The Fall

I am losing my ability to spell.

It's always come naturally to me, and I have a couple of spelling bee wins under my belt from my ability to accurately spell words I've never heard before. I've known many people for whom spelling is not an innate ability, and have to think hard every time they come across something with ambiguous sounds, such as "separate." How do you know the second vowel is an "a," and not an "e"? A huge percentage of words in the English language feature such seemingly arbitrary choices. Do you memorize them all?

In a way you do, since the words themselves don't offer hints one way or the other. (Unless you are very very into etymology, and know that "separate" comes from the Latin "separare," to pull apart.) But most of us don't actually choose between "a" and "e" every time we spell "separate" - it's wired into our brains. Same goes for most words that we've learned. It becomes instict.

But instinct is by definition an insubstantive, ungraspable thing - there is never a guarantee that you will still have it tomorrow. And I've been losing it. For instance, the other day I wrote "irreverant" ... and only noticed a good few sentences later, when I glanced back at the page. Even with words that I spell correctly (hopefully, most of them), I find myself slowing down to ask myself questions I've never asked before: double r? double l? double the first s or the second? It's likely that lack of confidence is playing a part as well, as I doubt my spelling powers more and more with every mistake.

This all reminds me of The Golden Compass, where Lyra has an innate ability to read the alethiometer, but loses it at the end of Amber Spyglass and must learn to read the symbols from scratch - a process, she is told, that will be painstaking and lengthy, but at the end of it she will have the symbols for good. In the books, this change is a symbol for the loss of the innocence of childhood when we become adults. The curtain is pulled back, so to speak, and we see that nothing is magical, or easy, in life - all good things are contingent and fragile, and nothing that you value is safe or exempt.

I read somewhere that the progression of humankind has been marked by its gradual removal from the centre of things. We begin with the notion of ourselves as central in some way, and time after time we are shot down and revealed to be anything but. We first thought the sun and moon revolved around us, but Copernicus removed us from the centre of the solar system and placed us on an orbiting ring. Then, 20th century astronomers displaced us from the centre of the galaxy, and our galaxy from the centre of the universe. Ouch. Some have asserted that the discovery of altruism and selflessness in animal societies has constituted the next step in this abasement; we once thought of ourselves as superior to animals because of our ability to transcend animal insticts, but it looks like being a nice guy is really part of our genes and, moreover, nature!

I am slowly getting to my point. Let us combine the above with Ralph Waldo Emerson's assertion (and, since we're talking about RWE, replace 'assertion' with 'truth') that the entire history of civilization is encapsulated in every individual life. So every human life enacts the progression from blubbering cave-brute to sophisticated, articulate twentieth-centuryalite, and the simple reason for that is that history cannot be inherited. There is some reason for why the caveman ended up here, where we are, some six thousand years later, and each individual has to "catch up" with her time, to live through six thousand years of progress and arrive where everyone else has arrived.

Anyway, I wonder if the same applies for our constant shifting away from the centre of things? When you're born, you are at the centre of everything - not just because everyone fawns over you, but because you have no real sense of other, no inkling of the possibility of multiple perspectives. As you get older, this becomes more apparent (I just typed "apparent" and then "apparrent" and then "apparent," see what I mean?), but it is clear after talking to any teenager for five minutes that their bubble hasn't yet burst, so to speak - their problems are the worst, their their their. I find it compelling that in one interpretation of the ideological start of the universe - the story of Adam and Eve - we begin in a state of ignorant innocence that is complicated by a fall. The first significant event for humankind is a fall from the awesomeness of Eden, which really had nothing to do with Eve's disobedience of God and was in fact due to the acquisition of knowledge in itself. (I have no idea if this is true, by the way - it just makes sense in my mind.) So what, really, made Eden so great? Symbolically, it was this great garden filled with naked people (and pigs you could munch on) - but what is Eden a symbol for? Isn't it just ignorance? A simple life uncomplicated by what goes on behind the curtain?

I would argue, then, that each of our lives is marked by a series of falls, falls that are caused by knowledge and resultingly push us farther and farther from our centrality. What is our centrality? Maybe our belief that we have it all figured out, that we know how to deal with life, that we are somehow immune because we are smart or clever or lucky. That we have a hand in our fate and are not the victims of casual, devastating chance. This process of displacement, which is a result of our acquisition of knowledge, is the exact same thing as the progress of humanity over the entire span of its existence, as humanity acquires knowledge and is displaced again and again.