Kevin Berger

The scientists constituted a fascinating foursome, each with his own point of view. Jeffery Pettis, research leader of the USDA’s honeybee lab, told us the current collapse is one of the worst in history. Eric Mussen, of the Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California at Davis, maintained that it may only be cyclical. Wayne Esaias, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, an amateur beekeeper, outlined his compelling views about the impact of climate change on bees. And John McDonald, a biologist, beekeeper and gentleman farmer in rural Pennsylvania, reminded us, if at times sardonically, of the poetry in agriculture.

First things first. The Internet, as you know, loves a rumor. Are cellphones killing the bees?

JEFFERY PETTIS: All the explanations that bees became disoriented by cellphone radiation, or this, that and the other thing — there is zero evidence for any of it. All we know is we lost the worker population and they died away from the hive. What’s unusual is they died over a short time period. Are they flying off to nirvana? Who knows where they are? They are just dying away from the hive, which is normal.

ERIC MUSSEN: It’s important to look at what’s normal. In the summer, bees go through a six-week life cycle: three inside the hive, three outside it as foragers. Then they die of old age. When bees are coming to the end of their life for whatever reason, they just fly off and don’t come back. They fly out to die because flying out and dying is what they do. The question is, Why are we seeing bees with such a shortened life cycle? Well, now we’re talking about winter bees. As you move into fall, the colony is supposed to be rearing bees that have a long life expectancy — from about October to March of the next year. The problem is the winter bees aren’t making it. Everything just sort of fell apart near the end of this summer and those bees that were supposed to live up to six months didn’t come close.

JOHN McDONALD: That cellphone thing is a major source of irritation to me. If it were true, I suspect about 10,000 people at Penn State would be lying on the street dead now. And yet you see them walking around and talking on cellphones. My son explained to me that cellphone radiation puts out a wavelength of about three inches. A honeybee is three-quarters of an inch long and so the bee is going to create virtually no shadow in that wavelength. That’s one reason why I look askance at that theory. The other is where I live, in the middle of Appalachia, the bees are disappearing and there are virtually no cellphones.

One scientist has said solving the bees’ disappearance is like “CSI” for agriculture. What’s the latest word from the lab?

PETTIS: The latest word is we’re working on a lot of different samples we’ve collected throughout the year. We’re working under the idea that bees have suffered a one-two punch. The first is a primary stressor — poor diet, mites, or low-level pesticide exposure. That puts them in a compromised or weak state, and then a secondary pathogen takes over. Because of how quickly the bees are dying, it seems most likely a pathogen would be involved. So we’re looking for a secondary pathogen that might be unique or novel.

Are pesticides a major culprit?

MUSSEN: Perhaps 10 percent of commercial bee colonies in any given year are either severely damaged or die on contact with agricultural pesticides. But there’s no reason to believe the exposure this year is any different from last year or any other year.

John, you wrote a pretty strong opinion piece that fingered Bt crops, which have been genetically modified to control insect pests. Based on your experiences as a beekeeper, how did you come to that conclusion?

McDONALD: My first collapse started last summer when a powerful colony, in a manner of a week, went downhill. The drone cone sort of cascaded down over the foundation like ice on a mountain. In another hive that was equally strong, the bees ended up lying dead on a mat that extended about six feet. That didn’t happen with the other hives, which is indicative of agricultural poisoning. Also, the drones hung around until snowfall, which is unusual, indicating some kind of kind of behavioral dysfunction with the worker bees.

I did a little research and found two studies about the Bt phenomenon. When you look at the action of Bt gene proteins taken up in the gut of insects, including bees, you find an enzyme that gobbles its way through any protein there and affects the insects. And bees are known to forage on cornflowers to get pollen to rear their young brood. I’m not saying Bt is the sole cause of collapse, only that I would like to have it investigated.

Is there any evidence, Jeff or Eric, of Bt crops killing bees?

MUSSEN: When Bt crops were being used in the fields to control lepidopteron insects, or butterflies, there were a significant number of studies run to try to determine whether or not incorporating Bt into the food of the adult bees, or the larvae, would hurt the bees. And the answer was no.

PETTIS: I contributed to a recent study where we directly fed the Bt toxin to whole bee colonies and could demonstrate no effects on them.

MUSSEN: There was a study, and perhaps this is the one John is referring to, that showed the active chemical in these Bt cultures is a protein crystal that develops in organisms. For four years in a row, an institution fed that protein to honeybees at 10 times the amount that they would ever encounter in the field if they were feeding on pollen. In three of the four years, they saw nothing out of the ordinary. In the fourth year, a parasite showed up, and the bees that had been consuming the protein appeared to suffer more. The experiment didn’t say the Bt protein gave the bees the “disappearing” disease, or that it killed all of them; it just said the bees that came in contact with the crops appeared to be more negatively affected by the parasite.

Can you tell us about your experiences with colony collapse, Wayne, and your studies to understand wider ecological causes?

WAYNE ESAIAS: Sure. I’m a small beekeeper. I have about 15 colonies and have experienced some loss. I realize there are many symptoms involved. Still, there are one or two I’m puzzled about. I keep records of when my bees collect pollen and nectar in my backyard. I weigh the hive and I have a time series that goes back to 1992. What I’ve seen over the course of that time is due to local warming: The pollen and nectar flow come almost a month earlier than they did in the 1970s. This is coincident with the urbanization of the D.C.-Baltimore area, causing temperatures to rise.

I’m also using data from NASA satellites to address how global warming or environmental change might be impacting our honeybee populations, and even the spread of the African honeybee. We see plants blooming at different times of the year, and that’s why the nectar flows are so much earlier now. I need to underscore that I have no evidence that global warming is a key player in colony collapse disorder. But it might be a contributor, and changes like this might be upping the stress level of our bee populations.

One new study suggested the collapse might be the result of a rare spore called Nosema ceranae.

MUSSEN: If you get enough Nosema ceranae, yes, a colony will die. If you get enough viruses, the colony will die. If you get enough mites, the colony will die. If you get exposure to insecticides, the colony will die. So all these things that we are looking at are capable of doing in a colony. There’s no doubt about it. So could a true lack of food. Literally, you could starve the bees to death. Beekeepers have accidentally done that many times. What you’re going to find is that in most cases there is not going to be one factor that did them in; it’s going to be a combination. This is the perfect storm for honeybees.

Millions of bees in California alone are trucked around from town to town to be used as pollinators on farms. That’s got to be awfully stressful on them, right?

MUSSEN: Yes, it’s a stress. But commercial beekeepers have been moving substantial numbers of colonies on trucks for decades. I’m not convinced that they’re being moved more, or that it beats them up any worse that it did 10 years ago. California beekeepers have told me that in a course of moving the colonies around in the back of the truck, they tend to lose 10 percent of the queens with each move. Some feel it’s that high. But that doesn’t mean that 10 percent of your bee colonies died; many of them will come back and you will still have a colony.

One researcher has said that the competition for food among the millions of bees used to pollinate almond trees in California could, essentially, be working them to death. Do you agree?

MUSSEN: Almond trees aren’t the problem. It’s what happens after the bees are done with the trees and are brought back to the holding yards. In late fall, there is basically no food — after the almonds — so the bees have to fend for themselves. Besides eucalyptus trees, there’s a bunch of weeds that the bees can feed on. They don’t get heavy and fat but they’ve got some food available.

