Words Versus Numbers

This weekend I read a children’s classic, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster It’s not really a children’s book. Yes, a child would enjoy the fantastical adventures of Milo the protagonist and his companions, but I think adults would greatly appreciate the meaning behind the stories. Milo enters the Kingdom of Wisdom through the Phantom Tollbooth, and discovers that the lands are not in the best of states. The king’s two sons have quarreled and heach built up their realms centered upon the cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis.

Azaz the Unabridged, the prince of Dictionopolis, loves words. His court is staffed by the (worthy?) wordy. Everything runs on words, and the Word trade market bustles with business. Azaz disagrees on practically everything where his brother Mathemagician, the ruler of Dictionopolis, is concerned. Numbers are everything in that realm, and the big business there is to mine numbers like ore. I don’t know if the author had the big business of ‘data mining’ in mind when he wrote The Phantom Tollbooth back in 1961, but it’s oddly prescient.

The brothers’ feud mirrors themes in The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow (1959), concerning the divide between the humanities and the sciences. The Two Cultures is constantly mentioned in discussions about a liberal arts education. Outside of academics and other ‘elites’, I’m not sure how many other people have read The Two Cultures or know of its existence. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure The Phantom Tollbooth has a much higher readership, and it’s message echoes many similarities to Snow’s thesis. The humanities are caricatured by Dictionopolis while STEM folks are the denizens of Digitopolis. The two princes represent extreme cases of taking words or numbers to the point of ridiculousness. The feud between the brothers has resulted in the banishment of Rhyme and Reason, their sisters, and Milo’s task-adventure is to bring Rhyme and Reason back to the Kingdom of Wisdom and restore the friendship of the brothers.

There is plenty of punditry in higher education circles about the ‘crisis’ in the humanities and the liberal arts in general. In recent years I have noticed more of an emphasis on the phrase ‘liberal arts and sciences’ from folks trying to remind other folks that the sciences are not in opposition to the humanities – an attempt to bridge the Two Culture gap. It’s an attempt to differentiate the sciences (and math) from being equated to professional training, the latter being seen in its narrow definition of worker-training being ‘opposed’ to the goals of a liberal arts education. It’s like the redrawing of lines to bring in more supporters into one’s camp. We would all do well to revisit Juster’s tongue-in-cheek book.

The version I have is a newer edition that includes an appreciation by Maurice Sendak (of Where The Wild Things Are fame) written in 1996. Part of the appreciation is worth quoting. Re-reading the book 35 years later, Sendak has this to say: “It provides the same shock of recognition as it did then – the same excitement and sheer delight in glorious lunatic linguistic acrobatics. It is also prophetic and scarily pertinent to late-nineties urban living. The book treats in fantastical terms, the dread problems of excessive specialization, lack of communication, conformity, cupidity, and all the alarming ills of our time.”

That was the mid ‘90s. With the current state of the U.S. and the antics of its current president, Sendak’s appreciation is prescient over 20 years later. He goes on: “Things have gone from bad to worse. The dumbing down of America is proceeding apace. Juster’s allegorical monsters have become all too real. The Demons of Ignorance, the Gross Exaggeration (whose wicked teeth were made ‘only to mangle the truth’), and the shabby Threadbare Excuse are inside the walls of the Kingdom…” With what we’ve seen in the past ten days post-inauguration of the new president, Juster’s book is sobering indeed. How Rhyme and Reason can be brought back in the present situation is a good question.

Politics aside, one demon that caught my eye was the “Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.” Milo and his companions are tricked into doing worthless tasks that seem so important while they are under the demon’s spell, but the spell is eventually broken by a magic staff that makes Milo start to think and wonder. He asks the demon why one should do only unimportant things. The demon responds: “Think of all the trouble it saves… If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if not for [the staff], you’d never know how much time you were wasting.”

This made me stop to think about my Procrastination strategy, wherein I formulate a larger somewhat-nebulous grand-sounding blue-skies task, and never work on it – and instead, I am able to get all my smaller tasks done. Perhaps I need to pause to think about the grand task, make it less nebulous and more worthwhile, and then actually pursue it. In my research, I’m very good at getting the low-hanging fruit and perhaps I’m avoiding directly tackling the big questions I’m actually interested in. I have all sorts of excuses: keeping the grant money & publication virtuous cycle going (why mess with an approach that has worked well for many years?), or using the primary involvement of undergraduates (we have no graduate program) as an excuse not to dig deep because I need to keep having ‘bite-sized’ and ‘digestible’ projects for them. I’m sure I have a litany of excuses; some may be threadbare.

I’m not quite ready to overhaul everything right this minute, but The Phantom Tollbooth made me stop and think. The one who stops thinking or paying attention gets stuck in the Doldrums (as Milo does for a short stint) where essentially nothing worthwhile happens even though there’s a fair bit of ‘activity’. Now that I’m paying attention, let’s see where this thinking leads me.