Ahmad Gamal Saad-Eddin

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One day, just like any other day, in the British countryside, the sun rose above Darwin’s house in Kent; a beautiful, quiet home surrounded by trees, where birds sang, leaves swayed with the wind, and dogs sniffed around for something to eat.

Time: 1866 or 1867

Charles Darwin woke up, washed his face, brushed his teeth, then went to his office to begin his workday. During this period, Darwin was looking for a solution for a huge gap in his theory, ‘Natural selection.’ I’m not the one who will explain this “knowledge gap,” but he himself mentioned it in his correspondence with his fellow scientists. Dear all, something is missing. We still don’t know how organisms are transmitting their traits from one generation to the other. Yes, we know traits are inherited, and the best of them are the winners of the race. We know, without a doubt, that children look like their parents, and their parents look like their parents, etc. The mystery we’re trying to solve is “HOW?”.

How is this information being transmitted from generation to generation? Yes, I know the answer: genes. But we talk now about the nineteenth century; people back then had no idea about germs, you think they would know genes? The world survived by luck! But I wouldn’t dare to mock the nineteenth-century scientists.

But hold on my dear, before you get any excited. This episode isn’t about Darwin, evolution theory, natural selection, or genes! Not even about the gap they’re trying to explain the transmission of traits with. This episode is about the house Darwin was living at, not the house exactly, but Darwin’s office in particular. To be honest with you, not exactly about the office. It’s about the magnificent library behind him.

Just to be so exact, it’s about the shelf of scientific journals that were being sent directly, once released, to Darwin as he was one of the prominent scientists of that era. Let’s go together to that shelf, please, and look for an unknown magazine issued by an unknown natural society that sent to him the journal which contained the key he was looking for. I’ll be clear with you, my dear viewer:

The treasure was in his drawer, literally. If Darwin, while bewildered trying to find an answer, if he just stood up and browsed his magnificent, marvelous library, he would’ve discovered that the solution to the mystery he spent years and years looking for was two steps away from him. He would’ve found a research paper with a simple title: “Experiments on Plant Hybridization”, published in the same year, 1866. This paper didn’t just have the answer, but in fact, it contained what I may exaggerate and say, the secret of our existence.

You know me already, I don’t usually exaggerate; when I tell you it’s the secret of our own existence, so it’s actually the secret of our own existence. You might be wondering: Who is the author of this paper I’m making all this fuss about? I’ll tell you, he is the one and only, Gregor Johann Mendel.

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Time: October 1843

We’re now at St Thomas’s Abbey, Brno, in the Czech Republic now, Johann finally arrived at the Abbey after an exhausting trip. A 21-year-old young, short man, with sharp features and short-sightedness. He was originally a farmer. His parents were, too, a simple family from the Province of Silesia. The Abbey provided Mendel with accommodation, a private place for reading and studying, books, a curriculum, and a monthly allowance. So we could say that his life got easier compared with the life he was living on the farm.

However, my dear, Mendel wasn’t supposed to be in this place at all; the course of his life dictated that he was supposed to be on the farm helping his family in planting and reaping. They really needed him. This is why they hesitated at first when one of his teachers told them while he was a child: this boy is a genius.

His father thought, a genius? Then what? Let him be a genius in farming and man up! What use could he get from education? But Mendel’s noticeable brilliance and his teacher’s insistence, and with the insistence of all the teachers who taught him after that, along with the encouragement of the family’s church monk, all of this settled the argument; Johann will continue pursuing his study. So he traveled to begin his school away from his family for the first time. He was ELEVEN. Right after that, he was off to college, attending a two-year program at Palacký University Olomouc, studying physics, mathematics, philosophy, and statistics, keeping his excellence impressively and remarkably.

But his genius had a hidden side; it was a tough experience for him and the same for his family. As with any other major social upgrade like this one, it had its own harsh consequences. Johann was his family’s only son, as we said, it was expected of him to take care of the family’s small farm after his father who was getting older. Then, All of a sudden, all plans changed tremendously; Mendel went to finish his study, financially burdening his whole family to cover his tuition that his sister gave him his dowry away so he could pay for his studies.

Mendel’s father also expected that once his son graduated, he would go back and relieve of the farm’s work. But Mendel was away. After his health deteriorated, the father, Anton Mendel, decided to sell the farm to his son-in-law on one condition, a part of the profit must continue to support Mendel’s studies. This will make Mendel suffer a great deal of guilt for a long time. 

