not just mechanically how I live, but  spiritually how to live.

So here I am, at the end of this twisting, exhilarating journey, about to embark on the next phase of my life. I know a little bit more now about how to homogenize a cellular solution. I know a little more of the history of the Russian language. And I know a little more about life.

And it’s all in one book. One glorious book of knowledge and life.