Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  8

  Science

  MYSTERIES OF LIFE

  9/22/28

  ABOUT ONCE A YEAR the human soul gets into the papers, when the British scientists convene. Once a year the mystery of life, the riddle of death, are either cleared up or left hanging. The reports of the learned men enthrall us, and there have been moments when we’ve felt that we were really approaching an understanding of life’s secret. We experienced one of those moments the other morning, reading a long article on the chemistry of the cell. Unfortunately, when we finished we happened to glance into our goldfish tank and saw there a new inhabitant. Frisky, our pet snail, had given birth to a tiny son while our back was turned. The baby mollusk was even then hunching along the glassy depths, wiggling his feelers, shaking his whelky head. Nothing about Frisky’s appearance or conduct had given us the slightest intimation of the blessed event; and gazing at the little newcomer, we grew very humble, and threw the morning paper away. Life was as mysterious as ever.

  SEEING THINGS

  2/18/28

  THE NEW REPTILE HALL was officially opened a few days ago in the Museum of Natural History and we visited it amidst a group of youngsters who kept crying “Good night!” and their mothers who kept murmuring “Mercy!” The place is like that. It might be called the Conan Doyle Hall, with certain exhibits marked: “Strong Influence of Lewis Carroll.” Things out of the dead worlds of Sir Arthur’s writings and Mr. Carroll’s “Looking Glass” are here but you have to accept the word of eminent scientists that they once lived. Place of honor goes to the dragon lizards which, brought from the Dutch West Indies, lived for a while at the Bronx Zoo. They look like dinosaurs reduced nine-tenths and, in fact, were spotted for dinosaurs by excited travellers who saw them rear up on their hind legs at a distance and gave the Sunday papers an annual feature story for ten years until the Museum went down and caught a few. The largest is nine feet long.

  Even taking into account the grimly handsome Sphlenodon, which looks exactly like William Boyd in the last act of “What Price Glory,” we like most the group of fat Brazilian horned frogs which have soft velvety black and green heads and must have been cronies of Tweedledum and his brother. Some of the exhibits tie up neatly with literature, such as the Russell’s Viper, which has the title röle in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Speckled Band,” and the tiny mongoose which is the Rikki-tikki-tavi of Kipling’s tales. The mongoose is shown snap-ping its fingers at a King Cobra, which mongooses devote their life to chivvying about and killing, thus becoming, in our opinion, the world’s bravest animal.

  In one case reposes the world’s largest frog, and although right next door is a tiny reptile whose sex life and fighting skill are described minutely, the sign by the world’s largest frog frankly says, “Nothing is known of its habits,” thus giving us an example of the oddities of scientific research to ponder about the rest of our life. All the snakes are here, including one with no card telling what it is, and the Green Mamba, which is as lovely as a jade necklace and as poisonous as the devil. The snake that interested us most, though, is the Pine Snake, for this is the one the lady snake charmers play with, and it is described as harmless and of very gentle disposition, the worst it ever does being to make a noise like a hot iron plunged into water.

  We never go to the Museum but we look up two favorite exhibits of ours. One is the incredible raccoon bear, a cross between those two animals and, we like to believe, a sheer figment of the craftsmanship of the whimsical doctor who said he found one in Tibet. The other is the thirty-six-ton siderite which Peary* brought back from Greenland after two vain tries. The sign tells of the immensity of the task and relates that the mammoth hunk of almost pure iron was finally brought here and given to the museum. But how this was done is left to our imagination, which never fails to be both interested and baffled.

  TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

  7/13/35

  ON A ROCKY ISLAND in the blue sea, shining white, its tall tower naked and beautiful in the sun, a lighthouse stood, abandoned. We passed by in a boat, remembering when the place was full of life, the keeper tending his light and drawing his pay, his wife hanging out flannel drawers to the Seabreeze, his children, like Captain January’s daughter, roving the island, watching the ships. Now, in the channel, three or four hundred yards off the rocks, is a gas buoy, winking its mechanical warning, supplanting a whole family. To us, an idle mariner on a painted ocean, the empty lighthouse seemed a symbol of all that is going on in the world: new devices putting men and their families out of work. As we passed the forsaken island and stared at the boarded-up windows and thought about the family applying for relief and the Congress worrying about new taxes to provide the dole, we wondered whether it wouldn’t just have been simpler, somehow, for the government never to have bought a gas buoy. Is it really cheaper to support a light-house keeper on relief than to support him in his lighthouse? Science, blessing us with gas buoys, is a hard master and perhaps an evil one, giving us steel for flesh, dole for wages, solving every problem save the essential one: what to do about the pride of a former lighthouse-keeper, who doesn’t want relief, who wants bread earned by toil, seeing his light shine afar.

  Of course, the defenders of scientific progress claim that for every displaced victim of technology, there is a new job opening up—if not in the service industries, or in entertainment, then in the field of invention. Maybe this is true. Certainly there are some queer new jobs that one hears about these days. There is the engineer, for instance, who carved out a niche for himself in the world by devising an apparatus which copes with the problem of the flies which hover by the thousands over the manure beds on mushroom farms. A huge fan sucks the flies across a refrigerating coil, which chills them and drops them, dormant, into large milk cans. The lids are then clamped on the milk cans and the flies are shipped to frog-growers, who chill them again and serve them, with a dash of bitters, to frogs. Maybe some ex-lighthouse-keeper can busy himself, in our brave new world, by thinking up something nifty like that.

