“Analytic acts: retrosynthetic,
Deconstructive towards efforts mimetic.
Then, new thoughts’ connections,
In forward directions,
Yield efforts most novel-poetic.”
The National Library Week routine continued with the 26 Aprll 2023 post. Rather than reference a specific book, this particular limerick commemorated an insightful quote about writing from renowned author and educator Toni Morrison: “Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together.”
Here, the poem noted some analogies between the different techniques used in retrospective analysis and in creative work, in both literature and chemistry.
“Analytic acts: retrosynthetic, /
Deconstructive towards efforts mimetic…”
Toni Morrison lived from 1933 to 2019; she won countless awards for her writing, including the Nobel Prize for Literature and a Pulitzer Prize. She was also on the faculty of multiple colleges, including Princeton University.
The first half of her quote (“Teaching is about taking things apart”) highlights the role of analysis in learning about literature: deconstructing a given work to better understand how the component elements combine.
Encountering this quote for the first time, I was reminded of retrosynthesis in organic chemistry: working backwards from a target molecule to its starting materials.
The goal in both cases would ultimately be completing an “effort mimetic”: a comparable creative endeavor that could be completed independently.
“Then, new thoughts’ connections, /
In forward directions, /
Yield efforts most novel-poetic.”
The completion of Morrison’s memorable quote, (“…writing is about putting things together”) is summarized in the latter three lines of this limerick.
Once someone has had a chance to better understand a written work by taking it apart, they will also have more knowledge and a larger skill set with respect to “new thoughts’ connections / in forward direction”: in other words, writing something of their own.
Similarly, a chemist who considers the retrosynthesis of a target molecule all the way back to accessible starting materials does so to ultimately devise a feasible synthesis (a set of “forward” reactions) to that target.
“Novel-poetic” is a closing phrase that both summarizes two common types of creative writing endeavors (novels and poetry) and highlights the idea of a “novel synthesis” in chemistry: one that breaks new ground toward an important target molecule for the first time.
Chemphasis 