Flight of Death

I’m exactly three weeks behind working on the daily New York Times crossword puzzle. My wife and I started doing these maybe seven years ago. When we first started, we worked on them together because we couldn’t finish them alone (even the easier ones), and it was also a fun activity we enjoyed. Now that we’re both quite experienced, the Monday through Wednesday ones are a cinch that we work on individually, and complete with no trouble. Thursday through Saturday, we start on them individually and then help each other if someone gets stuck. My spouse enjoys doing the puzzle on her iPad, while I still prefer paper and pencil. Why are we three weeks behind? Early on, due to traveling, we would occasionally miss some days, and would be slow at catching up. However, being behind allows me to print out the puzzles up to three weeks in advance, so if I’m taking a trip, I have enough puzzles to keep me happy!

Since we’re three weeks behind, some of the puzzles we’ve worked on this week are Halloween-themed. Thursday puzzles are usually strongly themed, and have some sort of a twist to them. The Oct 27 puzzle was lots of fun, even though it took me a while to figure out the catch. I won’t reveal it here, for those who might be working their way through (but, like me, are somewhat behind). I do want to talk about one clue in the Friday (Oct 28) puzzle. The clue was: Fictional character whose name is French for ‘flight of death’ (13 letters). Since I don’t know French, I skipped thinking about this early on, but after I had worked out some of the letters from other clues, the answer came to me in a flash: Lord Voldemort. It’s been fun to see an increase in Harry Potter clues of late. Potions master Severus Snape showed up not too long ago. We’ve actually been three weeks behind for at least the past three years, if not longer.

The clue got me thinking about the meaning of Voldemort’s title. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought about this before. Perhaps Voldemort chose his name ‘Flight of Death’ as a sign that he would cheat death. He did boast that he “had gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality”. This would explain his efforts to cheat death, or perhaps steal from death. The French word vol can also mean theft instead of flight. (I looked it up.) ‘Theft of death’ sounds clumsy though. Maybe ‘flight’ works better. [Upcoming Spoiler Alert!] His approach, though, was to split his soul into several pieces and hide them carefully in magical objects. Since I’ve been thinking about word meanings, it made me think that the Greek word for soul is psyche and therefore psychology is the study of the soul. So a psychology class is where you learn about the workings of the soul. If there was a Dark Magic wizard school, its Psychology course might teach you about the act of splitting your soul, and committing great evil in the process. Scary thought. Note to self: Be careful of any Psychology professors at a School of Magic.

But since Potions is my arena as a chemist, this got me thinking about the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone. I am planning to have students propose the invention of a new potion in my chemistry class next semester. The final project will be writing a section of a potions “textbook” that suggests what ingredients are needed for the potion and how to make it, based on scientific principles with a dose of fictional creativity. (This semester’s invention of new elements project is proceeding reasonably well. I just read drafts of the submitted project proposals.) My guess is that some sort of life-giving or life-enhancing potion will be on the list proposed by students. What should go into such a potion? This turns out to be a difficult question. Vitamins? Free-radical absorbers? Amino acids? Other “molecules of life”?

The problem is that we don’t really spend much time thinking about what it means for something to be life-giving in a positive sense. The negative or reverse problem is what we think about: How to beat illness, how to cure disease, how to slow down aging; basically it boils down to how to slow down the ravages of death at least for a short time. This is Voldemort’s namesake quest – how to flee death. From a scientific standpoint, we know a lot more about death than life. At the molecular level, the machinery eventually “breaks down”. Entropy wins. A potion might aim at slowing down telomere shortening, or enhance the recognition and destruction of cancerous cells, or enhance the immune system’s capability of destroying foreign malevolent invaders, or provide a chemical concoction that reduces DNA/RNA copying, transcription and translation errors. Living “better” is often defined as being free of disease. Even the famed elixir of life does not ultimately cheat death. You have to keep taking it, like a medication, to control the otherwise chronic processes of aging. All this brings up age-old philosophical questions: Why do we live? What is life’s purpose? What does it mean to live the ‘good’ life? What is life?

What do we do when faced with difficult questions and puzzles we can’t answer? Sometimes we punt to an easier question. What is one way I enjoy life? Being able to do the crossword puzzle! I’m already looking forward to working on the Sunday (Oct 30) puzzle tomorrow. It’s now become part of my brunch routine. Sunday puzzles are also strongly themed, and much larger than the 15 x 15 grid of Monday through Saturday puzzles. Maybe it will be Halloween-themed, but maybe not. I will enjoy it, in any case!