  GRAVITY

  4/3/37

  IT SEEMS AS THOUGH NO LAWS, not even fairly old ones, can safely be regarded as unassailable. The force of gravity, which we have always ascribed to the “pull of the earth,” was reinterpreted the other day by a scientist who says that when we fall it is not earth pulling us, it is heaven pushing us. This blasts the rock on which we sit. If science can do a rightabout-face on a thing as fundamental as gravity, maybe Newton was a sucker not to have just eaten the apple.

  There’s one thing about this new gravitational theory, though: it explains the fierce, frenzied noise that big airplanes make, fighting their way through the inhospitable sky. We now know that a plane, roaring through the air, is not straining against the attraction of one friendly earth, but is sneering loudly at the repulsion of innumerable stars.

  SILENCE OF THE SPHERES

  10/30/48

  ASTRONOMY IS NO LONGER a mere matter of gazing at the stars; one must listen to them, too. The Milky Way sends on a frequency of 14.2 megacycles. The other galaxies and the sun maintain a tighter broadcasting schedule than N. B. C. There is, in fact, a sort of cosmic signal always going out to the earth, and the new equipment of our astrophysicists enables them to hear it as plainly as a soap opera. It sounds, in the words of a Harvard listener, “like a combination of gravel falling on the roof and the howling of wolves.” If we remember right, the silence of the spheres had something to do with the conversion of Pascal: he discovered faith when he became conscious of silence. Little did he know how noisy his world was, how deceptive silence can be (and the nearness of wolves and the steady rain of gravel).

  The time in our own life when we came closest to being convinced by silence was one time at sea in a light fall of snow. We heard nothing—no gravel, no wind, no wave, no wolves, no bell buoy. It was convincing and it was beautiful. We are sorry to learn, at this date, that there was nothing to it.

  HOT PIPES

  3/1/52

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p; WE READ A NEWS STORY the other day telling about the withdrawal of a group of young atomic scientists from the world. When the doors closed behind them, these fellows entered a life as pure and as remote as that of a monk on a mountaintop. Instead of disappearing into puffs of cumulus clouds, they vanished into the swirling mists of secrecy. It gave us quite a turn, secrecy being the slow death of science, purity its most debilitating quality. Science can’t possibly serve people well till it belongs openly to all and associates itself with wisdom and sense—those contaminating but healthful influences.

  We saw a remarkable example, recently, of an architect’s remoteness from the world—as though he had withdrawn to his own private mountaintop. We chanced to pay a visit to a student’s dormitory room in an engineering college, to see how things were going. The building was a modern one, and of course the designer must have had access to the vast storehouse of technical knowledge that the institution had assembled through the years, so we expected to find something pretty good in the way of digs—something sensible, if modest. What we found was an immaculate little torture chamber suitable for cremating a cat in. The temperature was 92’. Two large steampipes extended from floor to ceiling. These supplied constant heat, day and night. The only way to subdue the hot pipes was to open the window. The only place the bed would fit was under the window. The student admitted, under close questioning, that his living conditions were less than marginal and said he’d already been to the infirmary with a stiff neck caused by extreme exposure. He was not at all disgruntled, however, and was at work on a counter architectural wonder of his own—a system of baffles to carry the cold outside air directly onto the hot pipes, bypassing the bed, confounding the original designer, raising the institution’s fuel bill, and investing the room with a Goldbergian quality proper to youth. We looked over his schedule while we were there. One of his courses was something called Heat Engineering. Probably the architect who designed the room took the same course, years ago, and got honors. But it isn’t enough that a designer understand Heat Engineering to save humanity, he must have once slept next to a hot pipe.

  FRED ON SPACE

  11/16/57

  WHEN THE NEWS BROKE about the dog in the sky, I went down into the shabby woods below my dump to see if Fred’s ghost was walking. Fred* is a dead dachshund of mine. He is restless in death, as he was in life, and I often encounter his ghost wandering about in the dingle where his grave is. There are a couple of wild apple trees down there, struggling among hackmatacks to gain light. A grapevine strangles one of these trees in its strong, purple grip. The place is brambly, rank with weeds, and full of graves and the spirits of the departed. Partridges like it, and so do skunks and porcupines and red squirrels, so it is an ideal spot for Fred’s ghost. I went down because I felt confused about the Russian satellite and wanted to interview Fred on the subject. He was an objectionable dog, but I learned a lot from him, and on this occasion I felt that his views on outer space would be instructive.

  Fred’s ghost was there, just as I suspected it might be. The ghost pretended not to notice me as I entered the woods, but that was a characteristic of Fred’s—pretending not to notice one’s arrival. Fred went to Hell when he died, but his shade is not touchy about it. “I regret nothing,” it told me once. The ghost appeared to be smoking a cigar as I bearded him for the interview. The interview follows, as near as I can recapture it from memory:

  Q—The Soviet Union, as you probably know, Fred, has launched a second rocket into space. This one contains a female dog. Would you care to comment on this event?

