Fable of the Wasp and the Caterpillar

The caterpillar had only been chewing though leaves, chewing and crawling as he had for his whole short life. Chewing and crawling—these were the only things he knew.

Then he felt something he had never felt before. There was a weight on him. He could not move. His legs were frozen. A feeling ran through him, chill and warmth at once, something slipping in between all the segments of his long narrow body. Then the weight was gone. Still he could not move.

Once he could move again he returned to chewing and crawling, for these were the only things he knew. But the leaves tasted strange to him now. They did not satisfy him. Day by day their taste faded, yet day by day he hungered more. He ate and ate until his skin grew tight, but still he was not satisfied. Once, at the end of a leaf, his hunger was so frenzied that he tried to eat the stem. He cried out in desperation and despair.

At his cry other caterpillars came to ask him what was wrong. He looked at the other caterpillars, fat and happy, slow, stupid crawlers and slow, patient eaters, and burning heat rose in him. He screamed at them and cursed them. "Chew and crawl! Crawl and chew! Leaf after leaf, all the same! Wake up. This is not all there is. This can't be all there is. You're all the same! You all want me to be just like you, nothing, to be nothing, to do nothing, just blend in, just hide, just pretend not to exist."

They stared at him with blank, hurt stares. Their fat bodies waved and jiggled on their little legs. He hated them the more for being hurt by his hate.

"You're all disgusting. You're all pathetic. You're just holding me back with your stupid crawling and your stupid chewing. I won't do this anymore. I'm leaving. Nobody follow me."

He left and nobody followed him.

His days were all his own now. He spent them chewing and crawling, but now he could chew and crawl in his own way. He wasn't like them anymore. Something had happened to him. Something had touched him and set him apart. He had been chosen for something—chosen, him! So all alone he chewed and crawled and waited for the thing to come, waited for his destiny to arrive, the grand destiny he knew was prepared for him.

Sometimes at first he would stop, stop and scream at no one in particular, just to scream out the rage that filled him at all the fat stupid caterpillars and all their stupid chewing and stupid crawling. But now, even as his thinning body began to swell again, his rage was softening. Instead of desperation he felt clarity, and instead of rage, he felt pity. He had been chosen, he knew, but he had not just been chosen—he had been elevated. He was above them in all ways. He would look down on the caterpillars to watch their slow mindless chewing and crawling. Sometimes he would laugh, sometimes cry. There was so much more, yet them couldn't see it. They were so small, so trapped, so limited. He, he alone, was free.

He could feel his destiny coming. It was close now. Chewing and crawling lost their interest for him. In deep shadow his body burned from an inner sun. He paused in long meditative reveries. He could feel the imminence of some great change. He would meet it with acceptance and gratitude, thankful to have been the one chosen, thankful to be the one who woke up. He no longer slept. His dreams and his waking sight fused until it seemed that everything he saw contained everything he could see. The moment was closer now. The moment was here. The clarity, the clarity hurt. The heat, the heat, he seemed to melt. He could not move but he was moving—there was movement—something moved—something stretched and twisted—something gave way—

Sometime later, in jewel colors still slick with caterpillar-stuff, a wasp took flight.

Moral: The God reveals but not as a Reward.

Severity

Severity apes wisdom. It looks as wisdom looks, it acts as wisdom acts. But severity is no more a kind of wisdom than fool's gold is a kind of gold. Severity is to wisdom as pedantry is to intelligence. Any quality of mind or dedication of energies that can achieve intelligence can also incur pedantry. Whoever ends up a pedant has missed becoming intelligent, and whoever ends up intelligent has evaded being a pedant. The same terms holds between whoever ends up severe and whoever ends up wise.

Being a pedant is easier than being intelligent. To continue being a pedant only means repeating what you have done before. To continue being intelligent means judging what you have done before. Severity, in the same way, is easier than wisdom. To continue being severe only requires that you go on denying and refusing. To continue being wise requires that you sometimes deny and sometimes accept, sometimes refuse and sometimes permit, according to the good you can do.