PETTIS: Beekeepers are always looking for what they call “good pasture,” places they can put the bees and not have to feed the bees themselves. Florida has an abundant and diverse set of floral plants, so the bees are not suffering. What’s interesting is that there’s a number of government control programs for invasive weeds. Beekeepers love invasive weeds. Most produce a lot of nectar for the bees. So there’s been competition in some cities over getting rid of the noxious weeds and keeping them for beekeepers. But California is unusual in that beekeepers are doing what we are starting to call “feedlot beekeeping,” where we are having to provide resources because there is just not enough food out there. And this is just to meet the almond-pollination demands.

MUSSEN: The real problem in California is that we’ve only had half a normal rainfall this year. So after the almonds, when the bees went out to find other things, there was barely anything there. What was really interesting was some of the bees looked like they were well on their way to establishing good colonies. They looked like they could live on the stored almonds they had picked up in the late summer and fall. But this time they collapsed. So that’s the question: Why?

And what’s your answer?

MUSSEN: I’m probably the strongest advocate in the United States suggesting that malnutrition was the underlying thing that set up our bees to be whacked by everything else researchers are looking at. Honeybees rely on pollen for protein, vitamins, fats and minerals. That’s where their major “health food” comes from. If we are having a typical year, and the rains come, there aren’t too many places in the United States where the bees cannot find their mix of pollens to meet their dietary needs and get them through a normal life cycle.

The question is, What happens when things don’t go like that? Well, you get this blast of hot temperature, which is about the time the flower buds are forming and the pollen grains are beginning to form. What does that do? You get sterile pollen. A beekeeper could look into the hive and say, “I’ve got all kinds of pollen in there and the bees disappeared.” Well, right, you’ve got pollen grains, but do they have any nutrition in them?

Anything that interferes with the availability of food, or the quality of the food, is going to be detrimental to the bees. They don’t have much of an immune system, so the only way that they can resist being infected by a lot of things is when they have their innate resistance up, and the best resistance is when they’re best fed. So my feeling is that their nutrition just wasn’t what it was supposed to be, and they were susceptible when they should have been resistant. I think something happened at the end of last year in many places in the temperate climate around the world, not just here, and fouled up the bees’ food supply. Unless somebody tells me differently, I’m blaming it on the weather.

ESAIAS: One of the things that I’ve noticed in my short little time series in my backyard is that I could pick out every El Niño and La Niña effect. These are normal. These short-term climate changes are normal, and our bee population and our natural pollinator population have seen them, and they can probably handle them. What is disturbing is the long-term trend. Maybe years of severe climate impact are going to be more frequent and it’s going to be really difficult to pick them out as causative factors unless we have a coherent way of studying each one.

Could the bees be dying because once they are sent out to do their work as pollinators on farms, they can’t find their way back to their colonies? Sometimes it seems like there are more mini-malls in America than flowers, and maybe the bees can’t navigate urban land patterns.

MUSSEN: Land patterns would be the least of their problems. When a honeybee transitions from an in-hive bee to an outside bee, it flies back and forth around the hive for a few minutes. Then it backs off and goes further away. In the process, it is taking a bunch of snapshots. That’s how it’s going to navigate from that time on — through those snapshots. It’s going to learn the roads, the trees, the houses, and the part of the hive with the entrance it uses. Bees use those landmarks to determine where they are and where they are going. That’s another reason why cellphone communication is not going to rattle them unless it completely fries their brains so they can’t see anymore. But when you put them into the environment where they have been flying, they’ll follow their landmarks home. So I don’t think we have to worry about that.

McDONALD: I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about the size of the current soybean and corn crop, which I think impacts on this. When we fly over the fields in a jet, we look down and think we see some pastoral idyll. But the truth of the matter is, we may be looking at a slow-motion ecological train wreck. I made some calculations, and the total soybean and corn crop, including genetically modified seeds, is in a neighborhood of 102 million acres. After a little basic arithmetic, that would be a strip of crops running from Pennsylvania to the Rocky Mountains. It would be 100 miles wide, and if you were flying over in a plane, it would take you four hours. When you look at that thing at that magnitude of disruption, you can’t help but suspect that maybe there’s more to the picture than meets the eye, when you consider the absolute scale of things, compared with natural environments where you still have weeds and flowers.

ESAIAS: Land use has changed drastically in the past 100 years. There’s no question that urbanization is increasing at a fantastic rate. I was thinking, as I was listening to John, that a lot of these concerns apply to our native pollinators — the things that live in the hedgerows and the woods — much more so than to our managed bee colonies, which are generally cared for by beekeepers. Crops are a significant source of pollen and nectar for our bees and our pollinators, and there is no doubt in my mind that the flora quality is changing, even if we can’t say whether it’s for the better or worse just now.

McDONALD: You know, I was looking at my flowering trees the other day. I have a beautiful weeping crabapple, and my grandson, while standing under the tree, which was just heavy with blossoms, said spontaneously, “Last year that tree was humming with bees.” Now there was one bumblebee on it. The small nascent bees and other little bee types are absolutely missing. Near that tree I’ve got acres of dandelions and you cannot find one of the native pollinators. And it’s not just the honeybees; it’s other pollinators like moths and butterflies. In many ways, their loss is probably more alarming or indicative of a deep problem.

PETTIS: We rely on honeybees for agriculture because we can move them in large numbers. And we know how to manage them. But the National Academy of Sciences recently published a study that showed that all pollinators — which rely on a diversity of flowers — are in decline. Whether it’s urbanization, habitat fragmentation, or an increase in agricultural land use, something is severely impacting the native pollinators.

Colony collapse disorder was reported by commercial beekeepers. Is it also happening to bees in the wild?

PETTIS: There’s very few places where we actually monitor the feral population. I know of a group in Texas that was following some wild populations of bees, and a Cornell researcher has found a group around Ithaca, New York. But it’s often hard to sample those bees. We know that wild bee populations were decimated by parasitic varroa mites over time, and they’ve rebounded, probably due to natural selection for natural resistance. But I’m not familiar with data coming in from feral populations.

McDONALD: A few years ago, in a very remote part of the state, I found thriving bee populations that I assumed were feral. To help them along, I set up bait boxes and put in anti-mite strips. I slipped them in seed oil and made little puddles so the bees had to walk through the oil in this experiment I called “remote medication.” But as the summer went on, the bees collapsed in spite of my attempts to help them. The feral population is just getting so hard hit that I suspect it’s virtually gone by now.

Are scientists looking at how the climate affects the bees’ favorite flowers and food sources?

ESAIAS: That’s a good question. Most of the nectar sources in Maryland, my state, come from trees — tulip poplar, black locus and holly trees. There has been a great deal of research on plants and increased CO2 and warming. I tried to find out how temperatures would affect blooming dates, and there is virtually no information in the literature on how temperature affects blooming dates of our trees and how increased CO2 concentrations affect blooming dates. There’s lots of research that says it makes plants grow faster, and some of them, like poison ivy, become more toxic. But ecologists in general have not paid attention to the timing of blooming and nectar availability and quality of pollen.

McDONALD: That is so true. The only number that I go on is that an apple tree will bloom after 40 days in 40-degree temperatures. That boils down that simple formula.