  A—Yes. They put the wrong dog in it.

  Q—How do you mean?

  A—If they wanted to get rid of a dog the hard way, they should have used that thing you have up at the house these days—that black puppy you call Augie. There’s the dog for outer space.

  Q—Why?

  A—Because he’s a lightweight. Perfect for floating through space, vomiting as he goes.

  Q—Vomiting? You think, then, that nausea sets in when the pull of gravity ceases?

  (Fred’s lips curled back, revealing a trace of wispy foam. He seemed to be smiling his old knowing smile.)

  A—Certainly it does. Can you imagine the conditions inside that capsule? What a contribution to make to the firmament!

  Q—As an ex-dog, how do you feel about space in general? Do you think Man will emancipate himself by his experiments with rockets?

  A—If you ask me, space has backfired already.

  Q—Backfired?

  A—Sure. Men think they need more space, so what happens? They put a dog in a strait jacket. No space at all, the poor bitch. I got more space in Hell than this Russian pooch, who is also sick at her stomach. Hell is quite roomy; I like that about it.

  Q—The Russian dog is said to be travelling at seventeen thousand eight hundred and forty miles an hour. Do you care to comment on that?

  A—Remember the day I found that woodchuck down by the boathouse? Seventeen thousand miles an hour! Don’t make me laugh. I was doing a good eighteen if I was moving at all, and I wasn’t orbiting, either. Who wants to orbit? You go around the earth once, you’ve had it.

  Q—News accounts from Moscow this morning say the space dog is behaving quietly and happily. Do you believe it?

  A—Of course not. There’s a contradiction in terms right there. If the bitch was happy, she wouldn’t be quiet, she’d be carrying on. The Russians are a bunch of soberpusses; they don’t know what clowning means. They ring a bell when it’s time for a dog to eat. You never had to ring a bell for me, Buster.

  (This was quite true. But I felt that I would learn nothing if Fred’s ghost started reminiscing, and I tried hard to keep the interview on the track.)

  Q—The Russians picked a laika to occupy the space capsule. Do you think a dachshund would have been a wiser choice?

  A—Certainly. But a dachshund has better things to do. When a car drives in the yard, there are four wheels, all of them crying to be smelled. The secrets I used to unlock in the old days when that fish truck drove in! Brother! If a dog is going to unlock any secrets, don’t send him into space, let him smell what’s going on right at home.

  Q—The fame of the Russian dog is based on the fact that it has travelled farther from the earth than any other living creature. Do you feel that this is a good reason for eminence?

  A—I don’t know about fame. But the way things are shaping up on earth, the farther away anybody can get from it these days, the better.

  Q—Dog lovers all over the world are deeply concerned about the use of a dog in space experiments. What is your reaction?

  A—Dog lovers are the silliest group of people to be found anywhere. They’re even crazier than physicists. You should hear the sessions we have in Hell on the subject of dog lovers! If they ever put a man in one of those capsules for a ride out yonder, I hope it’s a dog lover.

  (Fred’s shade thinned slightly and undulated, as though he was racked with inner mirth.)

  Q—This satellite with a dog aboard is a very serious thing for all of us. It may be critical. All sorts of secrets may be unlocked. Do you believe that man at last may learn the secret of the sun?

  A—No chance. Men have had hundreds of thousands of years to learn the secret of the sun, which is so simple every dog knows it. A dog knows enough to go lie down in the sun when he feels lazy. Does a man lie down in the sun? No, he blasts a dog off, with instruments to find out his blood pressure. You will note, too, that a dog never makes the mistake of lying in the hot sun right after a heavy meal. A dog lies in the sun early in the day, after a light breakfast, when the muscles need massaging by the gentle heat and the spirit craves the companionship of warmth, when the flies crawl on the warm, painted surfaces and the bugs crawl, and the day settles into its solemn stride, and the little bantam hen steals away into the blackberry bushes. That is the whole secret of the sun—to receive it willingly. What more is there to unlock? I find I miss the sun: Hell’s heat is rather unse
ttling, like air-conditioning. I should have lain around more while I was on earth.

  Q—Thank you for your remarks. One more question. Do you feel that humans can adapt to space?

  A—My experience with humans, unfortunately, was largely confined to my experience with you. But even that limited association taught me that humans have no capacity for adapting themselves to anything at all. Furthermore, they have no intention of adapting themselves. Human beings are motivated by a deeply rooted desire to change their environment and make it adapt to them. Men won’t adapt to space, space will adapt to men—and that’ll be a mess, too. If you ever get to the moon, you will unquestionably begin raising the devil with the moon. Speaking of that, I was up around the house the other evening and I see you are remodelling your back kitchen—knocking a wall out, building new counters with a harder surface, and installing a washing machine instead of those old set tubs. Still at it, eh, Buster? Well, it’s been amusing seeing you again.

  Q—One more question, please, Fred. The dog in the capsule has caused great apprehension all over the civilized world. Is this apprehension justified?