Sometimes you must be severe to be wise. Often you must be severe with yourself, must brace or flense yourself. Rarely you must be severe with others, to awaken or correct them. Severity taints trust (no one hugs a cactus twice): the difference between often and rarely is in the impossibility of resenting your own severity, and the certainty of your severity being resented by others. They will resent your severity even when you owe it to—even when they ask it of you. Sometimes you must be severe to be wise; but the wisdom is in the wisdom, not in the severity.

New ideas

New ideas receive their most complex formulations first. This is most obvious in intellectual domains, where the work that introduces an idea never shows how simple it can be. The first draft, being new, is labored, and being new-fangled, is cautious.

This is less obvious, but still true, in other domains, like mechanics. A late mechanical clock, though compact, looks far more complex than a room-filling medieval clock. But the new idea is not the clock; it is the escapement. The painstaking blacksmith, evaluating materials, working and reworking them, test-fitting and adjusting and re-fitting—his efforts were more complex than the industrial procedures which allowed an escapement to be made by someone who had no idea what one was. Likewise the modern computer looks far more complex, though compact, than the room-filling Cold War computer. But the new idea was not the machine; it was the transistor, and now Shockley's circuit, which took days to build, is printed by the millions in fractions of seconds.

Of course, as an artifact, the industrial clock is far more complex than the medieval, and the post-industrial computer is far more complex than the industrial. But artifacts are not themselves ideas. Indeed the shortest definition of an idea is to distinguish it from the other kinds of constituent thought as the part that gets simpler over time.

Ideas seems to obey a kind of conservation principle, one of complexity. In order for an idea to stand on its own, it must be complex in itself. In order for an idea to be simple, it must be inside in a complex system. This is easy to understand for clocks and computers—as escapements and circuits get simpler, they get smaller and more fragile, and must be embedded in more complex, larger, more robust objects.

But this appearance is misleading. Consider guns: as the idea of propelling a projectile with expanding gas got simpler, guns did get smaller—a path runs from the gun that destroyed Byzantium's walls to the concealable pistol—but they also got bigger—guns have been built to launch payloads into space. Or consider the internal combustion engine, which powers motor scooters as well as container ships.

This conservation principle holds for all sizes of artifacts, and for all degrees of abstraction. Few people understood the phrase the electrodynamics of moving bodies; most people understand the phrase mass warps space. But the simpler formulation implies an entire profession whose job it is to define exactly what is meant by mass, by warps, and by space.

Let me suggest some practical consequencs.

1. By the time an idea has become simple enough to be generally understood it has usually ceased to be independently useful. Sometimes this is tautological: when everyone understands democracy, democracy already exists.

2. Few improvements are due to ideas; most are due to realizations. Someone realizes that step B could be eliminated by an alternative method of step C; someone has the idea that the entire process is wrongheaded. To equate realizations and ideas both neuters useful but limited realizations by turning them into abstractions, and suppresses ideas by simplifying them prematurely. Treating the elimination of step B as an idea is how we get the anti-ideas of management. Losing real ideas among false ones is how once-great company X is bankrupted by startup or foreign competitors whose ideas inevitably turn out to have been screened as babies from company X's torrential bathwater.

3. When an idea is new it may be unclear which part of the initial formulation is the idea. Often you must proceed with no more than a sense that your line of research contains a new idea somewhere in it. And even when the initial formulation is ready for use, use must sometimes be widespread and pratical before the idea stands out.

Consider guns again. A submachine gun is a sort of hybrid of the rifle and the pistol. It uses pistol rounds in a rifle-sized frame. Since the gun is relatively heavy and the rounds are relatively low-powered, a single man can control the recoil when the weapon is fired on automatic. (Assault rifles work the same way, using a special class of rounds intermediate between pistol and rifle.) But the first submachine gun—the Thompson, that is, the tommy gun—was not designed with this idea in mind.

One of its inventors had observed in his time on battleships that under the conditions of high pressure in the firing of a naval gun different metals would stick to one another. He called his observation (after himself) the Blish Principle of Metallic Adhesion and patented it as a way of dissipating recoil. In fact what makes recoil manageable is a heavier gun. But not only were the first Thompsons built with Blish's bits of brass in them, they continued to be built this way until the scale of wartime production eliminated the extra step. The gun had been in service for two decades before the idea behind it became clear.

