Absurdity, Allegory and China

In my grade school, St Raymond of Penefort in Philadelphia, the old desks were attached to wooden runners and grouped in sets of three. The desktops, pitched at an angle to facilitate writing, were hinged at the top from a narrow level ledge/rail that included a hole for an inkwell. Fountain pens were still the standard writing tool when a #2 pencil wouldn’t do. The fountain pens we used were cheap, and writing, especially for lower elementary students, could be a messy business. The pen’s reservoir was a rubber sac which, when depressed and released, sucked ink up and into the innards. And so early on we learned to fill our pens, and in so doing ruined a lot of white shirts.

Once, in an effort to understand the concept of a “billion,” we were informed that if a fountain pen were a billion times larger than the one in our blue stained hands, the reservoir would be able to hold the volume of the Mississippi River. I looked at the map, at the long wavy line that wiggled from cold Minnesota down to steamy Louisiana, and thought, “That’s a lot of ink!” The map, though seemingly helpful in setting limits, was still impossible for me to properly scale, and since I’d never seen the mighty Mississippi, all I really understood was that a billion was still too big for me to grasp. I realized soon enough that all I’d really ever have that approached one billion were questions, and in the post-WWII education system I was stuck in – where rote work and smacks to the head were still the best methods for educating the masses – most of my billion questions were going to go unanswered.

I now live in a country where there are a lot more than a billion people. If it were possible to drain the Mississippi, I wonder if you could fit that many people into the emptied channel? After spending a bit of time riding Chinese buses, trains and subways, my sense is that if you were to begin at the Mississippi’s source, Lake Itasca, Minnesota, you could probably fit them all without cramming much farther south than St. Louis, MO. This makes me question the accuracy of the fountain pen reservoir volume model. But more than that, I am still pretty confused about the real size of a billion.

But when the numbers get into the trillions, I get a little dizzy and have no choice but to file it under the same heading as warp speed and God. So when I read Stocks end wild session mixed, Dow falls 128 and find out that “For the week, investors lost $2.4 trillion, and over the past year, the losses have piled up to $8.4 trillion,” all I can do is wonder if I didn’t pay enough attention in school. Back then I’m pretty sure that math didn’t go that high. But then again, I could have been too busy wondering where to wipe my inky fingers.