On the Preceding Rebuke: A Defense of Excess, Wonder, and the Occasional Pointless Lick

The utilitarian objects. Of course they do. They have a calculus to run, a ledger to balance, a finite pool of attention they guard like a miser guards pennies. They want the pebble without the cathedral, the itch without the scratch, the poem without the inexcusable crime of thinking about it.

This is asinine.

If the world operated as the utilitarian demands... if we truly optimized for "net utility," for the shortest path between stimulus and justified response, then ice cream wouldn't taste good. It would taste efficient. We would calculate the caloric intake, note the momentary hedonic uptick, weigh it against the metabolic cost of digestion, and conclude that the rational agent eats nutrient paste. The child who lets the cone drip down her wrist while she watches pigeons? Irrational. The man who orders a second scoop because the afternoon light looked nice? Wasteful. The entire apparatus of savoring-- the slowness, the attention, the willingness to linger... would be a bug, not a feature.

And you would never stick your tongue on a nine-volt battery.

But you have, haven't you? Or you've wanted to. Or you did it once at eight years old, not because it was useful, not because the experience yielded transferable knowledge, but because what would it feel like? That question... useless, inefficient, motivated by nothing but curiosity wearing its grubbiest clothes, is the same question that built every cathedral, wrote every poem, sent every probe past the heliopause. The utilitarian, confronted with a nine-volt, would calculate the expected disutility of mild electrical shock and decline. They would be correct. They would also be boring.

The rebuke accuses the commentary of projection, of building interpretive apparatus beyond what the text can bear. But this assumes texts have load limits, that meaning is a substance stored in the poem rather than generated between poem and reader. By that logic, Dickinson is eight syllables and a slant rhyme. Herbert's "Easter Wings" is a typographical gimmick. The Song of Songs is agricultural advice.

No. The poem is an occasion. The commentary is what we do with the occasion. And what we do. Whether we build cathedrals or shrug and move on... says more about us than about the pebble.

"Time recovered from not reading the original commentary: five minutes," sneers the utilitarian. Recovered for what? For optimizing? For efficiency? For the grave, which is the only place where time is truly saved?

Live a little.

Linger over the unnecessary. Over-read. Find Gödel in the grocery list! You might be wrong, but you'll be interested, and interest is the only currency that compounds without diminishing. Treat the parlor trick as a portal. Stick your tongue on the battery. Let the ice cream drip.

The pebble didn't ask for the cathedral. But the cathedral wasn't for the pebble.

It was for us. Take this to-go with you, you dullard.

The having-been-done done, the doer, done, does doing do what doing done has done? Done doing, doing done does done outdo the undone done, the done undone: undo.

The utilitarian will tell you this is nonsense. They will be right. Read it anyway.