Exuberance: The Passion for Life (6 page)

Bentley’s enthusiasm for snowflakes would be simply a footnote in the annals of enthusiasts and eccentrics were it not for the results of his sustained passion, for it was a passion which allowed him to withstand the chill of both winter and his Vermont neighbors. He endured the inevitable frustrations and failures involved in capturing and photographing a solitary snow crystal before it melted into nothingness because he felt an urgency that others did not. Bentley’s temperament and sensibilities impelled him to share beauty with those less exposed to it and to proselytize those who felt less acutely than he. His exuberance brought to millions a loveliness that fell from the skies. He saw, he felt, and he captured a tiny gorgeousness for history. No bit of Nature ever had a better Boswell.

Bentley loved snowflakes above all else, but he also made important contributions to the understanding of other phenomena of nature. He observed and carefully described the date, appearance, and intensities of more than
six hundred auroras and took meticulous measurements of nearly three hundred fifty collections of raindrops. He was a pioneer photographer of clouds, frost, and dew, and his work on cloud physics, in the assessment of Blanchard and other atmospheric scientists, was forty years ahead of its time.

The people in his New England village, however, regarded him as
a little cracked. Being Vermont farmers and less than transfixed by snow, they found Bentley’s intoxication odd. Why take pictures of snowflakes, they asked, when “you can’t sell them and you can’t eat them.” Fortunately, the American Meteorological Society disagreed and awarded the self-educated dairy farmer its first research grant. His photomicrographs of snow crystals made their way into scientific journals—sixty were published in
Nature
alone—as well as into popular newspapers and magazines, and they influenced naturalists, photographers, scientists, and jewelry designers at Tiffany.
There is no equivalent of his photographic collection, nor is it likely that there will ever be one.

When Bentley died in 1931, even his Vermont neighbors had a sense of the importance of his life and passing. “
John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing,” wrote his hometown newspaper. “Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.”

Nor had they his capacity for joy or exuberant pursuit. “
So long as eyes shall see and kindle at the beautiful in Nature,” Bentley said, his camera and pen would be there. It was this capacity to be kindled, of course, that set Bentley apart. His urgency and passion ensured that his message would be both seen and heard. The physicist W. J. Humphreys, one of the many eminent scientists who were deeply impressed by his work, wrote the text to accompany Bentley’s photographic masterpiece,
Snow Crystals
. In it, he observed that Bentley had pursued his life’s work with the “
insistent ardor of the lover and the tireless patience of the scientist,” that he had “made it possible for others to share at leisure, and by the comfortable fireside, the joys that hour after hour bound him to his microscope and his camera in an ice cold shed.” Bentley brought indoors an otherwise invisible beauty from the skies.

Bentley’s was a magnificent obsession, plumb-line true and enduring. Just days before he died, he wrote in his weather notebook for the last time. “
Cold west wind afternoon,” the entry reads. “Snow flying.”

(photo credit 3.1)

F
or most mammals, including ourselves, early exploration of the world is enhanced, indeed often made possible, through the exuberant play of youth. Such play, it has been said, is the business of childhood, but play is more than that: it is a deadly serious business. Much learning must get done in not much time, for youth is, indeed,
a stuff which will not endure. The time is short when a young animal, still protected and provided for by its parents and not yet bound to the waiting demands of hunting, mating, and procuring shelter, can run flat out, gambol, and improvise with impunity. “
In the sun that is young once only,” wrote Dylan Thomas, “Time let me play and be/Golden in the mercy of his means.”

We play because we have an exuberance of spirits and energy, but we are also exuberant because we play. We seek to play not only because it is a part of our evolutionary history, but because we know that more often than not it will bring pleasure. That pleasure, in turn, makes us more likely to act in ways that increase our chances of survival and sway. Long before our species adapted to the seasons and terrains dealt us by nature, other animals had learned how best to capture food and reach water, how to outflank predators, to be aware of their own and wary of strangers. They had evolved ways to fashion strong bonds with kin and learned the particulars of their home territories through exploration and risks taken. A coupling of instinct with learning, of pleasurable play with group bonding, of joy with curiosity and invention meant that animals with such capacities were more likely to respond with facility to changes in their environment. The varieties and combinations of behaviors tried out in play were among those that increased the odds of behavioral flexibility. Play exists, in significant measure, to promote plasticity and to teach an animal to take advantage of opportunity.

Play is a vital facilitator, shaper, and motivator: it allows the pleasurable practice of improbable twists and turns in instinctive behaviors which, in turn, creates for the animal a wider range of possibilities for future actions. It shapes the developing brain in potentially lifesaving ways. “
Natural selection,” wrote the philosopher Karl Groos in 1898, “will favour individuals in whom instinct appears only in an imperfect form, manifesting itself in early youth in activity purely for exercise and practice—that is to say,
in animals which play.”
It is not unlikely, Groos went on to say, that
“the very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play;
the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.”

By its nature, play is rather diffusely defined; the origins of the word remain surprisingly obscure.
Plein
, meaning, in Middle
Dutch, “to dance about, jump for joy,” is thought to be a linguistic ancestor of the English word
play;
so, too, is the Old German word
Spilan
, denoting a “light, floating movement.” “Play” takes up seventeen long columns and accounts for more than one hundred individual definitions in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. To these, modern science has added its own numbingly precise ones. Most definitions center on a feeling of free or unimpeded movement; activities involving fun and amusement and characterized by swift, exuberant, irregular, or capricious motions; and a springing, flying, or darting to and fro, a joyous gamboling and frolicking about.

