Fact and Fancy

by EDWARD WEISMILLER

TELL me any fact you like, and I will believe it. I will believe it, but I will not believe in it. For I do not believe in facts, and I do not like them. I am perfectly willing to look them in the face; I simply reserve the right to look away again. I know well enough that one cannot really reason without them. But in the end I am not, perhaps, a reasonable person. Being what I am, I should like others to know what I am. And I should like also to say, seriously, that in my view fancies are the true nourishment of man, and that facts are, wherever it is humanly possible, to be neglected.

Note that I have said “in my view”; I do not claim that what 1 am about to say is the truth.

There was a time in the world (call it the good old days, and laugh about it as long as you can) when the advocacy of fancy over fact would not have been necessary. Only a few centuries ago men thought that lightning signified the wrath of God; that the soul of man could be possessed by the devil; that Christ, when he lived on earth, was exactly six feet tall; that the earth was the center of the universe, and that it lnmg from heaven on a golden chain. We know now that none of this is so. But I am not sure what advantage it is to us to know. Only a few centuries ago, to speak on a slightly different level, men thought that there was an animal in the sea to correspond to every animal on land; that the elephant had no knees; that the cubs of the bear were born without shape, and had to be licked into their proper form by their mother’s tongue. And today we know that none of this is so. But, again, I cannot see that it profits us to know. Doubtless it is true, as scholars maintain, that the idea of the fabulous unicorn arose from corruptions, far after the fact, of eyewitness accounts of the rhinoceros. But my interest in this explanation is a very tepid one. I do not altogether rejoice that we can go into the forest today with no fear of those drumming, dangerous hooves, no terror of that spiral horn, sharp and shining white, leveled at our hearts. And which virgin you know would not have the unicorn come and lay his head, in gentle tribute, upon her lap? A unicorn — not a rhinoceros. The legends of the unicorn were in reality an acknowledgment that there were places in the world held by the Mystery, places where only a few out of all mankind could or ought to go. Now man belongs anywhere he can get to, and I do not always feel that it much matters where he goes.

But, you may tell me, those foolish beliefs of the ancients — they were “facts” to those who knew no better. The alchemists, who tried to find the philosopher’s stone (by means of which they thought they would be able to turn base metals into gold), nevertheless dealt with what they held to be scientific principles. It may be so. And yet I think it is significant that for centuries men solemnly believed hundreds of things which simple observation would have showed them were not so. The only explanation I can find is that simple observation, that basic principle of modern science, did not occur to them, did not seem to them important; and it did not seem to them important because they were really looking at something above, or behind, or to one side of facts as facts. They were looking at or for meanings. Once the fashion for facts arose, a million soap bubbles burst in a moment. The last three centuries have seen mountains of fact thrown up everywhere on the face of the earth; and doubtless they will endure. But does anyone imagine that Western man of the last three centuries has discovered so many facts because he is more intelligent than all his predecessors? We look where our eyes are directed; we discover what we set out to discover. I suspect that many a Newton, before Newton, sat under many an apple tree on this old earth, and thinking of ritual fruitfulness and decay, the fall of all things bright that yet, somehow, comes from God, heard only as a corroborative sound the fall of an apple into the long grass beside him.

But Newton saw an apple fall with the speculative eyes of his moment; and now man flies. This is at times convenient. But I do not see that it is important, in any but horribly wrong ways. Let me talk to you for a moment about facts. It is easy to think well of them, and to think well of man for discovering them — the principle of flight, the life secrets of subatomic particles. I am sure we all marvel as, one by one, the world’s first cosmonauts step safely back down on earth from their rides on the biggest Ferris wheel of all. I am sure we wonder what (classified) discoveries they make, what facts they know that we do not know, and what use scientists will make of the facts discovered. And believe me, a use will be made of them, because the fact is that facts can only be used. They are tools. And tools help us to do things with other things. They are utilitarian. They cannot be anything but utilitarian. And therefore the end point of the processes they initiate cannot be anything but utilitarian. Is it possible for us to comprehend what this means? Man may, and doubtless will, one day reach the farthest corners of the universe (not, let us hope, like T. S. Eliot’s Mrs. Cammell in “Gerontion,” “whirled/Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear/In fractured atoms”), but if he does this, all we shall be able to say is that he has done it. Oh, doubtless in that interstellar junkyard he is beginning to create he will learn new facts. And these will lead him to the knowledge of other facts. But no fact man ever learns will tell him who he is, or why he is here, or what life, or love, or death, or beauty means.

Now, I do not wish to underestimate the practicality of the practical. I, too, like to eat, though I do not eat all day long. Facts, I am willing to admit, are convenient; because of them we are physically more comfortable, in most ways, than man has ever been before. Facts can do everything for us, physically, including (if you will forgive my making the obvious remark) kill us. But perhaps what I am thinking is not so obvious, after all, for my suspicion really is that that is what they must prove best at. In any event, it may well be that these centuries will prove (if there is a history to record them) the age of man’s seduction by ruinous convenience, by the physical, by fact. It may well be that, if anyone remains to make the observation, an old riddle will one day be solved in these terms: Eve and Adam conducted the first scientific experiment, as a result of which, quite naturally, all men died.

