A couple of nights ago I was minding my own business when I heard Celeste ask our son Forster whether he would like to stay in an underwater hotel.
Forster is forty now. He recently moved to Florida and is working toward his project-management certification. Being back in Florida also puts him near things that have been part of his life before, particularly during his years in Wilmington and Key West—scuba diving, sailing, and an interest in the environment. So Celeste’s question wasn’t particularly strange. She was simply talking with our son about something he might enjoy.
But I heard “underwater hotel,” and a teacher I hadn’t thought about in years wandered into the room.
The Question That Wasn’t Sensible
Her name was Mrs. Fallaw.
In 1957 or 1958, when I was in high school, Mrs. Fallaw assigned us a research paper and allowed us to choose our own subject. I have no idea now what the other kids chose, but I decided to investigate underwater cities.
I don’t remember what first put the thought in my head. That bothers me a little, because I would dearly love to know. Had I read something? Seen something on television? Encountered some scrap of information that bumped into another scrap already rattling around up there? Nearly seventy years later, that part is gone. What remains is the question: Could people actually live underwater?
Once the question occurred to me, I wanted to find out.
I wrote to scientists and companies looking for information. Monsanto sent me technical material and samples. I investigated materials and pressure and tried to understand some of the problems involved in putting human beings in a place where we had not been particularly well designed to live. Then, with some help from Mother, I built a model. A cake carrier or cake cover became part of the structure. I wouldn’t recommend reconstructing the thing from my memory and putting actual people inside it, but there really was a model, and I was the only student in the class who built one.
I turned in the paper and my underwater city.
Mrs. Fallaw gave me an F.
She didn’t demonstrate that my proposed structure would collapse or that my research was faulty. She didn’t tell me the materials were unsuitable or that I had misunderstood the effects of pressure. The problem was more fundamental than that.
Underwater cities were not a sensible subject.
She offered to let me do the assignment again if I chose one that was.
I remember being hurt more than angry. There is something peculiar about being young and discovering that an adult you have been taught to respect doesn’t merely disagree with your answer. She thinks the question that fascinated you wasn’t worth asking in the first place.
So I did the assignment again and this time I had learned something about sensible scholarship.
I checked out a book from the school library by Willy Ley called Rockets and Jets. I substantially copied material from it, manufactured some references and footnotes, dressed the whole business properly, and handed it in.
Mrs. Fallaw gave me an A-minus, with a note saying it would have been an A+ if I had turned it in the first instance.
I have wondered occasionally what lesson I was supposed to learn from that experience. I’m reasonably certain the lesson I actually learned was not in the curriculum.
Then the Navy Got Interested
Interestingly, about a year later, my grandmother showed me something in the Sunday newspaper. The United States Navy was doing serious work related to human beings living underwater.
That did not mean my underwater city would have worked. It certainly did not mean I had invented underwater habitation, and I doubt the United States Navy was waiting anxiously for technical guidance from a Georgia schoolboy armed with a cake cover. My little metropolis might have imploded before anybody got the furniture arranged.
But the newspaper article told me something I hadn’t known when Mrs. Fallaw handed back that F. The question itself wasn’t foolish. Somebody with considerably more technical knowledge than I had was asking it too.
That distinction has stayed with me, although I don’t think I understood it then. There is an enormous difference between examining an improbable idea and dismissing it because improbable ideas are not the sort of things sensible people are supposed to entertain.
I rather like skepticism. Skepticism would have been useful to that teenage boy. How are the people going to breathe? What happens to the structure under pressure? What materials will survive down there? What happens when something breaks? Where does the waste go?
I might not have had good answers. Quite possibly I would have discovered that half my answers were nonsense. But every one of those questions would have taken the idea somewhere. Each would have made it encounter something real, and the idea would either have changed, survived, or died from the experience.
The Trouble With Snootiness
Snootiness does something different.
It saves you all that trouble.
If you can decide beforehand that a question is beneath serious consideration, you never have to risk looking foolish by considering it. You can remain perfectly sensible while somebody else wanders off and investigates the damned thing.
I suspect we all do some version of that. I certainly have. Something arrives that doesn’t fit comfortably among the things we already know, and instead of wondering, How could that work?, we find ourselves thinking, That’s ridiculous.
Maybe it is.
But how the hell did we find out?
That is where Mrs. Fallaw’s nose gets into the story. I don’t remember anything unusual about her actual nose, and after nearly seventy years I am not about to manufacture one for the poor woman. I’m talking about that imaginary nose some of us acquire when we are trying very hard to appear sophisticated.
It can get surprisingly high in the air.
The trouble with that position is not merely that you wind up looking down on things. Eventually the damned nose can block your view altogether, and because you’re looking down, you may mistake the restricted view for superior vision.
Mrs. Fallaw was not required to foresee underwater hotels. Neither was I. The interesting question is why an improbable subject should have been disqualified from investigation simply because it sounded improbable.
Nearly Seventy Years Later
Which brings me back to Celeste and Forster.
Neither of them was discussing Mrs. Fallaw, my research paper, the Navy, education, creativity, or the proper treatment of unconventional ideas. They were having an ordinary conversation. Celeste had found something she thought Forster might enjoy and asked him a perfectly ordinary question.
Would you like to stay in an underwater hotel?
And somewhere within earshot sat the kid with the cake cover.
That may be what amazes me most about ideas. The world doesn’t always announce when something ridiculous becomes ordinary. There may be no trumpet, no ceremony, and certainly no delegation arriving to apologize for having thought it foolish. Sometimes nearly seventy years pass, and then your wife casually mentions the damned thing to your son as a possible place to spend the night.
I don’t know how many ridiculous ideas deserve that much patience. Probably very few. Most ridiculous ideas may be ridiculous for excellent reasons.
But I wonder how we know which ones.
And I wonder how many we never examine because our noses are in the way.