ESAIAS: As a kind of a climatologist, I’m getting paid to study the impact of potential global warming scenarios on our ecology. There’s a lot of research being done on carbon cycling, but without information about when the plants bloom and how the quality of the flora changes, we are in a poor position to assess the effect of changes in temperature and rainfall on our ecosystems.

Can bees survive climate changes?

MUSSEN: I can tell you that beekeepers take their honeybees north to the upper Canadian border and all the way down to the equator. If they’re warm, they cool themselves by evaporating water, and if they’re cold, they heat themselves by sucking up a little bit of extra carbohydrate and rattling their muscles.

So they’re great adapters?

MUSSEN: They’re going to handle it. The honeybees are not the ones I’m concerned about. I think Wayne will back me up on this: Historians have said that thousands of years ago, there were some pretty nasty fluctuations in the Earth’s weather. And through this period of time, we became and continue to be very good farmers. But for whatever reason, we are beginning to kind of move into a cycle where we are going to find more extremes than we used to have. The droughts may be hotter and longer, the storms and floods may be more severe. Things aren’t going to be so nice in the future. But again, I think the honeybees are more likely to handle that as long as they’ve got some food available to them. But with some of these other pollinators, which we rely upon to keep the environment going for us, well, if they get knocked around too much by the weather, then that’s going to be really consequential.

What do you think the disappearance of the bees teaches us about ecology?

ESAIAS: If I can go back to what Eric was saying, I too don’t doubt the survivability of the honeybee. On average, it’s going to do fine. But what we are dealing with now is a series of local effects. That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to see an average global increase of temperature in the future, if you believe the predictions.

What does it tell us about our native pollinators and ecology? That’s such an exceedingly complex question that I don’t know. It just puts me in awe of Earth’s complexity. If you ask scientists to predict what global warming will do to an ecosystem, and they don’t throw up their hands and say, “Beats me,” then it shows we have a lot of work to do to understand the complexity and responses of all of these insect and plant interactions, when they occur, and will they get out of phase.

McDONALD: I think there is a cautionary tale here. Look at the progenitors of the maize, the corn which was developed in Mexico. It took a long time for environmental researchers to find the original plant because as the maize became dependent upon cultivation, a lot of those genes from the wild corn had died off. There used to be 1,000 small meatpacking plants, and if a problem arose at one, it was not particularly important to the other 999. But now with all these together as one vast factory, any problem that arises has instant implications everywhere. We’re at the mercy of assembly-line farming and high-speed distribution, and maybe no accountability as far as the quality of the food. But I don’t know how you do it. How do you get more people to go back to smaller farms? It’s practically utopian to bring that up anymore.

It’s amazing that an esoteric subject like beekeeping has erupted in the mass media. Do you think that’s been beneficial?

ESAIAS: I think the media coverage is wonderful. I think we are facing a series of problems like this, problems that are environmental in nature, and this has been a real eye-opener for me as to how poorly prepared this country and countries around the world are in taking note of how climate change or global change will impact our ecosystems. Humanity is affecting our ecosystems, and it’s very complex to determine whether this is due to environmental change or some disease. You can see now that it is very difficult to pull these things apart.

McDONALD: The media has done a very good job of telling all sides. But the problem is, how do you motivate people to change the way they are? Where I live, I try to live pretty low on the food chain and avoid the temptation of most of the things that people have. People are just incredible consumers and runners of fuel and buyers of gadgets. How do you change that? It’s as if there’s an ethical or a moral blank spot there. I don’t like to preach, but it’s pretty obvious: When you’re killing the Corn Belt by growing fuel to run SUVs, there’s a very bad disconnect somewhere along the line.

MUSSEN: Bees are a necessary part of our food production. If we don’t grow our own cherries and apples, can’t we just buy them somewhere else? The answer is yes. But do we want to become as dependent on foreign nations for our food as we are dependent on them for fuel? I would certainly hope the answer is no. I believe that the amount of food we exported to other countries last year was less than the amount of food we imported for our consumption. We used to be the breadbasket of the world. Now we’re just one of the breadbaskets.

McDONALD: The basket case.

MUSSEN: [Laughs.] So to keep our industry healthy, we certainly have to keep our pollinators healthy.

In the end, are we the people the ultimate cause of the bees’ collapse?

PETTIS: We’re the ultimate cause in that we’ve changed the planet to suit our needs. We’re running it to suit our needs and not to the benefit of all the organisms around us. Honeybees aren’t totally domesticated, but we have tried to domesticate them. We’ve tried to make bees more gentle and make more honey. In enhancing certain traits, we make the bees more susceptible to other things.

Do you think the bees will be back?

PETTIS: I do. I don’t think we’ve gone that far in domesticating them. The bee population is very diverse and can withstand an onslaught of different things — including beekeepers.

Research assistance by Jonathan Vanian.

A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process but is the men and women performing it. In his radiant new book, “The Age of Wonder,” Holmes treats us to the amazing lives of the pioneering sailors and balloonists, astronomers and chemists of the Romantic era. Making good on the book’s subtitle, he takes us on a dazzling tour of their chaotic British observatories and fatal explorations in African jungles, showing us “how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science.”

That’s an exceptional insight. After all, this was the time when William Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud along England’s lakes and John Keats told us all we need to know on earth is “beauty is truth.” To this day, Romantic poets and scientists are not supposed to be seen together. “Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity,” Holmes writes.

What’s superlative about “The Age of Wonder” is that Holmes, author of vivid biographies of Shelley and Coleridge, takes the air out of the terms “subjectivity” and “objectivity” and reveals the ways in which the artists were as enveloped in science as the men and women in the labs around them. In a harmony of scientific and artistic sensibilities, he shows, the Romantics tapped the marvels of nature and sounded the infinite benefits of science. It’s a song, if we can hear it, that can transform us today.

In Holmes’ keen focus, the Romantic era is the Age of Aquarius in science. There was something in the water then — a tonic of wonder, as he sees it. The austere fellows of the previous age, Descartes and Newton, were too obsessed with etching new sciences in stone to gaze beyond the mechanics of their labors. But as the Enlightenment marched on, scientists began to look up from their desks and into themselves. They became self-conscious. Doubts cracked the cold calculations before them — doubts, Holmes writes, that “favored a softer dynamic science of invisible powers and mysterious energies, of fluidity and transformations, of growth and organic change.”

Holmes’ Moses of Romantic science, its guide to a new promised land, was Joseph Banks. A dashing young naturalist, mad about botany, Banks’ lived by his own credo: “To explore is my wish.” In 1769, Banks ventured to Tahiti with Capt. James Cook on a mission whose primary goal was to observe the Transit of Venus. The Pacific Island provided a front-row seat to the rare occurrence of Venus passing directly between the sun and Earth. Banks wanted to study trees.

On the island, things changed. Banks quickly established his independence from Cook and his conservative crew by falling in love with the native people. Rather than colonize them, Banks wanted to understand them. He mastered some of their language, danced with them, had sex with them, and wrote candidly of the light and dark sides of their natures. They could be open and generous one day and thieves and strange sorcerers who practiced infanticide the next. Banks journeyed to Tahiti as an Enlightenment botanist determined to catalog shrubs and flowers and returned to England a Romantic adventurer who journeyed into the heart of human nature and helped pioneer the science of anthropology.