Despite all of these hardships, Johann spent his days hungry. No, not metaphorically. Literally hungry. He wrote in his letters to some friends about this period of his life, that the feeling he felt most was hunger because there wasn’t enough food or money. That left him no choice but to sleep on an empty stomach most days.

Away from home, away from his family, Johann felt depressed at his school. He had gone through two episodes of depression and lost his ability to sleep, and if slept, nightmares attacked him. Depression was heavier than he could handle; he dropped out of school and decided to go back home. But his family, once again, encouraged him to return to school despite all the hardships they had to endure. “The worst is over, dear son.” So he went back.

Misery and study continued till the beginning of 1843 when Mendel finally graduated. But he wanted to continue. Not only that, he decided to be a monk, taking the advice of a professor. And not at any institution, he specifically wanted to go to St Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, which became a prominent cultural and scientific center in the region. This was the first time he defied his family’s wishes, who agreed in the end when they saw his determination and signed an acknowledgement of their consent to join Abby as was required.

In October 1843, a 21 years old short man, so quiet, so polite, his parents, Anton and Rosine, were farmers from Silesia, with a serious profile and short-sightedness, arrived at the Abbey. On 6, August 1847, after four years, Johann became Monk Mendel, having “Gregor Johann Mendel” as his official name.

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In the summer of 1848, the Abbey announced that one of the monks must go to a high school in Brno to be a teacher of mathematics, science, and principles of Greek. Mendel applied for the job but it had a single requirement; he had to pass an official examination for teachers on natural science, and the result was an absolute failure.

In the oral part of the exam, Mendel missed all up. Obviously, the examiners said their word: if Mendel would be a teacher at the school we mentioned, he was required to complete additional training. Where would he go? The University of Vienna, for sure, to get a degree in Natural Science.

With a recommendation from the Abbey that covered all of Mendel’s study expenses, Mendel left it and off to Vienna. There, for the first time in his life, he encountered biology as a science. He also had to manage in such a huge city, feeling the same emotions he described many times; that he was so tiny among all his surroundings. He was just a simple farmer impressed by the lights of the city. Panic attacks attacked him again with trouble sleeping and eating, an intense fear of the world around him and a deep feeling of alienation.

What was impressive about Mendel was that all of these feelings pushed him to focus on his study. In two years at the University of Vienna, he studied physics, chemistry, biology, geology, botany, automotive mechanics and other subjects. In 1853, Mendel ended his education journey and went back to the Abbey, willing again to take the required test and get the long-awaited victory. How can I tell you, my dear? You must’ve guessed what happened after.

He failed. Not only that, but he completely messed up his chance and had a fight with his examiner on botany. We don’t know the cause of the fight, but to sum it up, Mendel really screwed up. He went back to the Abbey and decided to give up on the job and it would be enough for him to live an ordinary life as an ordinary monk at an ordinary abbey. While in Brno, Mendel entered the garden. He looked at it and said, “I will plant peas,” or “If you may allow me, I would like to plant peas,” because Mendel was so polite as I told you.

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The scientific writer, Robin Marantz Henig, writes in her book, “The Monk in the Garden,” that Mendel chose the Abbey and monasticism because he had a scientific ambition from the beginning, but he was aware of his family’s conditions and the rational decision was to work as a monk. At least in the Abbey, he would find the space and resources to work on his experiments. That mindset doesn’t contradict that he was a man of faith, a fact supported by his later findings.

He had a touch of each world, a profound passion for science and a deep faith in God. One of the details that confirm this point of view is that Mendel joined the Abbey as a scientist in the first place; he wanted to start with his experiments as soon as possible and his first thought was of mice, not plants.

But the abbot objected, telling him that they might approve the experiments but that didn’t mean they would tolerate mice. “Do it on plants. Here is a whole garden to do whatever you want with.” The farmer in Mendel woke up and thought, “Why animals when I’m originally a farmer? I’ll work with what I know best.” And like that, Mendel started his experiments on plants, peas in particular.

Mendel chose peas for his experiments for different reasons, all of them dictate that it wasn’t by a chance at all. Yes, he might’ve been a bit lucky, but it was the kind of luck that happens to people who are attentive to details and developed this attention by themselves.

