Why Didn't Ian McEwan Just Become a Scientist?

Ian McEwan's recent New Yorker story, "The Use of Poetry," is all about a British physics major in the 1960s who seduces his first wife after a week-long crash course in Milton. That it only takes him 7 days of reading before he can seductively quote and converse about the poet fills him with a certain disdain for the humanities. (In case you're wondering, the "use" of poetry is that it helps you meet chicks. That part might be true.)

Of his protagonist, McEwan writes: "His Milton week made him suspect a monstrous bluff. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily in his course...He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thoughts. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected that there was nothing they talked about at those meetings that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superior, these lie-abeds, and he had let them intimidate him."

So that was sort of a long quote. But seriously, what is the deal with Ian McEwan's total persistent hang-up about not being a scientist? He is one of the leading fiction writers of his whole generation and he's good and his novels sell and I understand being fascinated by science but his preoccupation seems to go deeper than intellectual curiosity or admiration. Like he has this need to constantly compare the very nature of the humanities and the sciences as if there were some crucial difference or shimmering similarity that, if only he could locate and embody in a character, would set him free forever.

Well, I am tired of this fight. If I had the sciences and the humanities in a room with me right now, I would say exactly what you would say to two-year-old cousins: you are each special in your own way; there is no need to fight over who is more special. No one is more special. Now go play outside.