Back in England, Banks became a cynosure of London society with his exotic Tahitian tales. His fame and intelligence led to his appointment as president of the Royal Society, the influential body of philosophers and scientists, who directed and funded the country’s scientific endeavors. As the man in charge for the next 42 years, mired in politics, navigating whimsical kings and religious leaders, Banks never abandoned the adventurer inside him. “His body may have been chairbound, but his spirit was increasingly airborne,” writes Holmes.

The first great discovery under Banks’ watch in England was made by German transplant William Herschel, a musician who learned to read the stars like music. An obsessive inventor, Herschel designed and built large “reflector” telescopes, which captured and concentrated starlight with unprecedented intensity and clarity, allowing him to plunge deeper into space than ever before. Herschel also devised a meticulous math for scanning the skies.

Just as impressive was Herschel’s unfailingly humble and devoted sister, Caroline, who worked around the clock at her brother’s side. Without a formal education, she became nearly as schooled in the way of the skies as her brother, though she would never say so (and neither would he). Caroline would discover numerous comets herself, making her one the first women scientists to win official acclaim from Banks and the Royal Society. (Caroline and her comets were a hot topic in popular magazines.) Holmes sketches the relationship of William and Caroline with heartbreaking, Thomas Hardy-ish skill. The domineering William, we learn, could never quite overcome his condescension toward his sister.

In 1781, after weeks of painstaking observation, Herschel identified a new planet in the solar system, Uranus. The discovery, the first of a new planet since ancient times, guaranteed Herschel’s eternal fame and electrified the populace.

Finding Uranus also underscored a verity of science that belied another myth about Romanticism. As much as the world wanted to believe in a Eureka moment, the truth was Herschel’s discovery arose from laborious work. But mere mortal that he was, Herschel could not refrain from romantically refining his story. As Herschel grew older, Holmes writes, he would tell listeners that he spotted Uranus in “a single wondrous night, the inspired work of a few ‘glorious hours.’”

Despite that embellishment, or perhaps because of it, Herschel embodied the ebullient tenor of the era. News of his discovery, and those of his fellow scientists, raced around the continent. Science and wonder, it seemed, had reached their apogee. Holmes goes so far as to say, “This moment of scientific optimism coincided with the political optimism in Britain and France. In 1789 the Bastille would fall, and the Rights of Man would be declared.”

At the same time, the astronomer augured a profound discontent. With his refined telescope, Herschel showed his generation that galaxies existed far, far away. Given the time it took light to travel, that implied enormous periods of time. He observed that stars and nebulae underwent constant changes over time. The universe was evolving. What Herschel saw through his telescope was a radical affront to the Bible and churches, which held that God created a fixed universe about 6,000 years ago. Beholding deep space and contemplating vast gulfs of time was, in Holmes’ phrase, “disabling with awe.”

And people were feeling it. John Bonnycastle, a popular science writer, wrote in 1786, “Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost. Surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean, mixed and confounded with the general mass.”

The awe of the universe was mirrored with acuity by the poets. Of all the masters of the era, Coleridge most often faced the immensity with wonder. Ever since he was a young boy gazing at the stars, he wrote, his “mind had been habituated to the Vast.” And in one of his late poems, “Limbo,” he imagined himself as a blind old man, gazing at the moon: “His whole face seemeth to rejoice in the light!”

Byron visited Herschel and described looking through his telescope as a religious experience. “I viewed the moon and the stars,” he wrote, “and saw that they were worlds.” Later, though, he tapped into the terror of the experience. In his poem, “Darkness,” he wrote: “The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space.”

But all was not lost. The mixture of beauty and terror in science took a colorful turn with the era’s balloonists, notably Vincent Lunardi. The boisterous Italian was a born entrepreneur. He charged an admission fee to see his balloon in a theater, took his dog and cat on flights and sold the exclusive rights to his aerial tales to newspapers. “With ballooning,” Holmes writes, “science had found a powerful new formula: chemistry plus showmanship equaled crowds plus wonder plus money.”

With their boisterous personalities, resplendent canopies and test flights that nearly always ended in dramatic crashes, the mad balloonists boosted the popularity of science. It was just that, despite some some significant research into hydrogen gas, air currents and clouds, few serious observers, including Royal Society president Banks, could figure out the long-term benefits of the spectacle.

Gothic novelist Horace Walpole, observing the flights, delivered one of the most prescient comments ever about the dark side of science. “Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race — as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science,” he wrote. “The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.”

Holmes charts the grim side of science in an engaging chapter on Scottish adventurer Mungo Park. Inspired by Banks, Park traveled to Africa to map the Niger River and explore the legendary city of Timbuctoo. Unlike Banks, though, Park did not dance with the native people; he was attacked and imprisoned by them. Park’s book “Travels In the Interior of Africa,” a rending account of his travails and epiphany among nature that stirred him to survive, inspired the pantheon of Romantic poets, and later Joseph Conrad. On a second trip to Africa in 1805, Park, on a boat in the Niger River, was ambushed by local tribesmen. He either drowned or was killed when he came ashore.

Doubts that thrilling science lacked social benefits began to creep into Romantic culture. They lodged in the person of gregarious poet and chemist Humphry Davy, who was crazy about nitrous oxide (laughing gas). At the “Pneumatic Institute,” a kind of prototype clinic for experimental treatments, Davy  performed countless experiments with the gas on himself. After one of his first forays out of his head, he wrote that nitrous oxide “made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.”

In no time, Davy convinced his friends, including poets Coleridge and Robert Southey, and medical doctor Peter Roget, to give the gas a go. In a funny anecdote, Holmes relates that Roget, the compiler of Roget’s Thesaurus, couldn’t find the right words to describe the feeling of ecstasy. “I felt myself totally incapable of speaking,” he said. Davy’s experiments ended mostly in ridicule; unfortunately, he couldn’t quite make the intellectual leap to realize nitrous oxide could revolutionze surgery as an anesthesia.

Davy, though, went on to produce “one of the great demonstrations of scientific ‘Hope,’” Holmes writes, one that revealed applied science could be a force for good and alleviate human suffering. Coal miners were dying from underground explosions ignited by the candles and oil lamps they carried. By surrounding the flame with a metallic mesh, Davy created a lantern that illuminated dark mineshafts without sparking explosions. The “Davy safety lamp” also foreshadowed a fixture of science in later generations. Another lantern maker accused Davy of plagiarizing his design. The charge was proven baseless but it hounded Davy for years.

As the turn of the century dawned, and brilliant new chemists and astronomers arrived on the scene, an encroaching sense that scientists were gaining control over human nature clouded the cultural skies. The fear was epitomized in Wordsworth’s line, “We murder to dissect.” Holmes limns the darkness with a scintillating chapter on Mary Shelley and “Frankenstein,” describing how her novel arose out the popular “Vitalism” debates between physicians who argued that human life was animated by some external force like electricity, and those, such as fearless young doctor William Lawrence, who argued there was no such thing, that the “human body is merely a complex physical organization,” Holmes writes.

Holmes, who understands the Romantic generation as well as any historian, and writes with a journalistic verve more engaging and personal than most scholars, offers a wonderfully fresh and insightful reading of “Frankenstein.” Because the movies have obscured the subtleties of Shelley’s original work, Holmes reminds us that the real tragedy of the Creature, who was articulate and self-aware, was his sense that he and his creator had lost their souls. “I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks,” laments the Creature.

