Some thoughts on Thurber's allegory of the scientist and truth, in analysis of the Quiet Type (Is Sex Necessary? The Feminine Types) ====== It is said of women, ``Watch out for the quiet type.'' Is that sex or gender. The quiet type is not amenable to scientific or any other kind of study, according to Thurber. ``Indeed, it is one of the unfortunate handicaps to psychological experimentation that many types of women do not lend themselves readily to purposeful study. As one woman said to me, `It all seems so mapped out, sort of.' '' =============== ``The first quiet type that I isolated was a young woman whom I encountered at a Sunday tea party. She sat a little apart from the rest of the group in a great glazed chintz, I believe it was, chair. She kept her chin rather down than up, and had a way of lifting her gaze slowly, without disturbing the set of her chin. She moved but twice, once to put by a cup of tea and once to push back a stray lock from her forehead. I stole glances at her from time to time, trying to make them appear ingenuous and friendly rather bold or suggestive, an achievement rendered somewhat troublesome by an unfortunate involuntary winking of the left eyelid to which I am unhappily subject. ``I noted that her eyes, which were brown, had a demure light in them. She was dressed simply and was quite pretty. She spoke but once or twice, and then only when spoken to. In a chance shifting of the guests to an adjacent room to examine, I believe, some watercolors, I was left quite alone with her. Steeling myself for an ordeal to which I am unused - or was at the time - I moved directly to her side and grasped her hand. ``Hallo, baby! Some fun - hah?'' I said - a method of attack which I had devised in advance. She was obviously shocked, and instantly rose from her chair and followed the others into the next room. I never saw her again, nor have I been invited to that little home since. Now for some conclusions...'' Thurber is really describing the academic, and his deafness to poetry, that is to say deafness to woman. ============== Thurber is writing about explainers, using the quiet type as what he - the explainer - is explaining. The woman represents truth, which is what Nietzsche said too. Beyond Good and Evil, take a look at the beginning of it, and compare Thurber. Truth does not ask you out. You have to seek it. But how? There is gruesome seriousness and clumsy obtrusiveness, characteristic of the credentialed analytic philosopher; there is courtship, characteristic of the poet. Recall Mallarme, ``You can imagine the hymn of the final triumphal dance in which the space put between the fiances by the necessity of their journey diminishes down to the source of their joyful exhiliration,'' by the necessity of their journey, my emphasis. What about truth requires courtship? ============== Nobody reads Thurber as a serious author, probably for a reason. Vicki Hearne has done a lot to show how to read him, in _Adam's Task_ and _Animal Happiness_ (I don't remember Thurber in _Bandit_ but maybe he is.) Appropos of nothing, but always the topic After the unfortunate episodes with the Quiet Type, our scientist was ``a little reluctant to report one other adventure with the QT'' that he then ``alludes'' to, about when he and a QT were both drunk at a party and ``This condition, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, militates against that fine precision of mind so essential to the best results in any scientific investigation.'' ``I do not remember all that ensued one-half so clearly as I should like to. I have often thought deeply on the matter, striving to reconstruct the complete scene, as it were, but my efforts have been hampered by the lamentable fact that I found dwelling upon the more easily remembered scenes so delightful that I simply dwelt upon them. I remember, for example, that I was at the piano, or more exactly, on it - standing on it. The Quiet Type, fearing that I might fall, grasped me firmly about the knees, and I did fall. I was not only uninjured, but I got to my feet laughing. At this she began to laugh. I had lost my glasses in the fall, and began hunting for them. In bending over, however, I was assailed by a slight touch of vertigo, which runs in my family, and fell again. ``The next that I remember is sitting on the edge of a cliff, or falaise, as the French call it, looking out over a lake. The young lady was beside me. ``Well,'' she said, ``what shall we do next?'' I asked her how I had reached the cliff - if I had walked there. ``Partly,'' she said. This set me to thinking. ``I have lost my glasses,'' I said, and began hunting for them again. She again seized me by the knees, and I fell. In falling, both of us became enormously involved. I instantly arose and was about to step into the lake, when she grasped me around the waist. We both sat down. ``You have gone as far as you can,'' she said, and tittered. ``I should like to go a little farther,'' said I. She arose. ``You're a funny man,'' she said, and laughed again. I grasped her, much to my surprise, by one ankle, and she began to topple toward the lake. I fell heavily backward, pulling her with me, and doubtless this saved her life. ``You must