Dear, let me tell you more about pea; it’s a common plant that grows in simple conditions, so basic. Also, it’s fast-growing to reach the reproduction phase, so we can cross it as soon as possible then wait for the offspring then repeat the cycle. Another major point is that peas have distinctive and obvious characteristics. Meaning that some have green seeds and others have yellow ones, some types have red flowers and others have white ones.

But the MOST essential characteristic is the way peas reproduce; literally in any way. A male plant could fertilize a female plant. If it didn’t come across any, it could fertilize itself. Pea always finds its way around. We can even pollinate it artificially, meaning to transfer the pollen grains from one plant to another. This makes us completely in control of who gets mated with whom and at the time we specify.

What makes it really wins that it’s edible. It’s not a joke. Many scientific historians stated that pea was also a practical decision. Instead of working on a non-edible plant, the monk decided to conduct all the experiments he wanted and then ate the results, why not?

Anyway, we are capable of pinpointing the exact moment Mendel started his experimentation; when he specified a set of features he noticed in peas and decided to study them.

“But wait a minute, please. Why is he doing all of that?” You might ask. No one knows. But in my opinion, it was a mix of a personal interest in the subject and to find anything to do after the failure he faced in his scientific career, his failure to pass an exam he really wanted and worked for. All of that made him try to prove something for himself as he, in his heart, was a scientist, and all his attempts and studies state that he had some idea he was determined to explore, particularly when we put in our minds that during college, he showed huge interest in hybridization. Even if he himself didn’t know what he was looking for.

It’s clear to us now, when reading his remaining notes and observing the nature of the experiments, that he knew the major scientific questions that were asked in the scientific society back then. He knew what scientists were trying to reach. Also, hybridization experiments were so popular in that period. Darwin himself tried with pigeons. It was the trend, so to speak. The essential question that occupied all minds, particularly after the publication of Darwin’s theories and ideas that influenced people’s thoughts: How features were inherited from one generation to another? How was an organism capable of transmitting information to its offspring? How did children come to resemble their parents?

Let me explain to you the meaning of this question; at that moment in the history of science, people realized that there was something that made children resemble their parents and sisters and brothers look like each other, that it’s so normal to find a boy who had his uncle’s nose or girl who had her aunt’s eyes. But no one knew the reason behind that. We had no idea about ‘genes.’ They all were just some preliminary hypotheses.

But strangely enough to someone who literally didn’t pass a biology test, our brilliant monk decided that he would pick some features, trace them in different generations, then see the possibilities of these features with the passing of generations. What traits and possibilities in peas did Mendel decide to study? Wonderful question. They were seven:

Mendel noticed that each has two possibilities:

1. Seed texture (round or wrinkled)

2. Seed color (yellow or green)

3. Flower color (white or purple)

4. Flower position (axial or terminal)

5. Pod color (yellow or green)

6. Pod shape (constricted or inflated)

 7. Plant size (tall or short)

In the beginning, Mendel’s goal was to find ‘purebred’ as any reasonable hybridization experiment would start. It was, eventually, what he learned at college. What is the meaning of ‘purebred’? When you cross a pea with another one, the result is a new plant that looks exactly like the first generation. An example: when crossing a tall pea with another tall pea, the offspring should be all tall ones, not like what happens in some cases, as Mendel noted, and that observation is one of the greatest ones he recorded. Which was that sometimes he would cross a tall plant with another tall one, and the offspring is all tall. Great. Normal. Then we find short plants in the middle!

What on earth are those? Where did they come from? He didn’t know. But he didn’t want that; he wanted pure tall peas that reproduce only tall ones.

At that time, science generally maintained an idea that said: the characteristics of a living being were a combination of the features of its parents; it was called ‘Blending Inheritance.’ They really believed that characteristics blend with each other. Mixed. That meant, in plants, that if a red-flowered plant bred with a white-flowered one, the offspring should have pink flowers, that’s what we get when we mix red and white after all. So the features of a mother and a father blend with each other in the same way. Mendel wasn’t convinced by such an idea. If it was right, we would reach a point where all of us would be identical.

Mendel noticed that it wasn’t the case, without a doubt, in peas particularly. He felt, and his feeling was right, that his first step in experimentation was to find a purebred of plants. Where would we find such a thing? With self-fertilization. This would assure that all offspring would result from one plant. Mendel brought a white-flowered pea and made it pollinate itself; the result was white-flowered peas. Once again, he brought a purple-flowered pea and repeated the process; the result also was purple-flowered peas. So far so good.

