Читать книгу The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy - David Boyle - Страница 8

What we can’t do is leave things as they are – all of those numbers are making us misunderstand things. They make us ignorant of the world past the ends of our noses, measuring things means defining them and reducing them. Still life is dead life. In fact, in Italian, still life is ‘natura morta’. We lose some of the magic in it. Every time a new set of statistics comes out, I can’t help feeling that some of the richness and mystery of life gets extinguished. Just as individual stories of passion and betrayal get hidden by the marriage statistics, or the whole meaning of the Holocaust gets lost in the number 6,000,000. There is a sort of deadening effect, a distancing from human emotion and reality. Not much, but just enough for it to matter – like Jedediah Buxton trying to understand Shakespeare’s masterpieces by counting the words.

Magic is about breaking out of categories, words and definitions, and I should declare an interest – I want a bit more of it. Measuring things takes away the childish sense of wonder where things are really possible. A serious-looking man with a white coat and clipboard – one of those disinterested people who counts a lot but feels little – will have to put me right, and tell me off for filling people’s minds with airy-fairy nonsense.

But don’t blame me. I was plummeted into this frame of mind as a teenager when I came across a poem by D. J. Enright called ‘Blue Umbrellas’, which in a few short lines summed up the poverty of definitions:

The thing that makes a blue umbrella with its tail –

How do you call it? You ask. Poorly and pale

Comes my answer. For all I can call it is peacock.

Now that you go to school, you will learn how we call all sorts of things;

How we mar great works by our mean recital.

You will learn, for instance, that Head Monster is not the gentleman’s accepted title;

The blue-tailed eccentrics will be merely peacocks; the dead bird will no longer doze

Off till tomorrow’s lark, for the letter has killed him

The dictionary is opening, the gay umbrellas close.

Bizarre measurement No. 1

Guz

(Middle Eastern measurement of variable length. One Guz = 27 inches in Bombay, 37 inches in Bengal, 25 inches in Arabia and 41 inches in Iran.)

Americans who claim to have been abducted by aliens: 3.7 million

Speed of London traffic in 1900: 12 mph

Speed of London traffic in 1996: 12 mph

Average time US patients are allowed to speak before being interrupted by their doctors: 18 seconds