Tuesday, December the 14th, 2004

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At the Duckpond

Imagine that you are standing beside a duckpond. Perhaps you are holding a plastic bag filled with the torn-up remains of a loaf of bread with which you intend to feed the ducks. You have been known to do such a thing, on a Sunday morning perhaps, come rain or shine. Now, what I want you to consider is as follows. Do you think there are any circumstances, whether on a Sunday morning or at any other time, when you might look at the famished expectant ducks paddling towards you, and single out one particular duck, and say to yourself, “Hmm, that duck looks lugubrious”?

Can a duck take on a lugubrious air? This is no idle question. For whether the answer is Yea or Nay, further and more cogent questions present themselves, tumbling over each other in their urgency to be answered. “If so, how?” or “If not, why not?” are clearly the next in line, but it does not stop there. To arrive at honest answers to all the succeeding questions will take all your wit and insight, and a knowledge not only of ducks and other waterfowl but of biology and psychology and the engines of perception and optics and so on, ad infinitum. You see, as each question begets another, by the time you have finished answering them—not that you will ever really finish answering them, more that you will faint from exhaustion—you will know everything there is to know about everything in the universe.

That being so, the lugubrious duck has earned its crusts of bread a thousandfold. So feed it now, before you swoon.