Sitting down to read a book on your Kindle—or, increasingly rare, on your lap—savvy readers understand there's a wealth of drama behind that book, years of heartache and challenge and triumph involving editors, agents, publishers, and the usual relationship/family turmoil.
What many of us don't realize, though, is that even further back in time, there's very often what I modestly call a "Genesis Moment" that consciously or unconsciously reveals the very existence of the book to the author, a serendipitous, unanticipated, unpredictable occurrence that sIts behind and permits the existence of the book.
I'll give you two examples. First, the Genesis Moment behind my favorite book series, the 24-volume Science and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham. Needham was an up-and-coming biochemical embryologist, who tumbled into a love affair with a Chinese graduate student—and his life was never the same.
Second, I'll recount my own Genesis Moment, as a young history major at Yale, struggling to fill a hole in my schedule for a MWF class which wouldn't require a term paper. I did; and my life took an abrupt turn, bringing into existence my three books concerned with aspects of China, of all things.
Needham's future was rosy at Cambridge University in 1937, and promising to get even better. The recent publication of his two-volume Biochemical Embryogeny had made him one of the youngest members of the Royal Society, and his "open marriage" with his fellow-embryologist wife Dorothy (not unusual in that time in British universities) was percolating along.
Enter Lu Gwei-djen, a young Chinese biochemist who had mastered all that the universities in Nanjing, China offered. Cambridge gladly admitted her, under the mentorship of Dorothy Needham. Gwei-djen managed to find a ship that dodged Japanese bombers over Nanking, and she escaped the Japanese troops that entered her home city just months later, soon running amok in what has been called "The rape of Nanjing."
Back in Cambridge, Joseph and Dorothy and Gwei-djen were familiar fixtures at campus pubs and movies. When Dorothy visited relatives, Joseph and Gwei-djen consummated their attraction in his room in Caius College. As usual, Joseph afterwards produced two Player-brand cigarettes as they relaxed in bed, and idly asked Gwei-djen how cigarettes were named in her language. She said "fragrant smoke," and traced the two characters on his palm. He grabbed his diary, and meticulously wrote the characters there. As Needham biography Simon Winchester relates, "when he did so, a distant door suddenly started to open for him, onto an utterly unfamiliar world." "It was very sudden," Gwei-djen later remembered. "He said to me: I must learn this language—or bust!" He did, with astonishing speed and sureness. Within the year he was well on his way to fluency both written and spoken. He championed assistance to the Chinese people suffering under Japanese aggression in marches, demonstrations, and letters, with his customary energy and zeal.
Soon the British government sent him to interior China to provide what assistance the beleagured Chinese universities needed in their relocated quarters, pushed into interior China by the relentness Japanese. Soon books, funnels, microscopes, journals, centrifuges and other necessities were flooding over the Hump airway from India to the Chinese colleges in the interior. And back in the other direction went a flood of old books and manuscripts relating to the ancient history of science in China.
You see, Gwei-djen's father, a noted pharmacologist in China, resented the common judgment at that time that China was a "booby nation," as Ralph Waldo Emerson had earlier labelled it. Her father was convinced that China had a rich history in science, unknown to the West. Gwei-djen challenged Needham to investigate this. Back in Cambridge after the war, Needham did—and how. He abandoned biochemical embrygeny and created The East Asian History of Science Library, fund-raised, and soon was a full-time historian of ancient China's scientific achievements—usually, he discovered, made centuries and sometimes millennia before the West.
He worked with furious concentration, himself typing the thousands of sheets of paper two-fingered (including a two-page letter to a young, unknown California professor, who had sent the famous man a letter inquiring about the role of Chinese secret societies in the Kuomintang-Communist civil war. This letter has been proudly displayed on my office wall for nearly half a century now). The volumes poured forth, aided by colleagues after his death in 1995 at age 94, reaching the 24 thick volumes today, acclaimed by historians and scientists alike, a monumental achievement resulting from a love affair.
My own Genesis Moment did not arrive smoking cigarettes after the consumation of a love affair. But mine was nearly as interesting, and certainly added a completely unexpected dimension to enrich my life.
I faced a problem late in my sophomore year at Yale. I had filled up my schedule for next year, but desperately needed a final course that fit into my last available time slot: MWF at 11 am. I was a history major at the time, and randomly searched such courses in the catalogue. Aha; here was one. And hey; not only the right time, but no term paper required, and the final exam was not cumulative. Eureka! I glanced over at the title of the course: Chinese History, Ancient and Modern.
What the devil?! Chinese history? I didn't know or care anything about Chinese history. But there it was: MWF, 11 am. And no term paper. I'm in.
As I began the course, I realized that not knowing anything about Chinese history made it—well, more interesting. It was all completely new, and in fact, quite fascinating. My two professors had been prisoners of the Japanese in Shanghai during WWII, and prominent Sinologists now, being lured away from Stanford to Yale just a decade earlier. I promptly signed up to study the Chinese language (written as well as spoken), and soon was as taken by the language as Needham had been (though not at his rapid pace). I particularly liked the sheer kinetic pleasure of writing the Chinese characters (and still do, today).
Long story short: after a year in the U.S. Army in Vietnam at the Surgeon General's office in 1969-1970, I took my PhD at Duke in Biology (evolutionary ecology) and taught biology for 28 years at California's Chico State University (all that is another story altogether). But I remained fascinated with China throughout all this, traveled there numerous summer breaks, kept up my Chinese language by virtue of those nearly dozen trips, and wrote three books on China topics. Jade and Fire (historical fiction) was published by Random House in 1987; Relax, You're Already Home (on Taoism) by Penguin/Putnam in 2004; and The China Ultimatum (future historical fiction, cover shown above) by iUniverse in 2012.
In addition, on my trips I gave lectures (on evolutionary ecology) in Beijing to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology; and in Hong Kong to Hong Kong University and to The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I also wrote a short description of a 1984 trip deep into Sichuan with two adventuresome friends: The Three Stooges in China: Pursuing the Sacred Mountain in 1984. And spent an amazing evening and several days with Ye Duzhuang, who translated Charles Darwin's works into Chinese throughout an adventure-filled, tragic life in revolutionary China. (Chapter 23 in my 2021 Forgotten World is devoted to Ye's life and my time with him in China.)
So: two Genesis Moments that unexpectedly changed the lives of two fellows in decisive ways, permitting and inspiring the birth of some (Barnett) or many (Needham) books that have entertained and enlarged the lives of readers. Genesis Moments that sit hidden and forgotten behind the book.