ken burns was not your average eight-year-old. he thought in complete sentences. he realized things as fast as adults. he did not yet know how to communicate emotions, or strategies, or anything like this, but he had not yet realized that he needed other people to nurture him, so he didn't seem to mind. the countryside is not a bad place for a kid like ken burns to grow up. city folk may think that it's a boring, stultifying life, but there are as many if not more mysteries in the country as in the city. how do gophers manage to dig tunnels? how does corn grow? questions like this, which city people take as givens, were the things that engaged ken burns as he watched the kite sail, appreciating the wind patterns. it's a good thing to be eight and full of intellectual curiosity. it's a better thing to be eight, full of intellectual curiosity, and not have the outside world pounding on you. to be able to explore without having yet learned the value of caution. when i was eight, i couldn't leave my apartment because the complicated world outside was dangerous, and no amount of smarts could solve the physical pressures. ken, soon to be kenneth, has the world ahead of him.
quite simply, there are not enough people here. this will become clear at eighteen, when ken has to figure out many different types of people; here, he is exposed to at most fifty different types. but this is not a universal problem; the people are as interesting as any other set, if one has the background to understand them. it's just that ken is getting bogged down in the month of july, where he has already learned to expect the rapid thunderstorms and other surprises of nature. he turns his eyes away from naturally occurring events, which hold nothing more, to figuring out people, but he doesn't see the interactions between the people, because there aren't enough people. so he is pessimistic. this is ken's misanthrope phase.
most people reach this pool of ideas and end up going around in circles, never exhausting it, always trying to find the end of the path. it seems like an endless pool, but the external gods laugh from their dimension, seeing people go around and around. the people, who have a bad enough memory so as not to be able to recall that they have had these thoughts before, do not seem to mind. but ken, unconsciously, has formulated a plan to mark the ideas that he has already thought, so as to not get stuck in a loop. it's not clear how he did this, and it's not clear how he keeps track of it, but at some point he realizes that he's been here before. he realizes that this structure is old and not changing much, that it can't change much. he hasn't solved any of life's questions, but he's proved that they're not really solvable. it's not the optimistic answer, which is why no one ever comes to it, but ken's misanthrope phase hangs around enough to enable him to avoid wasting his life. ironic.
it's a very difficult problem. it requires reinventing the wheel, but armed with perspective ken solves it. if you think about it, it's the ultimate act of human creativity and faith: to posit, without any evidence, that there are novel experiences waiting to be had. that there are things that exist which don't fit into your current world. ken won't go off the deep end, ever. at this point he is in total control of himself, and while the better story would be to have this surrendered during a moment of weakness effected by a woman or a death or a life-crippling injury, it will not happen. some people just mature and stay there. at this point, whatever happens is accidental. if ken goes to college, it's by accident. if he drops out and goes to the big city, it's by accident. the point is that some accident has to happen, which will trigger the next phase of his life. it's not as lucky or coincidental as you might think.
he doesn't know where he came from, because when he was there, there was no reason to distinguish it from the rest of the world since the rest of the world was irrelevant. to put it in a modern-day context, he doesn't know his own phone number since he's never had any reason to dial it. ken feels bewildered, but he's still in control. he knows that going forward is just as arbitrary as going backwards. his abstract thought pays off; he doesn't panic and take ridiculous actions, and he doesn't grasp at whatever straws he can find. he just lives. he picks up on how one is supposed to live -- there are the usual missteps along the way, but as he learns more and more types of people the traps become easier and easier to avoid. the key point, the moral of the story, is that ken has learned the same most relevant skill as a city dweller: the skill of meta-pattern-recognition, where one knows instinctively where to look for patterns.
ken has always moved slowly from point a to point b, and this is the one thing that's happened to him that truly is serendipitous. it allowed him to move continuously with nature, so that he was never out of touch with his environment, so that he was never ambushed by nature. here is an advantage of the country dweller over the city dweller: the first thing the country dweller learns is nature, and so he adapts easily when it changes. ken, at nineteen, has branched out into the world of emotions. this is the pivotal point in the story, the point where one sees which child psychologist theories are correct. is there a correlation between childlike intelligence, which has enabled ken to understand the world, and moral intelligence? is ken a morally good person? at this point i'm afraid i must leave you, since i don't know the answer and to presume something would not be faithful to the mission of truth. what i can say is that there is certainly enough evidence out there to figure this out. subjectively, of course.
it's really a different way of thinking. the child psychologists in this school are dead-on: growing up in the city requires a quick wit, while growing up in the country requires deep thought. the cities refuse to admit this, but it is true, and each type, even those less talented, struggles when confronted with its opposite situation. but struggling is not the end of the world. ken, who encountered the antihero sometime between the last chapter and this one, engages in a frantic one-year morality play during which he and the antihero exchange mindsets. at the end, they are equally fluent at both. it's not really comparable; ken has some advantages at risk assessment which the antihero does not, because of the ingrained thoughts that he naturally applies to it. and vice versa.