As the 19th century raced on, a sense of alienation from nature deepened. Artists felt their enthusiasm draining and their pessimism rising. In a letter to Coleridge, Southey wrote, “I wish it were not true, but unfortunately it is, that experimental philosophy always deadens the feelings; and these men who ‘botanize upon their mothers’ graves’” — a reference to another Wordsworth line — “may retort and say, that cherished feelings deaden our usefulness; and so we are all well in our way.”

It is necessary for scientists to hone their objectivity to “discern objects clearly” and shun “intellectual mists” and “absurd fables,” argued Lawrence. And so it is. But in the process, scientists, and the generations they represent, cut themselves off from the “magnificent, the sublime and the beautiful,” in Davy’s words. Our deadened feelings spurred us to commit atrocious acts with the tools of science, symbolized by the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

Today, we are still chasing the laws of nature, with surgical new technology, and writing the history of science. But we stand again at a crossroad, facing new environmental and geopolitical dangers. As Holmes writes, “The old rigid debates and boundaries — science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics — are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective.” The Romantics gave us that perspective. Now we just have to live by it.

 Honky-tonk and ingratiating three-chord pop, courtesy of her tenure with the hook-crazy New Pornographers, come easily to Case. Now, in studio album No. 5 with her own band, she continues to widen and hone her musical vocabulary, with echoes of New Orleans soul and Berlin cabaret, to create bold art songs. With the voodoo reverb dialed down for a change, she orchestrates warm guitars and pianos, spiced by organ and percussion, into melodies that fly and dive and hover over sorrow. Her voice, an earthy tenor with edges that cut, is propelled by a mind that never comes to rest, like an insomniac. Her emotions rise and fall and forever reverberate. When you give in to her personal apocalypse, you hear an artist striving to say one true thing. “I choke it back, how much I need love.” And then, of course, “The next time you say ‘forever,’ I will punch you in the face.”

 I keep saying apocalypse and I mean it. In her literal and figurative move across the country, from suburban Washington state to small-town Vermont, Case — who first found her way in country-punk bands, in the shadow of those hurricane furies, Sleater-Kinney — now sounds like a minstrel along Cormac McCarthy’s road. In “Fever,” which staggers like a junkyard blues — love the prickly Hawaiian guitar — Case sees gas pumps and jackknifed trucks and “sea birds choked in fishing line.” Sleeping in an open field, “marching ants across her temple,” she envisions death with “his schything arms.” Fear takes hold and she finds relief in a fragile mantra: “My dove is home, her breast is warm, my dove is home.”

 I will say one more thing about the Case of “Middle Cyclone.” She is an animal. She sings so in a song called “I’m an Animal.” Do you know the Edward O. Wilson notion of biophilia? “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life,” writes Wilson. On an album that is a lyrical menagerie of elephants, killer whales, vultures, mollusks and whippoorwills (nice reference to Hank Williams), Case exalts our innate relationship with other creatures. It’s a beautiful turn but it doesn’t rest in folky piety. In Case’s “Middle Cyclone,” we are killing ourselves. In her minatory world, the mockingbird sings “screaming car alarms.” Although it’s true the pop-happy chorus of “People Got a Lotta Nerve” — “I’m a man-man-man-eater” — bops along with levity.

So you recollect “Middle Cyclone” in haunting solitude and while listening feel only the music’s dazzling glow. I am tempted to compare the new album to Case’s second, the rough-cut masterpiece “Furnace Room Lullaby,” nothing but simple country hooks and full-throated love crashing and burning into stinging whiskey hangovers. But the comparison isn’t quite fair. Case has moved on musically, finding new tempos and styles to reflect her searing imagination, and it’s working with charm. For all the thought poured into the construction of the new songs, they don’t feel finished. Like life. I bet that’s Case’s intention. Just as it’s no doubt her view that one day the earth will be done with humans and there will be, as there is at the end of “Middle Cyclone,” only the sound of crickets.

Steves laughed out loud when he read that line, he told me. But see, that’s the problem. He’s so good-natured and devoted in his PBS travel specials to showing places that Fodor’s would never send tourists to in their floral shirts that he’s created a monstrous new travel industry. He’s the apotheosis of the anti-Carnival Cruise crowd.

Oh, well, what are you going to do? I’ve used his books in Europe myself. But there’s an activist side to Steves that many of his fans may not be aware of. Behind his abnormal geniality thrums a daring political agenda. Not a didactic one, mind you, but a Rick Steves one.

In short, Steves wants Americans to get over themselves. He wants us to please shed our geographic ego. “Everybody should travel before they vote,” he has written. We should be represented by politicians who want America to act as a good global neighbor.

Steves’ agenda is epitomized in his recent TV special on Iran. At the request of a friend in the United Nations to help “build understanding between Iran and the U.S.,” Steves has produced a loving portrait of the demonized country. Characteristic Steves-on-the-street interviews open closed minds to the sophistication of Iranian citizens and their lack of antipathy toward Americans. In one scene, a man in a car pokes his head out the window and says to Steves, “Your heart is very kind.” Steves is incredibly proud of his Iran film and is offering the DVD for $5 to any community group that wants to discuss it.

I recently caught up with Steves while he was killing time in the Tulsa, Okla., airport, where he had just given a talk about Iran, and was heading home to Washington state. In conversation, he was as ebullient as ever, fearlessly spelling out his views on globalization and terrorism, the scourges of tourism and the importance of decriminalizing marijuana.

Conservatives continue to harp that the U.S. shouldn’t negotiate with Iran, and call Obama weak for even appearing agreeable toward the country. What can your Iran show say to American hard-liners?

When I made the show, I was not interested in endorsing or challenging the complaints we have about Iran’s government. Maybe they do fund terrorism, maybe they do want to destroy Israel, maybe they do stone adulterers. I don’t know. I just wanted to humanize the country and understand what makes its people tick.

When I came home after the most learning 12 days of travel I’ve ever had in my life, I realized this is a proud nation of 70 million people. They are loving parents, motivated by fear for their kids’ future and the culture they want to raise their kids in. I had people walk across the street to tell me they don’t want their kids to be raised like Britney Spears. They are afraid Western culture will take over their society and their kids will be sex toys, drug addicts and crass materialists. That scares the heck out of less educated, fundamentalist, small-town Iranians, which is the political core of the Islamic Revolution and guys like Ahmadinejad.

After all, this is a country that lost a quarter of a million people fighting Saddam Hussein, when Iraq, funded by the United States, invaded Iran. And they remember the invasion like it was yesterday to them. It’s amazing: They have a quarter of our population and they lost a quarter of a million people, fighting Hussein. That’s a huge scar in their society.

I just feel we underestimate the spine of these people. They will fight and die to defend their values. And their values are not to destroy America and Israel. Their values are to defend their way of life against Western encroachment. Because of recent history, they have grounds to think America threatens them. So it would be dangerously naive to think we could shock and awe them into any kind of submission.

Do you want your film to have a political impact in the U.S.?

Well, yes. I talked to 2,000 people in Tulsa today. After I explained this to them, I am convinced they now have a little less self-assuredness in thinking that Iran is the evil our government wants us to think it is. I was actually scared to go to Iran. We almost left our big camera in Athens and took our little sneak camera instead. I thought people would be throwing stones at us in the streets. And when I got there, I have never felt a more friendly welcome because I was an American. It was just incredible. I was in a traffic jam in Tehran, a city of 10 million people, and a guy in the next car saw me in the back seat and had my driver roll the window. He then handed over a bouquet of flowers and said, “Give this bouquet to the foreigner in your back seat and apologize for our traffic.”