After that, Mendel decided to cross these two plants. Dear viewer, it might seem like an insignificant moment to you. However, we can mark this as the exact moment Mendel’s experiments started. It’s a very touching moment for me.

Mendel brought a purebred of a white-flowered pea and a purebred of a purple-flowered pea, crossed them, then planted the seeds. The flowers of the resulting offspring were all purple. Not a single white flower. The whiteness trait was gone, completely out of the equation. After that, Mendel self-fertilized the last one, to ensure the limitation of the new offspring’s traits. Then he took the seeds of the latest one and planted them. The result was bizarre; the white flowers are back. Here’s where the genesis and extraordinary statistical capabilities of Mendel proved themselves, which was a skill he acquired at the University of Vienna. Mendel decided to count the purple-flowered and white-flowered peas. Why?

He counted them, my dear, because it was his way to dictate the order in chaos, it was his way to locate the dearest friend to a scientist: pattern. Mendel noticed a repeated pattern all the times he ran this experiment and he had run them so many times. Take my word for it. He was determined to distinguish that pattern in numbers. And that he did. After counting them, he noticed that for each mating, the ratio of purple-flowered plants to white-flowered plants was: three to one, almost three to one. Every single time, it was a quarter of them.

The logical question is why did the trait disappear the first time? And why did it reappear? And why came back making a 3:1 ratio? Mendel thought to himself that it might be the case of that specific trait; he decided to run the same experiments on other traits in peas such as the height and the seed shape. Every time the result came the same; the first generation had one trait and the other disappeared and in the second generation, the trait reappeared. Every time making 3:1.

Mendel concluded that traits were controlled by heritable ‘factors’ from the gametes, but he didn’t know what they were. They are what we all know now; ‘genes’. Mendel also concluded that each new plant inherited a trait from the male gamete and another one from the female gamete and according to that, a single trait appeared at the end. This is what defines the ‘phenotype’ we have. As long as there is a trait that disappears in the first generation and then reappears, the second trait will overshadow it. As long as it appears in the second generation, this dominant trait is not present only in one out of every four cases 3:1.

Mendel called the trait that appears in the first generation ‘dominant’ and the one that disappears ‘recessive’. Thus, if a plant from the offspring takes a factor of the dominant trait (R) from a particular characteristic which is the flower color in this case, and takes a factor of a dominant trait (R) from the same characteristic, the flower color, the result is that the flower color will be purple (RR). If it happens that a plant takes the factor of the dominant trait (R) for the characteristic of flower color and the factor of the recessive trait (r), the result will be that the factor of the dominant trait is the one that will dominate (Rr). Therefore, the result will be that the plant will also show a dominant trait, even though it has another recessive factor. In case of two recessive traits (rr) meet, the result will be the appearance of the white color; this recessive trait will appear because there is nothing to overpower or overshadow it.

Mendel, at that moment, was as if he was sitting in a dark room with a candle, trying to understand the Big Bang. He ran his experiments more than once and in many ways then decided to start studying two traits at the same time. Meaning that he would mate a purple-flowered and tall plant with another white-flowered and short one. The result was that the first-generation plants would have long and purple flowers because the dominant factors were the ones that overshadowed the recessive factors; the result was that the traits that appear were the ones associated with these factors, long and purple-flowered. As for the second generation, he found the offspring was making 1:3:3:9. What does it mean?

It means ratios:

1: short and white-flowered (both are recessive traits).

3: short and purple-flowered (recessive trait and dominant trait).

3: long and white-flowered (recessive trait and dominant trait).

9: short and purple-flowered (all are dominant traits).

This means that the traits are inherited from generation to generation independently, it is normal to find a plant that shows a dominant trait and another recessive one. And this, in fact, is one of the most crucial of Mendel’s laws of all. Because this means that all the factors that control each trait are inherited independently from the other factors that control other traits. Mendel was thrilled with these results and formulated three laws that we now call the laws of Mendelian inheritance:

Law of Dominance: dominant factors hide recessive factors.

Law of Segregation: organisms inherit traits independently of each other. 

Law of Independent Assortment: an organism inherits two inheritance factors (two genes) for each trait from its parents.