be more careful,'' I told her. We sat up. ``Don't you think you better take me home?'' she said, in a singular voice - low and odd. ``Rather,'' I responded, and arose. I took her back to the house, which was some half-mile distant, we rejoined the others, and that is all I remember. ``I shall always regret, of course, that I did not have full possession of my faculties during the walk to the cliff's edge, for there might have been, in the ten or fifteen minutes it must have taken, an excellent opportunity to ``get at'' the young woman. There is nothing so provocative of pleasant, revelatory talk as a quiet walk with someone at night. Howver, the episode ended as I have said, and a golden opportunity was lost.'' ========== There's a thousand ways to go here; the easiest is that truth requires you to be somebody in particular. Thurber was laid up by a bumblebee once, ``it was the first time in my life that anything smaller than a turtle had ever got the best of me, so naturally I don't like to dwell on it,'' and he read in _The Outline of Science, a Plain Story Simply Told_. In Chapter XXXVI, ``The Story of Domesticated Animals,'' There are few dogs which do not inspire affection; many crave it. But there are some which seem to repel us, like the bloodhound. True, man made him what he is. Terrible to look at and terrible to encounter, man has raised him up to hunt his fellow man. Thurber writes, ``It pleases me no end that this passage, with its careless use of English, accidentally indicts the human being: ``Terrible to look at and terrible to encounter, man ...'' ``Accompanying the article was a picture of a dignified and mournful- looking bloodhound, about as terrible to look at as Abraham Lincoln and as terrible to encounter as Jimmy Durante. ``Poor, frightened little scientist! I wondered who he was. Some of the chapters were signed, but this one wasn't, and neither was the one on the Einstein theory... I had the strange feeling that both of the articles were written by the same man. I had the strange feeling that _all_ scientists are the same man. Could it be possible that I had isolated here, as under a microscope, the true nature of the scientist? It pleased me to think so; it still pleases me to think so. I have never liked or trusted scientists very much, and I think now that I know why: they are afraid of bloodhounds. They must, therefore, be afraid of frogs, jack rabbits, and the larger pussycats... Out of my analysis... I have arrived at what I call Thurber's Law, which is that scientists don't really know anything about anything. I doubt everything they have ever discovered. I don't think light has a speed of 7,000,000 miles a second (or whatever the legendary speed is). Scientists just think light is going that fast, because they are afraid of it. It's so terrible to look at. I have always suspected that light just plodded along, and now I am positive of it.'' Vicki Hearne, who has gathered this in her _Animal Happiness_ p115, interposes: ``..Thurber does not say merely that science can fail in this or that particular; rather, he assaults the intellectual foundations of scientific, and in one way and another, almost all modern thought - its claim to ``objectivity.'' It of course follows from the claim or objectivity, the realist's or ``god's-eye'' view, that a scientist qua scientist is no one in particular, an inference that is identical to Thurber's claim that ``all scientists are the same man.'' This creates a knotty problem indeed - one, I can cheerfully report, that our logicians and philosophers are beavering away at, so I don't have to. What is interesting to me is the rest of the implicit metaphysics of this passage, with its underlying proposition that to be objective, to be no one in particular, is to be too frightened to know anything about anything..'' The human brain is about the size of a turtle, she notes; and it might lay us low, as in philosophy, just to return to Kant. Thurber continues: ``I can understand how that big baby dropped the subject of bloodhounds with those few shuddering sentences, but I propose to scare him and his fellow-scientists a little more about the huge and feral creatures. Bloodhounds are sometimes put on the trail of lost old ladies or little children who have wandered away from home. When a bloodhound finds an old lady or little child, he instantly swallows the old lady or little child whole, clothes and all. This is probably what happened to Charlie Ross, Judge Carter, Agness Tufverson, and a man named Colonel Appel, who disappeared at the battle of Shiloh. God knows how many people bloodhounds have swallowed but it is probably twice as many as the Saint Bernards have swallowed. As everybody knows, the Saint Bernards, when they find travellers fainting in the snow, finish them off. Monks have notoriously little to eat and it stands to reason that they couldn't feed a lot of big, full-grown Saint Bernards; hence they sic them on the lost travellers, who would never get anywhere anyway. The brandy in the little kegs the dogs wear around their necks is used by the Saint Bernards in drunken orgies that follow the killings. ``I guess that's all I have to say to the scientists right now, except _boo_!''