Did you edit out any scenes that might have portrayed Iranians in a negative light?

No. I was very upfront in the show that I wasn’t there to do things like visit nuclear plants. Some people say, “You’re just being duped, you got a minder, he’s only going to show you the good parts of the country.” But we went through streets with angry anti-American posters. We showed that. You see the “Death to America” thing.

I do want to make clear that Iran is not a free society. They traded away their freedom for a theocracy, out of fear. It’s just like Americans. We don’t want to torture people, we want to have civil liberties, we don’t want our government reading our mail. But when we have fear, we let fear trump our commitment to our civil liberties and decency. We allow torture, we allow the government to read our mail. It’s not because we’re bad, it’s because sometimes fear is more important than our core values. And Iran is afraid. They’ve given up democracy because they know a theocracy will stand strong against encroaching Western values.

In your 2004 essay “Innocents Abroad,” you wrote: “To even consider the terrorists’ concerns (U.S. military out of Islam, Arab control of oil, security for Palestine) is out of the question in today’s America. But the passions are strong enough and technologies of mass horror are accessible enough that radicals/heroes/terrorists/martyrs from angry lands … will certainly strike again if no one listens to their concerns.”

Oh, yeah. I just feel more strongly about that than ever.

That sounds like you were being sympathetic to terrorists. Were you?

No. I’m trying to be empathetic to what motivates them. We think they’re terrorists, but we have to remember that 96 percent of the planet is not American. And most of them look at us like an empire. When I write about us being an empire, it touches a nerve more than almost anything else I write. I get so much angry feedback.

But I don’t say we’re an empire. I say the world sees us as one. I say there’s never been an empire that didn’t have disgruntled people on its fringes looking for reasons to fight. We think, “Don’t they have any decency? Why don’t they just line up in formation so we can carpet bomb them?” But they’re smart enough to know that’s a quick prescription to being silenced in a hurry.

We shot from the bushes at the redcoats when we were fighting our war against an empire. Now they shoot from the bushes at us. It shouldn’t surprise us. I’m not saying it’s nice. But I try to remind Americans that Nathan Hales and Patrick Henrys and Ethan Allens are a dime a dozen on this planet. Ours were great. But there’s lots of people who wish they had more than one life to give for their country. We diminish them by saying, “Oh, they’re terrorists and life is cheap for them.” They’re passionate for their way of life. And they will give their life for what is important to their families.

As a travel writer, I get to be the provocateur, the medieval jester. I go out there and learn what it’s like and come home and tell people truth to their face. Sometimes they don’t like it. But it’s healthy and good for our country to have a better appreciation of what motivates other people. The flip side of fear is understanding. And you gain that through travel.

But even saying you’re trying to understand terrorists’ motives still grates. Don’t you think?

Yeah, people don’t like to hear that. They think it’s showing weakness to the terrorists. But we have to think more carefully about why we are angering so much of the world. I’m just trying to say, Hey, look, we’re 4 percent of this planet, we’ve spent as much as everybody else together on the military, and we’ve got military bases in 130 countries. Yet only we can declare somebody else’s natural resources on the other side of the planet are vital to our national security. Only we can be pissed off if they elect a government that nationalizes their own natural resources.

We wonder why didn’t God give us those resources. I don’t know what motivates us to think we’ve got rights to their natural resources. This is poignant stuff, and a lot of Americans don’t want to hear it. But I just want to come home and remind my neighbors that we’ve got to work with this world. Our military and economy is not strong enough to have a unilateral foreign policy. We’re not strong enough to go it alone.

You’ve lamented that 80 percent of Americans don’t have passports. And yet we almost had a vice president who didn’t have one until 2006, and in fact criticized passports as a sign of elitism.

I remember that. She put travelers down as a latte-sipping crowd.

What would it have done to America’s reputation abroad if John McCain and Sarah Palin had won the election?

People cut us some slack for electing Bush the first time. He was an unknown quantity. But the second time we elected him, people just shook their heads and said, “There is no excuse for this.” They knew he was a unilateralist — our way or the highway. And so what if we’re outvoted in the United Nations 140 to 4? Don’t you know that’s because the four nations — the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands and Micronesia — are the compassionate, enlightened coalition, and everybody else is clueless? That kind of thinking astounds our friends abroad.

If we had a terrorist event six months ago, we would have McCain for president today. Because fear would have driven us to the hard-liner on the right. And thank goodness we didn’t have fear raging in our society during the election, so we could elect somebody who wants to talk with the rest of the world. The irony is we make the future more dangerous by not talking to the rest of the world. We can be a part of the family of nations. We don’t need to be a pushover. We can promote our values in a respectful, civilized way. That’s just more pragmatic and more productive.

So if McCain and Palin had won, what would we have seen abroad?

More and more Americans wearing Canadian flags.

What are the international consequences of Obama’s victory?

We’re part of the family of nations again. If you go to Europe wearing an Obama T-shirt this summer, you’re going to get free drinks all around. I’m just so excited that America can provide leadership again. When we opt out of these things, we’re not providing leadership. We think we can coerce people into going along with us, but all we do is isolate ourselves. And the world moves on without us. If the world moves on without us, one day we’ll wake and we’ll find we’re rich only in weaponry, and everybody else is rich in other ways. Then our little house of military cards will collapse on itself, and we’ll be a second-rate nation.

What’s the most important thing people can learn from traveling?

A broader perspective. They can see themselves as part of a family of humankind. It’s just quite an adjustment to find out that the people who sit on toilets on this planet are the odd ones. Most people squat. You’re raised thinking this is the civilized way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not. It’s the Western way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not more civilized than somebody who squats. A man in Afghanistan once told me that a third of this planet eats with spoons and forks, and a third of the planet eats with chopsticks, and a third eats with their fingers. And they’re all just as civilized as one another.

Do you think Americans are more provincial or racist than people in other countries?

The “ugly American” thing is associated with how big your country is. There are not just ugly Americans, there are ugly Germans, ugly Japanese, ugly Russians. Big countries tend to be ethnocentric. Americans say the British drive on the “wrong” side of the road. No, they just drive on the other side of the road. That’s indicative of somebody who’s ethnocentric. But it doesn’t stop with Americans. Certain people, if they don’t have the opportunity to travel, always think they’re the norm. I mean, you can’t be Bulgarian and think you’re the norm.

It’s interesting: A lot of Americans comfort themselves thinking, “Well, everybody wants to be in America because we’re the best.” But you find that’s not true in countries like Norway, Belgium or Bulgaria. I remember a long time ago, I was impressed that my friends in Bulgaria, who lived a bleak existence, wanted to stay there. They wanted their life to be better but they didn’t want to abandon their country. That’s a very powerful Eureka! moment when you’re traveling: to realize that people don’t have the American dream. They’ve got their own dream. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing.

Echoing Paul Bowles’ famous line, what’s the difference between a tourist and a traveler?

I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, my family was excited to go to Mazatlán. You get a little strap around your wrist and can have as many margaritas as you want. They only let you see good-looking local people, who give you a massage. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I don’t consider it travel. I consider it hedonism. And I have no problem with hedonism. But don’t call it travel. Travel should bring us together.