For sure, what we know now about genetics and heredity is a bit different from the knowledge that the Austrian monk, who was in a garden inside an abbey, hybridizing peas, had. We know that the appearance of traits on peas is determined based on a single gene, from male and female gametes. However, this is not the way many traits appear in most of the organisms that are controlled by more than one gene and the interaction of these genes is what forms the traits eventually.

But that is precisely the fascinating and magnificent thing about this story; now we and this great Austrian man were able to see and understand part of the picture based on the scientific knowledge we had at that moment. This is exactly what makes Mendel’s discovery bizarre, striking, and incomprehensible. Because he, in one of those rare scientific moments, seemed capable of imagining the Big Bang on the light of a small candle. Only because he had thought enough about it and his observation was limitless or it had to be that way.

What makes us appreciate Mendel’s discovery, even more, is that he, through the simplest of observations, formed very complicated ideas. Geneticist Kim Nasmyth says that Mendel’s spectacular achievement was that he was capable of monitoring the transmission of genetic information from generation to generation without having any idea of the factors or materials that transmit this information, which we are now calling genes. Mendel managed to observe the method of ‘information’ transmission, not ‘Matter’. This is a very difficult thing. For it, we had to wait for decades until scientists paid attention to these experiments, repeated them then made sure that they are true. Years after that, scientists finally were capable of distinguishing chromosomes and genes based on those experiments.

Over about eight entire years, from 1856 to 1863, Mendel did his experiments on about 30,000 peas; his results were the same every time. So he finally decided that he would head down the reasonable path and do what any scientist would do and publish them.

On a cold quiet night, in February 1856, Monk Mendel stood in front of the Natural History Society of Brno during their regular meeting on plants. The audience sat there, half listening to what he said. No one asked any questions, no one tried to discuss with Monk Mendel any of what he was saying. The meeting ended, attendees left and no one thought about anything from what they heard.

After a year, Mandel’s research paper was published in the society journal. Perhaps because of its title, many people thought that it was hybridization, not genetics. Copies of the issue were sent to a group of heavyweight scientists, including Charles Darwin. However, it seemed nobody was interested in an obscure journal published by an unknown scientific society in order to read a research paper written by a monk living in his abbey hybridizing plants.

Darwin didn’t even open the journal. This was how the scientific community received the first release of one of the most essential theories of biology in the nineteenth century, with utter silence. “Guys! This is the research that will change our understanding of the world. This is the research that tells us how traits are transmitted from generation to generation. This is what we are looking for.” But Mendel was a lone voice in the wilderness.

In 1868, Monk Gregor Mendel became the abbot himself at the same place he had been studying and teaching for the entire past fourteen years of his life. Because of the new administrative burdens on his shoulders with his eye problems and his poor eyesight due to his old age, and his inability to go on with laborious farming work, Mendel, day by day, walked away from his garden, where he grew his plants and made his experiments over many long years, then the phase of office work in his life had begun.

He got overly preoccupied with routine administrative tasks, signatures, new constructions, distribution of teachers and monks to schools, and accumulated taxes on the Abbey. Boring work. Maybe for him, it didn’t differ that much from his boring experiments on peas, or maybe it wasn’t like that. We’ll never know how he truly felt because we have lost most of his notes and letters which he used to document his thoughts and diaries. Though he hinted in some of his correspondence that he felt bitter because his work was ignored, his gentle and calm nature didn’t show this bitterness at all. Even if he felt it, we will never know.

On January 6, 1884, Monk Gregor Mendel died and was buried in the same Abbey he spent his entire life. People who lived through that time said that it was like a mass funeral. His colleagues in the Abbey, his friends, members of the church, people from nearby villages, and representatives of other churches and other religions, all of them came to bid farewell to this marvelous and beloved man. Nobody knew that the man they were saying goodbyes to at that moment was the person who discovered one of the rarest and strangest discoveries in the history of science; discoveries that not only formed a new branch of science called ‘genetics’, but also changed a lot about our perceptions of the world and the way nature operates. At the final moments of his funeral, no one thought that his story wasn’t over yet, that Mendel’s life was, in fact, just at the edge of beginning again, and that he would be reborn precisely 35 years after his death.

