A Soulful Journey

The story is as old as Walcott’s beloved Cambrian mountains.   You begin with a promise: I won’t have time research but I will be more efficient. Others have fallen by the wayside, but I will be different; I will never abandon my research; I’ll keep working and publishing at close to full volume.   Slowly, the perverseness of creeping inevitability takes over.   Research fades. You never abandon the ideal, or the original love. You will get back to it, after his term as director, after retirement, after…. Sometimes, you really do enjoy an old age of renewed scholarship; more often, as in Wilcox case, death intervenes.   –Stephen J. Gould Live life while you are alive.  Soon it will be over. Follow your heart.

On September 27, 1926, Charles Doolittle Walcott took some action to implement a dream. He wrote: I wish very much to have a talk with you in regard to the Smithsonian Institution and my withdrawing from all executive and administrative work May 1, 1927– When I will have completed 20 years active service as secretary.   Henry, Baird and Langley died in the office but I do not think it is wise for the Smithsonian Institution or for me to go along. I have writing to do that will take all my energy up to 1949. What fun it would be to watch the evolution of democracy up to 1950. Just now I am not looking ahead beyond 1930. I was told I might pass on at 26, again at 38 and 55 but being of obdurate temperament I declined. Charles Walcott died in office on February 9, 1927.   – Stephen J. Gould