But enough complications. Surely I have given this idea enough complexity to start on.

Three Horror Stories

I.

"Hello? I'm still down here. Open the door. Can you hear me—hey! Put the lights back on! This is a joke, right? Very funny! Open the door! Wait—I know you're down here somewhere. I can here you moving around. That is you, right?"

II.

"Well, yes, we have received the test results. There's really nothing to worry about, sir. The guard? Oh, he's always here. Hospital policy. Let's get this over with. Have you experienced an increase in appetite recently? Have you experienced hardening or discoloration of the fingernails? How about any strange shapes or colors that recur in your dreams? Hmm. Well, no, the problem isn't your eyes exactly. Have you recently been to Africa? South America? Oh, the specialist's on his way, there's nothing to worry about. One more question, and this one may sound a little strange, but I need you to answer it honestly. Sir, when was the last time you defiled something?"

III.

"It's great to meet somebody else who's not afraid of heights. Do you come up here often?"

"Every once in a while. I love the view. It gives me a sense of freedom. Like I could do anything up here. Like I can see the world but it can't see me."

"It's a great view. It's great until you look down, yeah? I mean I'm not afraid of heights, but that a helluva drop."

"Close your eyes for a second. I want to show you something."

Technology

The history of technology is the history of human weakness. The rest of history is what happens once human weakness has been compensated for, or accepted where it cannot be. But most things that happen, happen in the sub-history that technology implies.

Banning plagues and famines are not its substance. Consider glasses—consider that a hundred years ago or less every person whom you see wearing glasses would simply have lived with crippled eyesight. And bad eyesight is not experienced as such until it becomes severe. It presents as headaches, tiredness, irritability, helplessness. They lived in bad moods, cursing their fate, cursing their own weakness, cursing their own temperaments—all for a trick of the light.

It seems plausible that the most significant freedom which artists acquired in the 20th century was not freedom from patronage but the unknown freedom of safely assuming that the public had good eyesight.

For the diffusion of political authority, the gradual rise in test scores, and other trends of the 20th century which suggest the human race is becoming smarter, the most parsiminous explanation is simply that the human race is seeing better.

Consider something less conspicuous: consider bread and water.

Billions of people having pure water on tap shouldn't signify only as a victory over worm and germ. Since civilization begans our is perhaps the first time the majority of mankind has been sober.

As for bread: enriched bread (or enriched rice, or that wonderful component of bread, iodized salt) does not signify only in the banishment of diseases like rickets or scurvy. Invert your perspective. Consider pregnancy—consider the dietetic demands of scientifically managed pregnancy. Number the sheer diversity of the nutritional concerns to which a conscientious mother must now attend. We are overcautious, of course, but not in every precept. To be born as a peasant—and most people who have ever been born, were born peasants—was to be born pre-maimed by the neglect of every one of these precepts.

Aristocracy, perhaps, is simply the social order that results when only a small proportion of people can be kept well-fed enough to think clearly. Democracy, perhaps, is simply the social order that results when the majority of human beings are not born a little brain-damaged.

Consider lead. To the horror of posterity, somewhere in his Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton, in the early 17th century, wrote that if lead were indeed poisonous, then all the nobility would be poisoned with it, for they all brought their water in by lead pipe. (Hand-worked pipes, mind, not machined.) Centuries later his fellow apprentice printers thought young Ben Franklin laughably fastidious for wearing gloves when he handled lead type. Suppose he had not.

Then consider our recent century of lead-based paint and leaded gasoline.

The easy way to deny such fragility and uncertainty in the human condition is to propose that tougher lives made for more rigorous selection—that people with weak eyesight or inefficient metabolisms just died off, so that the average human being then was as healthy as the average human being now, when technology coddles our softer stuff.

But look to the mountains. Mountainous areas, their soil washed sterile with rain, have always subjected their residents extreme malnutrition. Yet there they have lived, worked, built, written, sung, and bred, even as their thyroids swelled and poked goiters out of their necks.

