Chapter 2

At 44 years old, I realize that my mind has been engaged for about 40 years. By the age of four, I had a vocabulary and had already begun accumulating experiences. These experiences created tension with the inherited wisdom of my Anglican upbringing. Since then, my life has been layered with the Anglican aesthetic, but science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the experiences of my teenage years, 20s, 30s, and 40s have constantly pushed against that foundation.

What surprises me most is the ongoing tension—the conflict between my inherited beliefs and my evolving experiences. This tension has followed me through school, life, and now, my professional and personal endeavors. What stands out to me, after all these years of contemplation, is that life is an admixture of different arcs. As Polonius says, “pastoral-comical, tragical, historical.”

These arcs reflect the different paths a protagonist takes, whether they are anti-heroes, tragic figures, or classic heroes in the historical sense. Life is an iteration of these archetypes—our prototypes of self—constantly being refined, version after version. In my case, I’m now at version 44.9, and it’s clear that this iteration is a combination of various arcs.

One arc is my role as an assistant professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, which is itself a significant narrative in my life. Another is my obsession with monumental characters in history and philosophy, from the Bible to Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, and Handel. More recently, thinkers like Marx, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche have deeply influenced me. These modern figures have introduced new types of protagonists—antiheroes who bring the plebeians to the forefront, unlike the classical figures found in Shakespeare.

Mozart, for me, occupies a special place. He anticipated the romanticism of 19th-century literature, and he feels like a precursor to the figures of Marx, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche, of course, wouldn’t want to be called a romantic, but in his pursuit of criticism, there’s something romantic in his character. Life, like the greatest art, contains all these arcs—pastoral, comical, tragic, and historical. They recur in fractals, over and over, in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

Take Hamlet as an example. It’s a triple-thread: pastoral in its interactions with plebeians, tragical in its existential themes, and historical in its story of political power and betrayal. This masterpiece mirrors life because it embodies all three arcs. Likewise, our own lives constantly intermingle these threads—sometimes one more than the others, but they are always present in some form.

This brings me to my current work: designing and releasing an app for the medical and clinical research community. Even here, the same arcs are at play. The pastoral-comical is found in the practical, personalized nature of the app. The historical is its strategic importance, framed from a Marxist perspective, as it challenges the static nature of current research outputs by introducing dynamic, real-time elements. The tragic is in its existential, Dostoevskian personalization—where it’s never perfect, always iterative, ad infinitum. That’s where the Nietzschean aspect comes in: continuous refinement, continuous struggle, continuous creation.

Nietzsche, at 44, once reflected on his early work, writing that “this spirit should have sung, not spoken.” I feel the same about my app. I won’t “sing and dance” for the NIH study sections, but I also won’t speak. Instead, I’ll let the app itself embody this tension and release, letting it be understood in its own time. The tension between pastoral, comical, tragic, and historical arcs is central to its creation, and it will express what can’t be communicated through words.

Ultimately, life is this endless interplay of tension and release, of these arcs blending together in different proportions. Without this, we might find ourselves in a state of wealth and peace, but that peace is hollow—it breaks inwardly, leaving no outward cause for death. The tension is what keeps us alive, iterating, creating, and refining.