Reduction

Back in 1854, Henry David Thoreau rather famously wrote:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

And then:

An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

A few years ago, at a summer institute at Wake Forest, one of the instructors saw my Thoreau Society T-shirt--which reads, "Simplify, simplify"--and remarked that "if he'd really meant it, he'd have said it only once." But that's a topic for another day.

Today, I want to think about what it might mean to "reduce it to its lowest terms," not by moving to the woods, but by simplifying.

I get what HDT means when he writes about reducing life to its base, finding the things that are really life as opposed to all those things of society that aren't really life. But yesterday, while I was out for my run, I was thinking about this idea of reduction in mathematical terms.

When we reduce a fraction to its lowest terms, the value doesn't change. 50/100 is still 1/2, and 832/2496 is still 1/3. We reduce the fraction to make it simpler, to make it easier to use, but the value of the thing represented doesn't change.

For Thoreau, though, I think we might begin to think about reduction as involving only the denominator. Although I don't believe that the value of life can be accurately represented by a number, we might create a metaphor that says something about the value of life through a fraction:

Time / Affairs

Time here is an unknown quantity to us, but it is, for practical purposes, a constant to us--as much as we might like to extend our lives, we can not reliably predict or even alter the time we have. Applying HDT's advice to "let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand" suggests that given any quantity of time, the quality of our life might be improved by reducing the number of affairs we concern ourselves with.

This is not the trend. Instead, we are pulled to "a hundred or a thousand" things (or a million--what would he have said about mass media today?) by television, radio, internet, billboards, peers, newspapers, jobs, books, phones. And while more than "two or three" of these things are probably worthwhile, even noble, we ought to think more about the cost of spreading ourselves so thin.

I'm reading essays for a state north of here this month--their tenth grade writing assessment, a prompt about technology's effect on us--and I'm struck by how many of these students see the ability to multi-task as one of the great things that technology has brought us. What I see on a daily basis is students struggling to focus, unable to maintain attention on a single topic for very long. Try reading The Odyssey or "Self-Reliance" when you can't think about a single topic for more than about forty-five seconds at a time. Students revel in the fact that they can look up something on the internet in seconds which took their parents hours in the library to find. But didn't their parents find something more than just the answer?

Incidentally, there's an article in Newsweek today reporting on a study at FSU on multi-tasking which concludes:

Many of us pride ourselves on our ability to multitask. But if willpower and mentally strenuous work both require the same fuel, and that fuel comes in limited supply, something along the way probably has to give. It's just a matter of what.

I'd object to "probably," and I think HDT would, too.