Little water bear

Pyrococcus furiosus (‘rushing fireball’), discovered in the Aeolian Islands in 1986, is a micro-organism that thrives at high temperatures (around 100°C) near underwater geothermal vents. Organisms able to live in conditions that would kill most things – under extremes of temperature, pressure, acidity, radiation – are known as extremophiles. Bacteria known as snottites (the etymology is bluntly Anglo-Saxon) live in caves deep underground where they feed on hydrogen sulphide. Among the largest extremophiles are half-millimetre-long eight-legged animals called tardigrades. Johann Goeze, who first described the phylum in 1773, called it kleiner Wasserbär (‘little water bear’); they’re also known as moss piglets. More than a thousand species have since been identified, found everywhere from the seabed to the peaks of the Himalayas. The oldest tardigrade fossils date from 530 million years ago. They can survive for several minutes at 150°C or near absolute zero (and for several days at −200°C); endure both a vacuum and 6000 atmospheres of pressure; and tolerate levels of radiation a thousand times higher than would kill a human being. They’ve been taken up on space shuttles, exposed to open space for ten days and survived. According to a paper by a team of German researchers published in Bioinformatics and Biology Insights last year, the ‘specific molecular pathways for stress adaptations’ in tardigrades ‘are partly conserved in other animals and their manipulation could boost stress adaptation even in human cells.’

Towards the end of The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s father shows Nick Carraway a book Jimmy Gatz had ‘when he was a boy’, a copy of Hopalong Cassidy with a handwritten ‘schedule’ on the last fly-leaf, mapping out his day: ‘rise from bed’ at 6 a.m., followed by ‘Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling’, ‘Study electricity, etc’, ‘Work’, ‘Baseball and sports’, ‘Practise elocution, poise and how to attain it’ and ‘Study needed inventions’. There’s also a list of ‘general resolves’:

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smoking or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents

Henry C. Gatz ‘was reluctant to close the book’, Nick says, ‘reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use.’ It’s a mean thought, and a funny one. But Fitzgerald may have been mocking himself as much as Gatsby’s father. The University of South Carolina has made freely available online a fully searchable digital facsimile of a ledger that Fitzgerald kept between 1919 and 1938. In it he kept a ‘Record of Published Fiction’, details of ‘Money Earned by Writing since Leaving Army’, ‘Published Miscelani (including movies) for which I was Paid’, ‘Zelda’s Earnings’ and an ‘Outline Chart of my Life’, one page per year.

He wrote most of The Great Gatsby when he was 27, ‘the most miserable year since I was nineteen, full of terrible failures and accute miseries. Full of hard work fairly well rewarded in the latter half and attempts to do better’. September 1923: ‘High Hopes for the play. A new schedule & more work on the novel. Ball game (worlds series).’ April 1924: ‘Out of the woods at last & starting novel. Gloria Swanson’s party. Kauffman’s party. Decision on 15th to go to Europe.’ Twenty-eight years old was ‘The year of Zelda’s sickness and resulting depression. Drink, loafing & the Murphys.’ Among the lists of names of friends, places, drinks and fights with Zelda, he records for September 1924: ‘Hard work sets in.’ October: ‘Working at high pressure to finish.’ November: ‘Novel off at last.’

The entries for his childhood are more entertaining. For September 1900, the month he turned four, he wrote: ‘He had a party to celebrate his birthday. He wore a sailor suit about this time & told enormous lies to older people about being really the owner of a real yatch.’