Most jobs are done because they have to be done – to earn a living, support a family, get on in the world, secure the future. Some jobs are back-breaking, some comfortable, some challenging, some boring in the extreme. Most work is a chore, not a joy. There are very few persons who absolutely love their jobs.
I have known some of them. They are the blessed of the earth. A long time ago I met a visitor to Guyana who has remained vivid in my mind. He was an expert on grasshoppers. He was a great enthusiast and I spent an hour talking to him about grasshoppers around the world and could easily have spent another day or a week on the subject. I did not know, until he told me, how full the world is of grasshoppers – green and gold and brown and black and red even, some inches large and some dot-like small, with a thousand sounds and songs and habits of their own. If you should cut down one of your great forest trees, he told me, in the branches of the crown, if you look carefully enough, you will find twenty or more separate species of grasshopper there. This man was going up the Essequibo for a few days and was looking forward to discovering at least a handful of completely new kinds of grasshopper to add to his collection. There was going to be a full moon and apparently there are some grasshoppers that are especially attracted by a combination of the moon and the sweet sap in the leaves of a certain kind of tree he hoped to find.
This man was one of life’s especially happy people. You can always tell them. A sort of serenity settles around their eyes. There is absolutely no bombast in them. They are filled with a pure enthusiasm which lights up their faces and makes them vibrant when they talk about what they love to do. There is no greed in them – no greed for power or position or money or public precedence – which is why in this rare category of the especially happy no career man, no politician, no big businessman, or anyone seeking the limelight, is ever likely to appear. The truly happy are those who find supreme contentment in working quietly all their lives to add to the stock of human knowledge in their chosen, much-loved field. The satisfaction they get is in their own constantly renewed awareness of how their small successes daily increase mankind’s precious store of knowledge. Perhaps, as an added bonus, they also find pleasure in the informed praise of peers and colleagues in their field, but that is not the main thing. The main thing is self-satisfaction, in the best sense of the world.
“When I am out of joint, from bad weather or a poor run of thoughts,” EB White, that perfect American essayist, once wrote, “I like to sit and think about Edward Howe Forbush.” The great ornithologist, Edward Howe Forbush, loved birds all his long life from when he was a boy of ten exploring for song sparrows in the woods and fields around Boston to his death at 71 when he had just a few pages left to finish his great summation of bird life, the magnificent 3-volume, illustrated book Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States which has given, and will continue to give, infinite pleasure and instruction to the generations as they succeed each other. Knowing such people, or reading about them, lifts the heart even in the worst of times or moods.
So now I read with great delight of Nico Declercq of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Cindy Dekeyser of that Institute’s campus in France in Metz who have applied modern acoustic theory to explain why audiences in the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus can hear the actors as well far back in the amphitheatre as right up front.
As well as the slope, the two researchers considered the seats themselves. There are stone benches arranged in rows, which give the semicircular bowl-shape of the theatre a corrugated surface. In a paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Dr Declercq and Ms Dekeyser calculate how each frequency of sound behaves as it diffracts off the rows of seats.
Epidaurus’s perfect acoustics are indeed the result of what its audience sits on. Theatre-goers receive sound from the front, reflected off the theatre’s foreground, as well as from behind them, backscattered by the seats. The seat rows only backscatter frequencies above a certain threshold, so they act, in effect, as a sound filter. Conveniently, Epidaurus’s threshold is about 500 hertz. That is the usual upper limit of the noise of wind rustling through bushes and of the murmurs of an audience, which might have drowned the actors out.
Dr Declercq points out that it does not matter that the theatre design also removed fundamental tones of the human voice because the brain reconstructs these from the available high frequencies. Millions of people experience this daily without noticing it when they listen to somebody else’s voice through the telephone.
Such people are possessed of a passion which is innocent, intense and perfect – a passion which adds to the stock of human knowledge for the pure love of it. Blessed by the Gods in his work as he is, Dr Declercq goes happily from job to job. Previously, for instance, he had demonstrated why a handclap in front of the stairs of the great pyramid of Chichen Itza in Mexico has an echo that sounds like the chirp of a beautiful bird called a quetzal. What a lovely life he has!
