For Marie Curie
In 1929, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem about the great Marie Curie, proclaiming the dichotomy of her existence. Rich writes of a body that was slowly being bombarded by the very element she had purified. She reflects on Curie’s resolute denial of her wounds, “the cataracts on her eyes,” the frightening truth, that the cause for her steady demise was born in the same source as her power.
Eighty years on, in a classroom, in a university, in a capital city, in a Western, First World country, in the 21st century, at a moment when freedom of speech and information are as given as our right to breathe, a female lecturer stood in front of a first year Philosophy class composed mostly of females, and spoke of her belief, that the smarter the woman, the more difficult her life would be.
As if forewarning that our knowledge, our power, could be double-edged, in the six years of my university education, for better or worse, this would be a quote that stuck. Every girl in the room that day would carry around the weight of those words forever; until they were lucky enough to forget them, or strong enough to deny them.
Did Curie know that those viles of radioactive isotopes she carried in her pockets and stored in her desk drawer, were both poison and medicine?
Productive in their cure, active in their destruction, seductive in their magical blue- green glow; discoveries that had seen her claim the Nobel Prize twice, elements she had named; ushering her ending.
Learning; information, with all of its allure, its promise of power and satisfaction, would open us up in the classroom that day, and in classrooms everywhere, to a new world. So too would it expose us to something almost radioactive in its power; an insatiable hunger, to always, always, know more. To fear a static mind.
A life of understanding, analyzing, comparing, associating, gives rise to endless opportunities and with it, a denial so similar to Curie’s, that this knowledge could ever be damaging, that this knowledge, like power, could ever be unproductive.
So too do we begin to deny a place for ourselves in the ordinary. Having read on love, on sexuality, on the mind, on the order of things, having known of 41 women before us who’ve won the nobel prize, we, young women, will go on to aspire, and be. We will never accept the runner up to something we rightly know exists, because, well, we’ve read it. And history doesn’t lie.
We will lose friends, lovers, acquaintances along the way because they may not be able to keep up with our dreams. We will lose some of them simply because they failed to inspire us any more than we could inspire ourselves.
Some, bitten by a desire to succeed and surpass will inevitably fail. Some will go on to greatness, and all will die denying that those who fed us knowledge were the ones who made us fear it.
