Farewell Len Shlain

Good-bye Len

My friend Leonard Shlain died last week.

I will miss him.

It is not often that you read a book that changes the way you see the world.  Perhaps only a handful in a lifetime. So it was that I was captured by The Alphabet versus The Goddess, which I read in 1998.

I found the book by accident, while browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble and bought it on a whim.

It was mindblowing.

For many years, I made it require reading for my class at NYU.

You have to read it yourself, but in short, it’s a look at how the transition from an orally-based culture to a print-based culture some 2500 years ago shifted all of society’s norms; far beyond simple communication.  It was, according the author, a function of a shift from a left-brain to a right-brain dominated culture.  The author, Len Shlain, was not a sociologist by training, but rather a surgeon, and a very good one at that.  He was Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF.

The book so captured me that it changed the way I interpreted everything else.

A year after reading it, I was working at The Voice of America, where we were giving small video cameras to the radio journalists and having them move from radio to TV.  Shlain’s ideas were with me than, because we were, in fact making a transition from an oral culture at VOA to an image based one.

As I said, I began to see the implications of Shlain’s thinking everywhere.

To my surprise, I noticed a signboard in the hall at VOA listing all the people who were going to be on the air that day.  VOA ran 53 radio studios simultaneously, so there were always lots of guests coming in and out of the building.

One of them was Dr. Leonard Shalin, author.

Like some autograph-seeking nut, I stationed myself outside the radio studio where Shlain was on the air.

When the show was over, I introduced myself to him and told him how much the book had influenced me.

“What are you doing now”, he asked, “let’s have lunch”.

So we did.

It was a lunch that began a long and important friendship for me; one that would last just over a decade.

My first conversation with Len Shlain was like every other one I ever had with him – mesmerizing.

I have met many people in my life, but I never met anyone like Len Shlain. He had a mind that was so fast, so eclectic, able to leap from topic to topic to topic and yet tie it all together to make sense through a single thread. His knowledge of history was encyclopedic, and yet his area of specialty was medicine, on which we rarely touched.

He held patents for several surgical devices he had invented. He designed, architected and built his stunning home; a labrynth of glass, terraces and steel clinging to a cliffside overlooking San Francisco Bay.  It could have been in Architectural Digest – maybe it was.

His last book was a life study of Leonardo DaVinci. A fitting work for a man who was as close to Leonardo as a modern day Renaissance man as anyone I have ever met.

Brilliant. A soaring intellect. Yet with so different a view of the world and so able to articulate and draw it all together in the most compelling way.

Last month I picked up and reread his first book, Art & Physics.  It’s a study of the rise of the Modern Art Movement as a parallel human event to the discovery of post-Newtonian physics; Quantum Mechanics and Jackson Pollack – how are they the same thing?

Absolutely fascinating.

The last time I saw Len, he and his wife Ina had made the schlep to our wedding in Tuscany in August.

They stayed with us at the Villa Pignano for a week, and we spent many an evening in the courtyard talking or singing. He knew every song you could name.

Ach… Len.

I am happy for the ten years that I knew you.

I am only sorry it was not for much longer.