Play, as Stephen Miller of Harvard has put it, is a “
soup of behavior,” something we recognize when we see it, but find hard to pin down in language. Miller studied zoo-goers watching animals at play and found that they were quite consistent in what they labeled as play, noting, for example, that “it didn’t look like it was for real” or that the animals “looked like they were enjoying themselves.” Scientists, however, found it far more difficult to label the diverse behaviors of play. Miller believes that the zoo-goers were almost certainly responding to a wide variety of cues which, because of their very subtlety (and, one would also guess, their effects on ancient, preverbal portions of the brain), scientists felt unable to measure objectively.

There are several typical features of play. Physical movements are often exaggerated; they are much slower or faster than usual, or much larger or smaller. Animals at play, Miller observes, move in ways that display “much flailing, bobbing, exaggeration, and indirect, ineffective action. In short … a ‘galumphing’ appearance.” “Galumphing,” borrowed from its inventor, Lewis Carroll, is a nearly perfect word. The
O.E.D
. notes that it is reminiscent of “gallop” and “triumphant,” conveying a sense of “marching on exultingly with irregular bounding movements.” Carroll, a master of linking play with pleasure and wit, used “galumphing” in
The Hunting of the Snark
to describe the actions of the seagoing, lacemaking
Beaver, who, having hunted the Snark, “
went simply galumphing about.” The slaying of the Jabberwock, in
Through the Looking Glass
, also entails galumphing:

“Galumphing” completely captures the joy and bounce of play: it is a word that sounds as play is; is in itself inventive, as play is; and is as open to meaning and possibility as the freewheelingness of play.

The exaggerated, cavorting quality of play acts in part to signal to other animals that it, and not other, more aggressive behavior, is intended.
Rhesus monkeys running to play, for example, are distinguished by their bouncing locomotion and rotating heads or torsos. These physical movements, like the “play face” exhibited by other primates, or like laughter in humans, invite other members of the species to play. The relaxed
facial expressions of black bear cubs convey playful intent, as do the highly specific positionings of their large and mobile ears. There is also a repetitive characteristic to playful encounters, as well as a “mock” quality, that is, a pretending or “as if” stance toward reality. This so-called nonliterality is one of the most reliable indicators of play in children. Play, said Karl Groos, “
gives the whole world of appearance a special colouring, distinguishing it from everything that is real, and rendering it impossible that even in our utmost absorption we should ever confuse the make-believe with the real.”

Play, unlike hunting or defense or most other behaviors,
appears to provide little immediate benefit to the individual animal or its species. The importance of the activity seems to lie for the most part in future benefits that accrue from the process of play itself, rather than in achieving any particular short-term goal. But, as we shall see, the process is vital. It is also pleasurable, and that pleasure, to the extent it encourages social or inventive behaviors beneficial to the individual and ultimately the species, is likewise vital.

Pleasure is a largely subjective state, of course, and, until recently, animal behaviorists have been reluctant to acknowledge its presence in nonhuman species. Few, however, deny the exuberant playfulness of young mammals. George Schaller, a biologist with the New York Zoological Society, describes the ebullient behavior of a two-year-old panda after it was released from a dark cell into the outdoors: “
It exploded with joy. Exuberantly it trotted up an incline with a high-stepping, lively gait, bashing down any bamboo in its path, then turned and somersaulted down, an ecstatic black and white ball rolling over and over; then it raced back up to repeat the descent, and again.”

In her classic study of Australian wombats, Barbara Triggs writes: “
Wombat play is made up of several characteristic movements and attitudes performed in no particular order but with tremendous enthusiasm and exuberance. Typically, a young wombat signals the beginning of playtime by standing absolutely still with its front legs stiff and straight. Then it jerks its head and shoulders up, sometimes lifting its front feet right off the ground. Then, but not necessarily in this order, it tosses its head from side to side; jumps in the air with all four feet off the ground; rolls over on to its side; races off at a rocking gallop before coming to a sudden stop, reversing through 180 degrees ‘on the spot’ and racing back to its mother, stopping or veering sideways just before the expected collision; lies flat on its stomach, head thrown back and swinging
from side to side, lips drawn back in a wombat ‘grin.’ If it is playing on or near a slope, it will sometimes run up the slope and roll down, tumbling over and over on its side.” Triggs, acknowledging the infectious quality of the marsupial’s exuberance, concludes by saying “I defy anyone to watch a wombat at play without laughing aloud.”

Some species—the primates, the marine mammals (especially dolphins, sea lions, and seals), the
Mustelidae
(which includes weasels, otters, and ferrets), and the dog and cat families—are more exuberantly playful than others. The sheer zippiness of the animals can be breathtaking. This is particularly true of weasels, which have been wonderfully described as “
hair-trigger mousetraps with teeth.” One owner described his weasel’s pelting-about: “
From whichever retreat hid him for the moment, a wedge-shaped head and wicked pair of eyes would appear. Then out he’d roll, turning cartwheel after cartwheel like an acrobat going round the circus ring. He moved so fast that it was impossible to distinguish where his head began and his tail finished. He was like a tiny inflated rubber tyre bowling round the room.”