That same week, I was invited to go to El Salvador and remember the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. I thought, “I’m not going to be any fun on the beach in Mazatlán, I have to go to San Salvador.” So I went down there and I had a miserable, sweaty dorm bed, covered with bug bites. We ate rice and beans one day, and beans and rice the next day. But it was the richest educational experience. It just carbonated my understanding of globalization and the developing world, and Latin America. I was in hog heaven. And I’ve been enjoying souvenirs from that ever since. Whereas my wife just gained a few pounds on the beach in Mazatlán.

Do you think tourism gets in the way of experiencing a foreign place?

Oh, yeah. But if you’re savvy, you understand the tourism industry just wants to dumb you down and go shopping. So you have to be smart. I was just in Tangiers, which is where all the people go from Spain’s Costa del Sol resorts for their one day in Africa. It’s a carefully staged series of Kodak moments. They have a lunch. They see a belly dancer. They see the snake charmers. They buy their carpet. And they hop back on the boat to Spain. When I see them, I can’t help but think of a self-imposed hostage crisis. They put themselves in the control of their guide and never meet anybody except those who want to make money off of them. It’s a pathetic day in Africa.

Did you ever read the Don DeLillo novel “The Names,” which takes place in Greece?

No.

I always remember this line from it: “Tourism is the march of stupidity.”

That’s a great line. And that’s my challenge. I write somewhere in one of my books that my kind of travel fits the industry like a snowshoe in Mazatlán. That’s our challenge: to offer Americans, who are thoughtful and curious, a way to be thoughtful in their travels.

Of course, that’s also your own consumer brand.

Yes, it’s been quite a publicity stunt! If all I was doing was selling timeshares in Mazatlán, I would not be getting anywhere near the exposure, generating the business I’m doing. And, on the serious side, getting Americans to think about Iran or drug policy.

How did the decriminalization of marijuana become such a passion of yours?

We’re blowing $10 billion a year criminalizing a drug that’s no more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. Nobody is saying drugs are good. People are just saying it’s smarter to treat drug abuse as a health problem instead of a criminal problem. Some societies measure the effect of their drug policy in incarceration; others measure it in harm reduction. America’s into incarceration, Europe’s into harm reduction. I just bring the European sensitivity home to America.

Was there one experience that opened your eyes to the issue?

A lot of my outlook and writing have been sharpened by enjoying a little recreational marijuana. If you arrested everybody who smoked marijuana in the United States tomorrow, this country would be a much less interesting place to call home.

The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It’s racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can’t get education, can’t get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we’ve got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.

There’s 80,000 people in jail today for marijuana. We arrested 800,000 people in the last 12 months on marijuana. Even in my rich little white suburban community of Edmonds, Wash., 25 percent of police action is marijuana-related. Everybody knows it’s silly. I’m not saying I’m pro-drug. I’m just saying it’s parallel to alcohol prohibition. When they rescinded the laws against alcohol, nobody said booze is good, they just said it was stupid to make it a crime, that you’re creating organized crime and people are dying.

Where’s the best place to smoke marijuana in Europe?

With good friends. I love the ambience in a little vegetarian restaurant in Copenhagen. Or coffee shops in small-town Holland. The big city coffee shops — the menus look like a drug bust — are full of people who are pierced and tattooed and dreadlocked. That’s not my crowd. But go to a small-town coffee shop and you end up talking about philosophy and music with 50-something locals who just drop in to chat and relax. It’s like a pub.

Given the lousy economy, can we still afford to travel?

These economic times are scary and who knows where we’re heading. But it’s dangerous to measure where we’re at today by the unrealistic high a year ago, which was the result of years of goosing our economy to make us believe we’re wealthier than we are. I could say our tours are down 30 percent. And they are. But that’s not really true. Our tours are below the impossible height they reached last year. But they shouldn’t have been that high anyway. We’re taking 8,000 people instead of 12,000 people to Europe this year. And that’s OK.

A headline today said, “Americans lose 18 percent of their wealth.” Well, no, it wasn’t real wealth, it was a bubble. You’re down 18 percent? You’re not. It shouldn’t have been up there in the first place. So get over it. Shut up. Go to work, produce stuff that has value. I really think the days are gone, I hope, when people can rearrange the furniture and get rich on it. You got to produce something.

The interesting thing is we’re all in it together. What I’m sad about is that when America catches a cold, the developing world catches pneumonia. And that’s happened now. And a lot of Americans are feeling sorry for themselves because they can’t have that fancy whatever-they were-going-to-get. But they have to remember that the gap between the haves and have-nots is even more pronounced and more desperate now. You’re suddenly worried about how much is in your retirement account, but other people are worried about how much is on their dinner plate tonight. That’s the reality.

So your advice is to keep travel in the budget?

I never met anybody who was a good traveler and invested time and money in a trip and regretted it. It’s a great life experience. And if you can’t afford it, I understand. But remember, life is short. The good old days are here now. If you spend your whole life thinking the good old days are ahead of you, you’re going to wake up with regrets that life passed you by. Of course, I sell tours and guidebooks. So I need to talk it up!

“The Book of the Unknown” is a collection of pre-modern tales — picture “The Princess Bride” without the gloss — that do an imaginative number on Judaism. They read as if a mischievous and slightly mad young scholar took up a secret residence in an ancient library and composed his own samizdat version of sacred Jewish texts. In fact, says Keats, “I wrote a number of them at the MacDowell Colony, where I had my own wood-burning oven. Every evening I would smoke myself out and in my delirium the tales would come. I mean, who doesn’t like hallucination?”

Each tale follows a humble outcast. They include an idiot fisherman, a clumsy trapeze artist and a hapless gambler, who, unknown to themselves, act as saints, the fabled Lamedh-Vov from the Talmud, and ultimately show their fellow townsfolk “how to live.” In one of the 12 tales, a saturnine thief, newly in love, stands in the dark and seems to see for the first time: “Desire burned in everything, sometimes less, sometimes more, kindled by the beholder. But while children could perceive that flame plainly, adults felt it only indirectly, as the heat of envy.”

The following is drawn from an onstage interview I conducted with Keats inside a cavernous landmark building in downtown Berkeley, Calif., future home of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, which sponsored the talk. We spoke on the top floor, which features Keats’ latest public artwork: stained-glass windows patterned as cosmic microwave background radiation, the so-called space between the stars in the universe. “The Atheon,” as Keats calls it, is a “secular temple devoted to scientific worship.” I was tempted to ask about the Atheon because I know Keats intends it to stir up arguments about science and religion, but I held back because I didn’t want to get him started down the wrong path. We were here to talk about “The Book of the Unknown.”

This is an amazing turn for you, Jonathon. These are simple and wonderful and magical stories — not things you would associate with a conceptual artist who sells real estate in the 11th dimension, as string theory would have it, or who plays recorded religious prayers to fruit flies, and who …

You mean my attempt to genetically engineer God? Actually, that was part of a larger project, a sort of thought experiment undertaken in a laboratory. I was trying to discover God’s place on the phylogenetic tree, but I was unable to obtain God’s DNA, so genetic engineering seemed like the most practical approach to the problem. I worked with geneticists at U.C. Berkeley. In scientific terms, the basis was a process called continuous in vitro evolution, which has been used successfully to genetically engineer bacteria so that they’ll consume oil spills. The underlying idea is to hijack the process of natural selection by …

Keep it short, would you? We’re supposed to be talking about your new book.

