In the span of the decade, 1994-2004, as the need has arisen for the productions of Ferment and Ferment Press, I've read at least one and sometimes several, biographies of Leonardo , Beethoven, Einstein, Kepler, Bach, Nash, Ramanujan, Hilbert, Sonya Kovalevskaya, Erdos, Mendelssohn, Milton, van Gogh, Ibsen, Richard III, Cromwell, Louis XIV, Voltaire,Emilie du Chatelet, Eleanora Duse, Artur Rubinstein, Maupertuis, Ismail Merchant, JFK, the Bush family , Sinatra, Chandrasekhar, Joyce, Jung, Russell, Henrik Iben, August Strindberg, W. B. Yeats, and others that do not come readily to mind. If I'm engaged in the search for a role model, I've not had much luck in finding one, which doesn't take away from the enjoyment of doing so.
Invariably I turn to the indexes of these biographies to see if these major figures in their own fields were friends to, acquainted with , or merely involved in some working capacity with contemporaries engaged in fields other than their own.
By and large the results are usually disappointing. It doesn't look as if Bach had much to do with painters, or Eleanora Duse spent any time hanging around mathematicians. One doesn't get the impression that Artur Rubinstein knew many research biologists, or that Joyce was terribly friendly with modern dancers. Bertrand Russell had a wider scope, yet he is one of the rare exceptions to the general rule. His life belongs as much, even more, to literature as it does to philosophy. Through his association with the Bloomsbury movement he came into regular contact with authors, painters, poets and musicians. It is likely that Bach knew nothing of the existence of Voltaire, though Voltaire must have heard music by G.F. Handel. ( We know that he'd studied the libretto of Gay's Beggar's Opera .)
I've wondered about this. It can't only be that they were so engrossed in their work that there was no free time for coming into contact with persons unconnected to their craft. Mozart attended Masonic lodge meetings where he could meet intellectuals of every stripe, although they do not seem to have had much impact on his personal, social or artistic life.
I've reached the conclusion that gifted persons who pursue a specific calling such as a science, artistic medium, craft or profession, develop habits of mind, mannerisms and forms of social behavior, (known as "personalities " ) that turn off, even repel persons not involved in the same proffesional pursuit.
In the long run the obssessiveness of mathematicians is only tolerable to other mathematicians . The aversion of literary persons (with some exceptions) for the unremitant ego- battering that scientists endure as their pet theories and clever notions are shot down by experimental data or the merciless censure of correct reasoning, tends to make the literary ambiance impalatable to scientists, whearas the literary types view the scientist as nit-pickers with limited imaginations and narrow scope.
The very fact that the discourse of a scientific paper typically repeats the same small collection of words over and over again, must disgust most poets who try to read them. Musicians must appear arrogant and naive to persons working in finance or trade, people who themselves soon appear tiresome to political activists.
Somehow the mental habits characteristic of any profession come to define a clan of persons accustomed to thinking in a certain way. Members of one of these clans start fidgetting in the company of persons who don't think the way they do. They may very well share the same opinions on many topics, but they deal with them through quite different ways of thinking.
A painter married to a classical violinist; a mathematician married to a comic actress ; a stock broker married to twelve-tone composer: such arrangements do occur, and once in awhile they are a success, but for the most part, alien pursuits lead to alien conceptions of the world, alien forms of socialization, and eventually total estrangement.
Diderot and Euler; Shakespeare and Francis Bacon; Washington and Benjamin Franklin; Mark Twain and Brahms; Goethe and Beethoven; Napolean and Monge; Einstein and Thomas Mann; Mendelssohn and Dirichlet. Historically they did relate, but the social interactions must have been formal, strangely disappointing and, by the mutual consent of both parties, mercifully brief.