Some remarks are quoted so often we cease to pay attention to them. The quips of Oscar Wilde, for instance, trip so easily off the tongue and skip so lightly through the mind that we rarely pause to consider their point. This is unfortunate, because there is often more weight to Wilde’s wit than is commonly acknowledged. Two of his best-known epigrams are spoken by Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Cecil Graham asks Darlington, “What is a cynic?” He tells him it is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It is also Lord Darlington who says that “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

These are more than mere witticisms, and they complement each other as the obverse and reverse of the same insight. For those among us in the gutter who disdain to watch the stars are likely to be the same ones who cannot distinguish between cost and worth.

Wilde was the leading figure in what was called the Aesthetic Movement, beneath whose frivolous façade lurked some altogether serious notions. Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism may well be the best book on the subject precisely because it considers it in relation to man’s soul. Wilde understood that the quality of human life is not something you can enter on the bottom line. More precisely, as the aforementioned epigrams make clear, he understood that to be satisfied with the merely quantifiable is also to display a woeful lack of imagination.

The etymology of the word measure can be traced to the same root from which the Sanskrit word maya derives. Maya, of course, is the world of appearances, and it is appearances that can be quantified. But anyone who takes precise measurement as a standard of truth has never cooked a good soup or stew.

In The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock tells of how he once asked the owner of his favorite restaurant in Brussels to “give me directions for making his type of stewed chicken.” The fellow readily agreed and told Nock to stop by the next morning, by which time he would have drawn up a detailed recipe. “‘But,’ he added, after a moment’s reflection, ‘you can’t make it.'”

“‘I can’t make it after your directions?'” Nock asked him.

“‘Oh, no, — quite impossible. If you went into my kitchen and I stood by you all the time telling you what to do, even then you couldn’t make it.'”

The dish represented, in other words, more than the sum of ingredients and the cooking techniques brought to bear upon them. Its success depended on all sorts of intangible and unquantifiable factors born of years of experience. A good cook doesn’t rely on measuring cups and spoons, but on his sense of taste and smell, his feel for when, say, the onions have reached just the right degree of caramelization.

And this is true of any art. I once asked a veteran watercolorist how long it took him to finish a painting. “Two hours,” he said, “and 40 years.”

It is that feel for things one gets after long experience with them that enables one to do something a little different — add a little more of this or little less of that or substitute something else entirely.

To think that precisely measured quantities grant us some degree of certainty is to fool ourselves. In fact, the notion of precise measurement in any absolute sense is illusory. If the circumference of a circle is arrived by multiplying Pi by the square of the radius, then the circumference of any given circle can only be an approximation, since Pi is an irrational number than can be divided infinitely. W.H. Auden says somewhere that he preferred irregular systems of measurement — such as inches, ells and furlongs — over the metric system. I feel the same way, and for much the same reason: They do not pretend to precision.

We may learn a good deal about the frog we dissect in the laboratory, but we learn a good deal also from watching a live frog on a lily pad snatch a fly out of the air. A chemical analysis of sodium chloride tells us nothing of the taste of salt in our mouths. This is not to denigrate science. It is merely to point out that science tells us quite a lot less about life as it is actually lived than many people seem inclined to assume. And, while what it tells us may be of great value, all those things it doesn’t tell us may be of equal or even greater value. Surely we can all agree that a ruler, a scale, and a calculator may not always be the best instruments for arriving at an understanding of the world’s wonders.

That’s What He Said is published on Tuesday.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

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