ken sees what's going on. the index of each region is going up. when ken started, his index was higher than where he was. he moved to regions with higher index as he grew up, so that during the second act his index was the same as the places he was infecting. he sees that he will have to start moving to (relatively) smaller-index places now, as he has reached his steady-state (not too different from his starting state, really), and the world is continuing to increase its index piecewise. and the conclusion is bleak and obvious: eventually, there will be no haven which empathizes with him. he is perfectly happy with his index of the world, but as the population shifts, the index everywhere will unavoidably increase in the name of rebellion and improvement. the great human hubris, and why we die -- it's the same reason why we have become the world's foremost race. because we strive to get better, only to have each individual of our race left behind in the process.
it's not clear if his lack of a perfect score is because he's actually wrong in this belief or because the person doing the grading is unqualified to do so. ken has reached the conclusion that fells half of the population, but he does not wilt. he has not run out of situations. he's not done. he hasn't yet realized that there are other people like him, even though he's met some. he hasn't learned to engulf himself in the ultimate infinity of truly comprehending that others think.
this is one of the first decisions he's actually made. most of the time so far, we have seen how the supposedly accidental (i do not claim it was in fact fated, just that some accident had to happen) occurrences of his life have affected him. but this could go either way; it's close enough that by high physics which i do not claim to understand but which i intuitively believe it's completely up to him. and he chooses to not interpret the dreams as relevant to anything in particular. it's a splitting point. ken dreams through his twenties. there's no real reason to stop. he lives, too, but he shifts to considering the dreams as his real life and the rest as the sideshow.
thus he wakes up and is not shocked by how much the world has changed. ordinarily this might seem disappointing, but, again, ken is in control. he doesn't get down. he just goes out with no expectations, neither looking for something new nor something old, and he gets whatever accident happens to occur.
i'm sitting outside watching my sister climb trees and flying a kite. it's an idyllic country day, with just the right amount of clouds in the sky, and i have to say that life as an eight-year-old is sweet. especially since i just learned the word "idyllic."
ken is twelve now, and he's beginning to run into the problems that city people would have said were inevitable. he's no longer interested by the gophers; he's figured out what it's like to be a gopher, and figured out how the pressures work. he's moved on to people, but the deficiency of the country, accentuated by his slanted view of the city (from people who tried to bash it as a mean, dog-eat-dog, place, which only spurred ken to want to figure it out), is becoming clear.
ken has reached the phase of abstract thought. he doesn't think about people much anymore, and he hasn't started thinking about the possibility of changing his world to be what he wants. he's discovered the one-time, gorgeous pool of ideas that have nothing to do with the world or with people. they don't get refreshed, but for his fourteenth year, he has enough to think about.
the second misanthrope phase is short, about two months. ken realizes that there is nothing worth investigating here, and that there is nothing left in the utter abstract. but he hasn't yet realized that he can go out and find things worth investigating.
the accident that actually happens is that ken gets lost. he starts walking and thinking, looking without knowing what he's looking for, and he comes out in unfamiliar territory. he tries to get home, but it's self-deception. eventually he crests a hill and sees a city, except he doesn't really know what the world means.
it's a cold windy day. ken, not paying much attention to the dorsal/ventral asymmetry of his body (as he has grown, he has picked up snippets of speech from places), has not gone back on purpose, but he has also not gone forward on purpose. still, he has found himself at an entirely novel place, which is also not as much of an accident as it appears to be: he was bound to get arbitrarily far from his starting point at some juncture, and it's as likely to be here as anywhere else.
ken at twenty-two starts taking risks. he never did before, and this is the advantage of the city dweller over the country dweller. the country dweller is in a world where everything can be thoroughly comprehended by someone like ken, so that risks are always unnecessary. ken never really needed to make snap judgments of feasibility; he always had time to think things out beforehand. meanwhile, the city dweller, his antithesis, is by this point well acquainted with situations so complicated that a quick appraisal and guess are necessary.
ken sees his life starting to end. or rather, he sees how his life will end. the world is not homogeneous; each segment of it has an index of technology, he says, even though he knows technology is not the right word. he considers it a flaw that he cannot come up with the right word; from his experience with the abstract pool of ideas, he knows that there is a right word this time.
this knowledge might upset the city person, who sees the end of all situations, but not ken. ken's used to this sort of thing; ken's used to the life cycle that sees crops lie dormant in the winter. he doesn't score 100% on this test, but it's for a very moral and human reason; it's because he wants to believe that all species are equal, that he will rebud later, somewhere else, some other world with lower index. he believes in infinity.
ken sleeps. ken discovers dreaming. when he wakes up, he rarely remembers what he dreams, but he knows that the dreams are there. he resists the urge to develop a meaning for the dreams as evidence (do they presage an afterlife? do they represent a parallel universe.)
ken wakes up at thirty-one, about ripe for a mid-life crisis. as i mentioned before, though, it's not going to happen. ken is in control of himself; he comes out of hibernation as ready to deal with the world as he was several years ago. the beauty is that he's been paying enough attention to keep up with the world even while mostly dreaming. he's been migrating from place to place, tracking his index further and further towards the low end of the spectrum.