Accurate but Still Living

I have often had occasion to wonder where Anatole France could have been living when he made the remark: “ What would we not give to see heaven and earth for a single minute with the eye of a fly ? But this is prohibited.” It may be prohibited in his part of the world, but it is not in mine. Would that it were, for ever since I added to the other bugbears, by which my education has worried along, the fear lest I should be inaccurate, I have been trying to see the universe with the eye of a fly, and nearly every influence in my neighborhood has assisted me to such an extent that I can almost report, like the fly in Cock Robin, “I saw it die with my little eye.”

For several years now, accuracy has been my bugbear. I was not always thus. Time was when I was a full-throated creature with things to say, and I said them. I even think that I used to be moderately interesting and entertaining until the time came when I asked myself that profound question, “Is it right, is it even decent, in this sort of a world, to be interesting? Can you conscientiously, in a world where the scientist has suffered and proven the enormous difficulty of getting at the real truth about anything, have the heart to be interesting ? If you confined yourself strictly to the truth, do you believe that you would have a baker’s dozen to listen to you ? ”

Thus the scientific sinner enticed me, and I consented. Henceforth I tried to serve the world differently, but no one has ever thanked me for it, nor, to tell the truth, have I ever seen any particular reason why any one should. They admit, that I am more accurate than I used to be, that is all. In the old days I had “a large Newfoundland dog way of handling matters,” and approached things in a somewhat generous and bumbling manner, which, considering its inaccuracy, gave surprisingly large results. If a truth, or what seemed to be one, came my way, setting me all alive and joyful, I would out with it while the joy was still fresh, and never mind a few loose ends and mistakes. Of necessity there was much that could not be proven. That was usually the best part of it. But nowadays I lop off all this at the start, though secretly thanking Providence,in a loose, shamefaced, unscientific way, for those beautiful years in which I let myself go before I knew better. If any good large thought, more than a millimeter in diameter, comes swinging down toward me, and I find myself prompted to say a dozen noble and inspiring things about it, I now suppress my exuberance at once by asking myself, “Would you dare utter those things if a psychologist should come into the room ? ” Certainly not, and I shrink all these things to an irreducible minimum.

Or if, later on, I run upon what seems some joyous significance in the natural world, and have proceeded a sentence or two, I see a biologist, or worse still, a professional “nature-lover” in the offing, bearing down upon me like a revenue cutter, and I make haste to destroy all evidence of the accursed thing, so that when he comes up I am even as he is.

My very being is becoming, I fear, like an evaporated apple. That the thing can be done has been well proven, and now that it has been proven that an apple can be evaporated, I feel like crying, “Let us back to the apple.” If the world were becoming a desert trail, or humanity were all en route for a Frozen North, this reduction of everything to tablet form might be legitimate and proper, but are we in any such plight? I used to read in the school physiology that it was not sufficient that the stomach should receive only the essential juices or elements of food, but that it needed to be distended by much useless substance in order to properly extract those elements. For many years I made it my humble and joyful effort to live along that line. Somehow I seem to have been less living since I have come closer and closer to the sheer essence of nutrition, while there are times when under this state of things I do not much care whether I live or not.

But I foresee that I cannot go on as I am going, my respect for the university and the laboratory method notwithstanding. Moments of feeling like a spiritual millionaire are becoming more frequent with me, and some day I shall be able to hold myself in no longer, and with a lot of others I shall be giving myself away and shocking my new-found scientific friends, with the amount I believe, whether I ought to or not.

How, then, shall I adjust my duties to accuracy with this unwieldy and glorious life within me ? It is my growing conviction that for people in my situation the highest wisdom is to go ahead, accept frankly and illogically our innumerable chances of being happy, and thereby keep the scientist busy with the new and delightfully perplexing facts with which we can furnish him. Let him be accurate, let us live and give him plenty of materials on which to wreak his accuracy. We shall do the scientist great wrong if we cease to furnish him with the materials he loves.