But, someone may protest, it is in the nature of the human mind to know; and if this is our destiny, how are we to avoid it? And anyway, facts aren’t really as bad as all that, surely? In answer, let me hazard one or two more things about facts. In the first place, they are, I suspect, tyrannical. They come to engross the mind that yields to them too far; and moderation in the use of facts is far more difficult to achieve than moderation in the use of alcohol or tobacco. We all know that facts have the overwhelming approval of our time, and that people who do not deal in them primarily are suspect, or at best tolerated. But how has this come to be so? Surely because of what the entertainment of fact does to the mind, since all facts lead so inevitably to other facts, and only to other facts. It is not merely that the imagination and the spirit are the unknown, and therefore to be feared. Far more important, fact has too many consequences to permit itself to be neglected; and after some centuries of non-neglect of fact, man finds (if he finds it, if he can still see) that what he is neglecting instead is his imagination, his spirit.

But now, truly, this is unfair, you may say: the modern scientist is very imaginative, and furthermore, he believes in God. No longer does evolutionary biology deny the possibility that God may have warmed, in His cosmic saucepan, the water that produced the first living cell; and the astronomer, the physicist, begin to glimpse a strange and unfathomable brightness at the end of the trail of law upon which their feet are set. But need one go so far to see that brightness? The simple man can see as much in the branched lightning of a veined leaf. And, after all, one may suspect that the scientist calls “God only what he does not, at the moment, see the possibility of explaining. But he will go on trying to explain; and he, or his successors, will succeed in explaining more than is now thought possible. And so the ineffable vision will be postponed. What is one to say? Does anyone recall the New Yorker cartoon of the farmer on a remote country road asked for directions by a shiny young couple in a shiny new automobile, and saying to them, “You can’t get there from here”?

I do not think it is in the nature of man’s mind to know; I think it is in his nature to want to know — to seek, and not to discover. And what he was made to seek is meaning, not fact. Therefore, I should say that fact is useful to man only insofar as it frees his mind, gives him leisure, gives him time to pursue the search for meaning. But does anyone suppose that — after the fact — it is at all easy to claim such leisure, or to want to claim it? All the mechanical genius of the West has produced leisure, yes, but also mechanical ways of using it. This is inevitable, and it is more true with each passing year. I am deadly serious, and I am not conscious of much exaggeration, when I say that it could honestly be argued that the civilization Western man has known is dying of facts. Last weekend I drove out on the highways, and somewhere between here and the ocean, from the midst of heavy traffic almost stalled because of freeway construction, I saw suddenly a pure curve of concrete, not yet ready to use, not yet connected to anything, lifting up and out to my right — and around it nothing, waist-high weeds, dead groves by the acre, and a few houses with the roofs fallen in and the windows gouged out.

Let me make one more observation about facts, and then I am through with them. It is this: facts are intractable. They shrug aside the human past; they point — forward. But either they lead nowhere, or else they lead man faster than he can follow; they lead him into ugly darknesses which they cannot illuminate. The economic consequences of the industrial revolution have, for example, proved uncontrollable; “facts” have entrained other facts whose laws we only partly understand, and whose operation we cannot much more than affect. Every saving of lives brought about by medicine (a saving so humane in itself) poses a problem in human ecology the solution of which is, and that doubtfully, in the future. “The use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes” — I need hardly try, even, to explore that conundrum. Wait and see. If you get there, you’re lucky. Meanwhile you will, of course, be spending more and more of what time is left you upon fact — how can you help it, sitting on the powder train as you are? Rebel? Be an individual? How can you, when fact has joined the peoples of the world together? One world, one thunderclap.

And what is the answer? It is possible to fear that there is none, this late in the day; but if there is an answer, it’s just this: we must go back to asking ourselves useless questions. “Who am I?” “Why am I alive?” And knowing the choices I have made, you will not be surprised to hear of my belief that every good poem ever written, every short story or novel, every painting, every piece of music or sculpture, addresses itself to these questions and to others like them. And because there are no real answers, only constant, and exciting, and often contradictory illuminations, the arts keep our spirits exercised, keep them flexible and alive instead of crystallized in fact like flies in amber. The arts deal in some ways with fact, it is true; but as long as we are lucky our artists will keep pace with our fact finders, will be at work breaking up new facts and making them useless — to everything but the spirit. Only the other day I read a short story in which the setting was a modern glass-and-chrome restaurant, bathed in what the author called the “penitential light” of fluorescent lamps. I would rather have seen that light, in that way, than know all about which electron must be booted out of what ring, and with what, in order to produce fluorescence.

The artist breaks up the world of fact by making us see comparisons, analogies, meanings that we never saw before. They lead to nothing, of course, except our own deeper understanding of ourselves and of the rest of humanity. But more than this they will lead us, imperceptibly, to live more and more in the realm of the spirit, which is where I think we were meant to live. And so perhaps there is a solution for our dilemma after all: read, look, listen. And love. Everyone agrees that the world needs love if it is to avoid being overwhelmed. But facts do not teach love: no one’s facts, not the scientist’s, nor the sociologist’s, nor the historian’s. I think love comes of the exercise of the spirit.

Let us not forget that man differs from the generality of animals in two things: he has something he does not understand but has called “spirit,” or “soul”; and he has something he understands very well, an opposable thumb. Our problem is the problem of reconciling these extraordinary and extraordinarily different virtues. At present, the reconciliation seems, ominously, not to be taking place. What man can do becomes increasingly what he cannot not do, and all that his life means is thrust desperately, or indifferently, to one side. There is no longer any novelty to us, even, in the thought that we have reached a place where our knowledge could completely anesthetize us, our practical triumphs wipe us out. If they do, what will be left on our departure will be a world of exploded facts.