In Praise of Wondering

As Truffle aims a tiny yellow stream at a stand of daffodils, a bird up in a tree lets loose a rill of perfect notes. If I had my phone, Merlin would identify the warbler for me. As for the tree, still in its yellowish, early spring foliage, it might be a maple, a hornbeam, or a butternut. Flora incognita would put an end to my wondering, if only I had my phone.

Back in the day when computers occupied entire rooms instead of pant pockets, my revered Zoology professor would take us on field trips and impress us by identifying birds as he drove down the road. But occasionally even he, when confronted with some distant, silent bird, would wave his hand and say, “that’s just a nondescript female,” leaving us to ponder how even a genius at wildlife identification could sometimes be stymied. Today, he would be replaced by an app.

Naming the creatures of the world was the job that God assigned to Adam, so it’s no wonder that we still have that urge. Now, thanks to the computer, the name of everything in the universe is but a click away. The capital of Burkina Faso? Ouagadougou. The parasite that can sometimes be seen moving under the infected person’s eyeball? The Loa loa worm.

The phone has become an essential crutch in conversation. If, as happens more and more frequently, my friend and I can’t think of the name of a certain writer, book, play, movie, actor, or director, we feel compelled to look it up. What were conversations like before smart phones? I don’t remember people talking less because names or facts would occasionally escape them. And we didn’t have to deal with those awkward pauses when one partner breaks eye contact and swipes and clicks to find the name of the boatman who ferried souls across the river Styx.

Until the advent of the smart phone, we were comfortable with our non-omniscience.  It was o.k. that our knowledge of the universe encompassed only a small fraction of it. What has become of the insouciant shrug that said, I’m just human, and I’m not supposed to know everything? Now, because the answer is at our fingertips instead of on a shelf in the branch of the local library, we look stuff up, endlessly. I must admit that there is a certain feeling of triumph in being able to find—eureka!—the name, title, or curious fact that had escaped us. And once we’ve found the name of the bird or the plant, for a minute we feel like we have caught the warbler, and the hornbeam is suddenly ours. The superstition that calling things by their name gives us power over them is inscribed in our DNA.

Yet I wonder if by naming the bird we miss its at least some of its birdiness. I suspect that infants (from the Latin infāns, one who cannot speak) are more in touch with the brightness of the eye, the toothpick fragility of the legs, and the manic urgency of the flutterings precisely because they don’t know what the bird is called. Words can be like mousetraps. They deliver the rodent, but the creature is dead.

I don’t want to deprive anybody, including myself, of the pleasures of wildlife identification. But I think there is a case to be made for sometimes walking phoneless into the woods, attending to the warblings in the canopy and looking out for that tiny early plant—you know, the one with the dark red splotches on the leaves and the delicate yellow blooms, whatever it’s called.