Human beings are very tough. What doesn't kill us, we can work around. Anthropological study of ancient remains observes that our forbears were largely healthy. So they probably were. The idea that the villages and cities of the past looked like hospital wards is the fancy of a super-realism that confuses ugly with true. Yet their health was not costless. The parts that survive to us—bones and teeth—are the parts with first claim to the benefits of food. For their strong bones, strong teeth, and strong muscles, they traded things of lower priority. They were all they had to be; they were not all they could have been.

Human weakness is not in sin and not in absurdity. We are not bad and we are not silly. Human abilities, if fully developed, are unstoppable, unlimited, and unquestionable. But we are weak. We are weak because we are fragile. We can do everything except save ourselves. All our abilities are so easily prevented, so easily unseated, that it may be done unnoticed. Being born and being fed are enough to rob us of them.

A diamond is (nearly) the hardest thing that can exist. Edge to edge, it can always wins. Yet a single well-placed tap can shatter a diamond: just because a diamond is so hard, the slightest flaw affords the leverage to cleave it through and through. We are all such diamonds. Just because we are strong, we are fragile.

Yet though we can be broken as human beings—we break so easily and in so many ways—still we cannot be broken from being human, from each other. Diamond dust is still diamond. The things my blind, starved, poisoned, crippled brethren made and created reach me in transcendence of their particular frailties. When they wrote, I can read. What they sang, I can hear. What they pictured, I can see. What they made, I can use. What they learned, I can know. History is just what we do despite human weakness; and culture—which is technology seen from inside—is just what we are despite it: what, as it passes from one generation to the next, combines our strengths, omits ours weaknesses, and represents us to ourselves whole—whole as we should be, whole as we can never be.

Solitude

The appeal of solitude may be as simple as the dislike of repetition. To be gregarious implies infinite patience for retelling the same anecdote, confessing the same weakness, counting over the same favorites, relating the same background. Identity becomes a matter of performance and habit, not expressed in but being the routine of self-introduction. Just to avoid this explains why people may chose to be solitary; just the time won from having avoided it explains how people can find pleasure in something apparently so unnatural.

But is there a positive definition of solitude—is there something that solitude is? Certainly if one ventures a bracketed solitude, and another commits to a prolonged solitude; if one is solitary by choice, and another is driven to it—each gives a different thing the name of solitude.

And surely what solitude is has changed and is changing? Surely technology is banishing solitude as it banishes loneliness?

Distinguish two measures of solitude: quantity of social interactions, and quantity of people interacted with. Eliminate repetitions. By the first measure the most gregarious of our ancestors was more solitary than the most solitary of us. The lines of communication were so few, so thin, and so uncertain that to pursue them itself required solitude—to write a letter is a solitary act. But by the second measure we are freakishly solitary. So many people once had to be dealt with to do the things we do by mail, message, and machine—so many butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, so many drivers, porters, draysmen, all to do what takes us no more than a few words with a cashier! (And the cashier is sometimes dispensable.) The two measures of solitude do not vary together—to be solitary in both senses is possible and perhaps defines loneliness—but to lessen solitude by one measure is to increase it by the other. Thus we are all solitary.

This sounds like a curse; but in truth it is a homeostasis. Life adjusts to provide us a minimum of solitude as the body adjusts to provide us a minimum of warmth. Solitude is a thing, not a state; it answers an appetite, not a purpose. Something vital, something necessary, something catalytic, some nutriment or vitamin of the mind, something as ambient and replenishing to human beings as light is to plants—this something is found, it falls, everywhere, except where other people obstruct it.

Yet the dullness and rigidity of repetition can be avoided, and the vigor and fecundity of solitude can be protected, without isolation. All it takes is to be all things to all men, which is the same skill as getting along with all sorts of people; an easy thing if you are willing to be lead and not to lead in talk, to let people think of you what they want to, and to lie to give simple answers to simple questions when the truth would be obstructively complicated. In this way people can be read almost like books—like old books that fall open to certain pages.

This approach is too habitual with me. Why I write the Ruricolist is uncertain—my reasons change every week—but surely one reason is to take cross-sections of myself without any particular sense of audience. The Ruricolist does not represent me in full; many of my interests go unrepresented here; but here I set the topics, pursue their complications, and claim the right to confuse. In writing about solitude I abandon it. But that is the kind of contradiction that essays live on.