Free I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould Page B

detail of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, but others consider
Ulysses
the greatest novel of the twentieth century. I ally myself with the second group. I also love
Parsifal
—and the writing of Vladimir Nabokov. I have always been a taxonomist at heart. Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail. How can you appreciate a castle if you don’t cherish all the building blocks, and don’t understand the blood, toil, sweat, and tears underlying its construction? 4
    I could not agree more with Nabokov’s emphasis upon the aesthetic and moral—not only the practical and factual—value of accuracy and authenticity in intricate detail. This sensation, this love, may not stir all people so ardently (for
Homo sapiens
, as all taxonomists understand so well, includes an especially wide range of variation among individuals of the species). But such a basic aesthetic, if not universal, surely animates a high percentage of humanity, and must evoke something very deep in our social and evolutionary heritage. MayI mention just one true anecdote to represent this general argument? The head of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., once hosted a group of blind visitors to discuss how exhibits might be made more accessible to their community. In this museum the greatest airplanes of our history—including the Wright Brothers’ biplane from Kitty Hawk and Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
—hang from the ceiling, entirely outside the perception of blind visitors. The director apologized, and explained that no other space could be found for such large objects, but then asked his visitors whether a scale model of the Spirit of St. Louis, made available for touch, would be helpful. The blind visitors caucused and returned with their wonderful answer: Yes, they responded, we would appreciate such a model, but it must be placed directly under the unperceptible original. If the aesthetic and moral value of genuine objects can stir us so profoundly that we insist upon their presence even when we can have no palpable evidence thereof, but only the assurance that we stand in the aura of reality, then factual authenticity cannot be gainsaid as a fundamental desideratum of the human soul.
    This difficult and tough-minded theme must be emphasized in literature (as the elitist and uncompromising Nabokov understood so well), particularly to younger students of the present generation, because an ancient, and basically anti-intellectual, current in the creative arts has now begun to flow more strongly than ever before in recent memory—the tempting Siren song of a claim that the spirit of human creativity stands in direct opposition to the rigor in education and observation that breeds both our love for factual detail and our gain of sufficient knowledge and understanding to utilize this record of human achievement and natural wonder.
    No more harmful nonsense exists than this common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern. The primary reason for emphasizing the supreme aesthetic and moral value of detailed factual accuracy, as Nabokov understood so well, lies in our need to combat this alluring brand of philistinism if we wish to maintain artistic excellence as both a craft and an inspiration. (Anyone who thinks that success in revolutionary innovation can arise
sui generis
, without apprenticeship for basic skills and education for understanding, should visit the first [chronological] room of the Turner annex at the Tate Gallery in London—to see the early products of Turner’s extensive education in tools of classical perspective and representation, the necessary skills that he had to master before moving far beyond into a world of