tomorrow …Yet I was thinking: We’re going to turn back. What happened and what ended, that we turned back? What constant operates within us to determine our degree of satiation and the duration of our every action? Suppose there’s nothing to bind or obligate us …We can’t give a whole lifetime to the pleasant freedom of conversation. But imagine you’re in love, you’re walking with your sweetheart. Again, you’ll turn back. You’ll wait under the clock for thirty minutes or an hour, in the doorway all night—but not till the New Year. You part at dawn. Time for the young lady to go home. Mama, and all that. But she had the same mama an hour ago, you know, and it’s been time to part for many hours, yet at this precise moment for some reason the time has definitely come. The nightingale or the lark? After which exhortation—count them—does Romeo finally leave? Why not earlier or later? Why is it that I didn’t think about the time while we were walking, and I’m not thinking about it now, yet we’re already walking back? What thought made us turn?”
“That one, I think, made us turn in the present instance,” said the doctor, who was precise in everything. My discussion was so unscientific that he ignored it. All he could talk to me about in this connection was the biological clock. But that was a different subject entirely …“You see, the biological clock is … ”
I listened to him, and the thought troubling me now was this: What is the concern of science, and what is not? Couldn’t my question be studied with precision, calculated, explained? Which law, out of the many laws, does science pluck out for study?
“The next one,” the doctor said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“We look for the law that comes next, after the one we have discovered.”
“Then don’t you think you’ll inevitably get sidetracked?”
“Beg your pardon?” the doctor asked.
“I mean, you begin to study a phenomenon, you discover a certain law, you feel your way from that one to another, from that one to the fifth, and so on. Haven’t you forgotten about the phenomenon you set out to study?”
“Ah,” said the doctor. “No, we haven’t.”
“Certainly not.” I grinned. “You study birds, you get interested in migrations. You study migrations, you get interested in the energy factor. You study …metabolism, is it? …and you focus on changes in the birds’ weight. You study fat in birds. By now you’re studying fat, don’t you think?”
“But had we studied all this before?”
“But does a bird have eyes? and wings? does a bird have a bird’s brain?”
The doctor burst out laughing. “Tell me,” he said, “you weren’t ever a D student, were you?”
“I was,” I said.
So I would go down to the sea in order to find the doctor on the shore, if he had just gone down, or else he would follow me out, red-eyed from a sleepless night doing calculations. His numbers didn’t add up, my letters didn’t form words—without saying hello we would continue yesterday’s conversation.
I lost all shame. I abandoned myself to the ambition of the nimble student. I asked him the questions I hadn’t asked as a young child. I might not get an answer, but I was delivered from my complex. All the questions without whose answers I had refused to understand anything further and received an “Unsatisfactory.” Does an insect feel pain? does a bird think? does a tree feel? do animals have a sense of humor? what happened to the intermediate evolutionary links; that is, why did man skip a rung on the ladder? has evolution stopped, and why? what do so many mosquitoes eat when I’m not here? can parasites be eliminated from the biological chain without harm? do birds have external sexual organs? And all these, quite quickly, came down to certain of the treacherous questions, which, in turn, came down to one: What is man?
He had no answer to this question. Only oblique reservations.
“In
“That one, I think, made us turn in the present instance,” said the doctor, who was precise in everything. My discussion was so unscientific that he ignored it. All he could talk to me about in this connection was the biological clock. But that was a different subject entirely …“You see, the biological clock is … ”
I listened to him, and the thought troubling me now was this: What is the concern of science, and what is not? Couldn’t my question be studied with precision, calculated, explained? Which law, out of the many laws, does science pluck out for study?
“The next one,” the doctor said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“We look for the law that comes next, after the one we have discovered.”
“Then don’t you think you’ll inevitably get sidetracked?”
“Beg your pardon?” the doctor asked.
“I mean, you begin to study a phenomenon, you discover a certain law, you feel your way from that one to another, from that one to the fifth, and so on. Haven’t you forgotten about the phenomenon you set out to study?”
“Ah,” said the doctor. “No, we haven’t.”
“Certainly not.” I grinned. “You study birds, you get interested in migrations. You study migrations, you get interested in the energy factor. You study …metabolism, is it? …and you focus on changes in the birds’ weight. You study fat in birds. By now you’re studying fat, don’t you think?”
“But had we studied all this before?”
“But does a bird have eyes? and wings? does a bird have a bird’s brain?”
The doctor burst out laughing. “Tell me,” he said, “you weren’t ever a D student, were you?”
“I was,” I said.
So I would go down to the sea in order to find the doctor on the shore, if he had just gone down, or else he would follow me out, red-eyed from a sleepless night doing calculations. His numbers didn’t add up, my letters didn’t form words—without saying hello we would continue yesterday’s conversation.
I lost all shame. I abandoned myself to the ambition of the nimble student. I asked him the questions I hadn’t asked as a young child. I might not get an answer, but I was delivered from my complex. All the questions without whose answers I had refused to understand anything further and received an “Unsatisfactory.” Does an insect feel pain? does a bird think? does a tree feel? do animals have a sense of humor? what happened to the intermediate evolutionary links; that is, why did man skip a rung on the ladder? has evolution stopped, and why? what do so many mosquitoes eat when I’m not here? can parasites be eliminated from the biological chain without harm? do birds have external sexual organs? And all these, quite quickly, came down to certain of the treacherous questions, which, in turn, came down to one: What is man?
He had no answer to this question. Only oblique reservations.
“In
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