Mendel’s discovery remained completely unknown for thirty-five years. Until three scientists, separately, came to the exact conclusion Mendel came to in his remote, isolated place. All of a sudden, the scientific society found out that a simple monk, living in a secluded abbey, completely away from central scientific communities, neither in Cambridge nor in Vienna nor other metropolises of science and knowledge, was able through observations, observation and attention only, to understand how traits are inherited from generation to generation. He solved one of the most significant and greatest mysteries of biology, no, of life itself.

As we said, there’s little detail available about Mendel’s life, but what is known for sure and was repeated on the tongues of all those who knew him is that this man loved flowers, not only as a model on which he conducted his scientific studies but because he loved them from the bottom of his heart. He loved them per se. In his correspondences and papers, he described his feelings towards plants as a father felt toward his children.

Like any other farmer, he loved the work of his hands. We could say with certainty that the period he spent growing peas to carry out his experiments was the happiest time of his life and the most suitable for his nature.

This is obvious in his warm relationships with his farmer neighbors; he met them regularly to discuss the best fertilizers and plants. This is obvious in his lasting desire to attend the Natural History Society meetings and in his keenness to record his observations. It seems that even after moving away from his childhood farm, he was still genuinely interested, somehow, in creating a parallel farm in another, completely different world. Until the last day of his life, Mendel was following the weather forecasts, recording his observations about it, overseeing the flowers he planted, and walking with his friends in gardens.

In the end, how can we understand what Mendel did? No, my dear, I don’t mean his scientific achievement. I mean: How on earth did he manage to do what he did? And the main question here: Why? Did he realize the value of his accomplishment? Nor was it just a coincidence. Why would a person spend eight years of his life mating between pea plants, 30,000 peas? Doing the same experiment over and over again and documenting the same results time after time after time. Why? Eight years, repeating the same experiment with 28 thousand peas. The truth is that we can’t be 100% sure but we can guess. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what he discovered but he knew that he discovered something unmistakably huge.

We are sure of that because of two things: what he confided to one of his friends, which we knew about many years after Mendel’s death, went like: “My time hasn’t come yet. But one day it’ll happen.” The second thing is his constant correspondence with the Swiss botanist, Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli. In their letters, he was trying to explain to him the results he found but it seemed that Nägeli, despite being a great and acclaimed scientist, completely failed to understand their significance. Bearing in mind that Mendel himself most likely didn’t know how to represent his findings sufficiently because the right scientific words and tools did not yet exist. In one of his letters, Mendel states clearly:

“I know that the results I obtained were not easily compatible with our contemporary scientific knowledge and that under the circumstances publication of one such isolated experiment was doubly dangerous; dangerous for the experimenter and for the cause he represented.”

Well, can we say that it was an obsession? That he was simply obsessed with monitoring and counting his plants? It is possible, for sure. It could be that Mendel, like many scientists, became obsessed with an idea and began a long quest for it. But this doesn’t answer another question: Why did he stop? Because indeed, when Mendel finished his experiments and published his paper, we could say that he forgot all about it and decided to focus on his new job even if it was an administrative one, irrelevant to his real interest. Can the obsessed abandon his obsession this way? The truth, my dear, I know that there are no answers. I’m just trying to think and make you think, too.

The famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, wrote that life is not primarily a search for the will to pleasure, as Freud said, nor is it a search for the will to power, as Alfred Adler said, but rather a search for meaning. Frankl wrote his book in very difficult circumstances; he was isolated and locked up in Nazi camps. You might say that this idea, the idea of a man searching for meaning, was a natural result of his life events; it was a genuine attempt to handle the pain and horror that surrounded him.

It is true that Mendel wasn’t in a Nazi camp, but an idea like this can be placed next to many events in Mendel’s life: being away from his home and family, his isolation and loneliness, and his feeling of guilt for abandoning them despite the fact that he took care of them. This feeling haunted him that to return the favor to his sister who helped him in his education, he decided to pay for all of her children’s education expenses. Add to that his delicate nature, his genuine concern for the people around him, and his feeling that he is doing something that matters. Maybe.

Frankl wrote in his book, a man becomes more human once he dissolves himself in something. Once he puts parts of himself into something he wants to do. Then, and only then, a man is capable of transcending and rising above oneself. The outcome will be self-fulfillment as if this is a side effect, not the goal. The more a man can transcend oneself, his circumstances, and his life, and actually do the work, the more he achieves; this is one of the strange ironies of the human soul. Perhaps Mendel found meaning in peas.

This piece was originally written as an episode for (El-Daheeh).