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Authors: E. B. White
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bombardments and fallouts may finally spell not better teeth and better medicine but no teeth and no medicine and a chicken dinner may become just another word for bellyache. The raccoon, for all her limitations, seems to me better adjusted to life on earth than men are: she has never taken a tranquilizing pill, has never been X-rayed to see whether she is going to have twins, has never added DPPD to the broiler mash, and is not out at night looking for thorium in rocks. She is out looking for frogs in the pond.
Dr. Fritz Zwicky, the astrophysicist, has examined the confused situation on this planet, and his suggestion is that we create one hundred new planets. Zwicky wants to scoop up portions of Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter and graft them onto smaller planets, then change the orbits of these enlarged bodies to make their course around the sun roughly comparable to that of our earth. This is a bold, plucky move, but I would prefer to wait until the inhabitants of this planet have learned to live in political units that are not secret societies and until the pens on the writing desks in banks are not chained to the counter. Here we are, busily preparing ourselves for a war already described as âunthinkable,â bombarding our bodies with gamma rays that everybody admits are a genetical hazard, spying on each other, rewarding people on quiz programs with a hundred thousand dollars for knowing how to spell âcat,â and Zwicky wants to make a hundred new worlds. Maybe he gained confidence to go ahead when he heard that in Florida they had succeeded in putting an elephant on water skis. Any race of creatures that can put an elephant on water skis is presumably ready to construct new worlds.
Dr. Vannervar Bush, who is in a far better position to discuss science and progress than I am, once said, âMan may, indeed, have evolved from the primordial ooze, and this may be accepted as good if we assume that it is good to have complex life on earth, but this again is an arbitrary assumption.â Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions.
I have made a few private tests of my own, and my findings differ somewhat from those of the Cal Tech men. We have two stoves in our kitchen here in Maineâa big black iron stove that burns wood and a small white electric stove that draws its strength from the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company. We use both. One represents the past, the other represents the future. If we had to give up one in favor of the other and cook on just one stove, there isnât the slightest question in anybodyâs mind in my household which is the one weâd keep. It would be the big black Home Crawford 8â20, made by Walker & Pratt, with its woodbox that has to be filled with wood, its water tank that has to be replenished with water, its ashpan that has to be emptied of ashes, its flue pipe that has to be renewed when it gets rusty, its grates that need freeing when they get clogged, and all its other foibles and deficiencies. We would choose this stove because of the quality of its heat, the scope of its talents, the warmth of its nature (the place where you dry the sneakers, the place where the small dog crawls underneath to take the chill off, the companionable sounds it gives forth on cool nights in fall and on zero mornings in winter). The electric stove is useful in its own way, and makes a good complementary unit, but it is as cold and aseptic as a doctorâs examining table, and I canât imagine our kitchen if it were the core of our activity.
The American kitchen has come a long way, and
Dr. Fritz Zwicky, the astrophysicist, has examined the confused situation on this planet, and his suggestion is that we create one hundred new planets. Zwicky wants to scoop up portions of Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter and graft them onto smaller planets, then change the orbits of these enlarged bodies to make their course around the sun roughly comparable to that of our earth. This is a bold, plucky move, but I would prefer to wait until the inhabitants of this planet have learned to live in political units that are not secret societies and until the pens on the writing desks in banks are not chained to the counter. Here we are, busily preparing ourselves for a war already described as âunthinkable,â bombarding our bodies with gamma rays that everybody admits are a genetical hazard, spying on each other, rewarding people on quiz programs with a hundred thousand dollars for knowing how to spell âcat,â and Zwicky wants to make a hundred new worlds. Maybe he gained confidence to go ahead when he heard that in Florida they had succeeded in putting an elephant on water skis. Any race of creatures that can put an elephant on water skis is presumably ready to construct new worlds.
Dr. Vannervar Bush, who is in a far better position to discuss science and progress than I am, once said, âMan may, indeed, have evolved from the primordial ooze, and this may be accepted as good if we assume that it is good to have complex life on earth, but this again is an arbitrary assumption.â Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions.
I have made a few private tests of my own, and my findings differ somewhat from those of the Cal Tech men. We have two stoves in our kitchen here in Maineâa big black iron stove that burns wood and a small white electric stove that draws its strength from the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company. We use both. One represents the past, the other represents the future. If we had to give up one in favor of the other and cook on just one stove, there isnât the slightest question in anybodyâs mind in my household which is the one weâd keep. It would be the big black Home Crawford 8â20, made by Walker & Pratt, with its woodbox that has to be filled with wood, its water tank that has to be replenished with water, its ashpan that has to be emptied of ashes, its flue pipe that has to be renewed when it gets rusty, its grates that need freeing when they get clogged, and all its other foibles and deficiencies. We would choose this stove because of the quality of its heat, the scope of its talents, the warmth of its nature (the place where you dry the sneakers, the place where the small dog crawls underneath to take the chill off, the companionable sounds it gives forth on cool nights in fall and on zero mornings in winter). The electric stove is useful in its own way, and makes a good complementary unit, but it is as cold and aseptic as a doctorâs examining table, and I canât imagine our kitchen if it were the core of our activity.
The American kitchen has come a long way, and
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