Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,60

of these extraordinarily high-powered, supernaturally advanced human specimens who come along in every culture every once in a great while, as history shows, although he said the younger airline passenger, whom he surmised may have been a corporate or academic scientist, did not use ‘supernatural’ or ‘messianic’ or ‘prophetic’ or any of the other terms the cycle usually reserves for specimens like this, instead using terms such as ‘advanced,’ ‘brilliant,’ or ‘ingenious’ and describing the child’s exceptional qualities and career almost exclusively in terms of cognitive ability, raw IQ—because he said apparently at a very young age, an age at which most of the village’s children were just beginning to learn the very basic customs and behaviors that the primitive village expected of its citizens, this two- or perhaps three-year-old child was already evincing an ability to answer absolutely any question put to it. To answer correctly, accurately, comprehensively. Even very difficult or even paradoxical questions. Of course the full range and depth of the child’s interrogatory intelligence were not manifested for some time; thus their emergence serves as the comme on dit Threshold Experience and occupies much of the protasis. That at first the ability seems simply a novelty, something for its parents to so to speak dine out on and amuse the other villagers with, something on the order of, ‘Look: our two-year-old knows how many twigs you have if you hold five twigs and then pick up three more twigs’; until of course one of the parents’ amused neighbors happens to say or ask something that prompts the child to disclose that it also knows everything culturally important about each different individual twig the man happens to be holding, such as for example the village’s official and idiomatic names for the trees the twigs derived from, and the various pantheistic deities and religious significance of each species of relevant tree, as well as which ones had edible leaves or bark that eased fever if boiled, and so on, including which species’ grain and tensile flexion were especially good for spear shafts and the small phytotoxic darts the villages of this region used with crude reed blowguns to defend themselves against the tropical rain forest’s predacious jaguars, which are apparently the scourge of the paleolithic Third World and the leading statistical cause of death after disease, malnutrition, and intertribal warfare. After which, of course, in short order, after reports of the remarkable twig prelection get about and the parents and other primitive villagers begin regarding the child’s intelligence in a wholly different spirit, it emerges that the child is also fully capable of answering all manner of both trivial and also profoundly non-trivial questions, practical questions that bore directly on the village’s subsistence-level quality of life, such as for instance where was the best place to find a certain kind of cassava root, and why were the migrations of a certain species of elk or dik-dik—a species which the village depended for its very life on hunting effectively—more predictable in the rainy season than in the dry season, and why were certain types of igneous rock better for fashioning sharp edges or striking together to produce fire than other types of igneous rock, and so on. And then, of course, subsequently, in a rather predictable trial-and-error heuristic evolution, it emerges in the action of the protasis that the child’s preternatural brilliance in fact extends even to those questions that are considered by the village supremely important, in other words almost religious-grade questions, questions which—substituting my friend’s own terminology for that of the analytical younger man on the United flight—involved not just cerebration or raw IQ but actual sagacity or virtue or wisdom or as Coleridge would have had it esemplasy, and soon the child is being called upon to adjudicate very complex and multifaceted conflicts, such as if two gathering-caste villagers both happened on the same breadfruit tree at precisely the same time and both claimed the breadfruit who should get the breadfruit, or for example if a wife failed to conceive within a certain specified number of lunar or solar cycles did the husband have the right to banish her altogether or did his rights extend only to no longer sharing food with her, and so on and so forth—evidently the passenger up ahead provided any number of exemplary questions, some of which were very involved and difficult for either my friend or his acquaintance to reconstruct. The point, however, is that the exceptional child’s answers to