Well, briefly, given that people pray to God, I figured maybe there’s a way in which God metabolizes worship. Playing prayers to various species as they evolved over many generations, I could see which ones thrived more than others. The species genetically closest to God would require the least mutation to exploit worship.

I see. Anyway, in “The Book of the Unknown,” the contemporary fictional scholar — very Nabokov of you — writes in the forward that each of the tales follows one of the Lamedh-Vov, the saints who don’t know they’re saints. You were drawing from the Talmud, right?

Yes, I plagiarized everything I could misremember, and a lot of what I misremembered was Jewish legend. The Lamedh-Vov are the 36 righteous, according to Hebraic lore. They are anonymous, unknown to everyone, even to themselves. Were one to know that he or she was amongst the 36, he or she would no longer be one.

Why not?

Traditionally, the Lamedh-Vov are the least expected people: the chimney sweep or the water carrier, rather than religious and political leaders. So that’s the simplest answer. Another way of thinking about it is in terms of a line from Talmud that I use as my epigraph: “Despise no man and deem nothing impossible, for every man has his hour and every thing its place.” That passage is not specifically about the Lamedh-Vov. But I think it’s crucial in terms of suggesting the way in which there are limitations to our ethics. Where saints typically stand as moral guides in the absolute sense, these 36 serve as a check on our judgment. Also, these stories were written during the Bush administration, when self-righteous judgment was rampant beyond anything I’d ever experienced in my 37 years.

In one of your stories, “Yod the Inhuman,” one of the saints is a golem. She is made out of mud by a Jewish scholar, who teaches her to experience pain and pleasure, and then he has sex with her. Later she becomes a whore to the whole town. I take it none of the original Lamedh-Vov from the Talmud were golems.

Well, there’s no way for us to know, given their anonymity, but I will say that even to make a golem female is pretty uncommon. As far as I’m aware, all the golems in Jewish legend were burly men. They were obedient brutes, useful in a pogrom, but hardly models of righteousness.

I’m not a Jewish scholar, but “Yod the Inhuman” sounds pretty blasphemous to me. Does it worry you that you may be blaspheming Jewish tradition and sacred texts?

If I’m blaspheming, it means I’m doing my job as a writer, and also, I believe, being true to the deepest value in Judaism, which is the value of questioning. Some people won’t agree with me, and not only the Hasids who commit the ultimate sin of religious fundamentalism. My ancestors founded one of the first Orthodox shuls in New Jersey, and I’m sure that many of these stories would mortify them. They probably wouldn’t like Yod’s aggressive sexuality, and would be even more upset that my Lamedh-Vov include a gambler, a thief, a murderer and — God forbid — a false Messiah.

But to write about each of these was a test for me, to see whether I could let go of conventional judgment, to broaden my understanding of evil and goodness. So we’re back to the notion of thought experiments: Is there a possible world in which a murderer might serve some noble purpose? Well what if, once upon a time, long ago and far away, there were a city so remote that it was overlooked by the angel of death?

Have you been a good Jew in your own life?

I butchered the Hebrew language at my bar mitzvah. And, when it comes to liturgy, I’m emphatically agnostic. But I think that at some deep level my Judaism has informed the way I live my life: the sorts of questions that I ask, and the sort of emphasis that I put on questions in their own right.

Your first novel, “The Pathology of Lies,” was about a female magazine editor who kills her boss and sends his body parts to the magazine’s subscriber list. Are you doing penance with “The Book of the Unknown”?

Probably not in the way that you mean. “The Pathology of Lies” was written in the spirit of contemporary literary fiction. It was satirical, and fundamentally modernist in the sense of being fractured, a narrative structured like life rather than with the internal coherence of an old-fashioned tale. If I’m doing penance with “The Book of the Unknown,” it’s by committing the literary sacrilege of breaking with modernism.

Why would you want to do that?

There’s nothing harmful about modernism per se, but it is rather retrograde. Life is fractured and confused, there’s no denying that, yet in their efforts to mimic those qualities, the modernists and their postmodernist imitators abandoned the very reason for telling stories, which is that stories reconceive life. Myths and folk tales and fables are alternate realities, simplified and stripped of current events, microcosms that we can enter into completely while recognizing their artifice. They are akin to the philosophical thought experiments that motivate my conceptual art. The modernist assumption is that people used to be too “primitive” to realize that their tales were unrealistic. In truth, the pre-moderns were ahead of us in that they had greater force of imagination.

Well, I don’t mean to criticize your artwork, Jonathon, but the stories feel so much warmer. They’re alive with love and jealousy and loss and reconciliation. Are you showing us a new side of yourself?

It’s a fair question, and if you see me differently through this new work, I’m not going to contradict you. But speaking from my own perspective, the underlying motivation — curiosity about the world in all its peculiarity — is the same in both cases, as is the fabulistic what-if approach to life. If the feel of this fiction is different, it’s because storytelling is a different mode of inquiry, and I think that one of the reasons why I value writing and art equally is that each has its own inherent qualities. Taken together, they allow me to reflect on the world in stereo.

Would you say you’re a spiritual person?

If you can define spirituality for me, I might be able to tell you. Probably my answer would be yes and no. I don’t buy into crystals and gurus, or practice Bikram yoga, but I do write stories. And that’s a spiritual pursuit in that it demands a suspension of disbelief; it demands a total commitment to figures who are, in literal terms, fictional. Yet I believe in them completely, and I believe in them because I have to believe in them, not because I want to do so. So I think that in that sense, yes, I must be spiritual. Also, I’m rather superstitious. A hat on a bed really disturbs me. Maybe imagining the fate of the hat’s owner is what made me into a writer.

Don’t you think reading is also an act of faith?

Absolutely, and especially when reading fiction. In recent years, fiction has been largely abandoned in favor of nonfiction, which of course is half made-up in its own right but carries the imprimatur of truth so that the reader need not apply any imagination. The decline of fiction has weakened our faith — our ability to suspend disbelief — and has created an imaginative vacuum exploited by religious dogma and intolerance. Maybe that’s what motivates me to write tales as simply as I can, so that they can be read by anyone, anywhere, even aloud. This is one of the unrecognized virtues of short stories, and perhaps a sign of the novel’s obsolescence. Fiction ought to be an everyday encounter, not because it’s informative or useful, but because it isn’t.

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Jonathon Keats reads from “The Book of the Unknown” March 11, Strand Book Store, New York; March 12, Brookline Booksmith, Boston. Read the tale “Alef the Idiot” here.

After Obama’s ministerial eloquence, her reading, stressing the poem’s meter, may have seemed choppy to some. Not true. That’s how poetry works, distinguishes itself from prose, from preaching. In her rhythmic delivery, her images held. (Not that the TV cameramen had a clue. They blunted the poem’s impact by constantly taking the camera off Alexander and scanning the uninterested crowd.) I guess I wish Alexander didn’t veer off her dirt roads into an exposition of love in the end, where she seemed to spin her tires in sentimentality. But I heard her faint echo of Walt Whitman nonetheless.

Yet the poem’s end quickly fades and what remains are two images that capture the promise of the new president with indelible beauty. “A farmer considers the changing sky/ A teacher says, ‘Take out your pencils, begin.’”