Oppositeness is fundamental to our understanding of the forces and characteristics of our universe, and in the worlds of maths and physics it is a vitally important factor. Positive and negative electrical polarity, magnetic north and south, on and off, one and zero – all of these underpin our very existence.
But equally, gray areas and gradations are a dominant feature of our daily lives. It’s not just a question of being wet or dry; in Ireland, at least, it’s a question of how wet you are. The sliding scale under our climatic conditions ranges from mildly damp in a light shower to soaked-to-the-skin in a slightly heavier downpour to swimming-for-your-life in a mild wintery squall. (Definitions of rainfall conditions are those used in weather forecasts in Ireland. )
It’s a funny thing, the concept of opposites. Everyone thinks they know what they mean when they say things like “opposites attract”. I remember when I was about four years old grappling with the idea like every kid does, because one thing the human brain really likes is neat categories. We all like to be able to pigeon-hole things, label them neatly, and know where to find them afterwards.
That’s fine with concepts like “up” versus “down” or “wet” versus “dry”. Black and white, happy and sad, awake and asleep – they all seem to label neatly as opposites. As a four or five year old, they make perfect sense, and in a very naïve way, they still work into adulthood as functional definitions. Of course, a four year old brain doesn’t know where to stop. Everything must have an opposite - the opposite of a man is a woman, a girl is the opposite of a boy, a cat is the opposite of a dog, a cow is the opposite of a horse…
Except that’s not how it really works. A cow is no more the opposite of a horse than a cat is the opposite of a dog. Oppositeness as a concept implies the complete reversal of characteristics, which is certainly not the case in the world of vertebrate mammals. One four legged, warm blooded, herbivore is not the opposite of another. Even allowing for gender, the male of a species is not the opposite of the female except in the extreme instance of biological sexuality. In every other respect, the male cat and the female cat are pretty much identical. Animal behavioural science is now telling us that homosexuality is not confined to the human race, so psychological gender opposites are not even necessarily the same as physical gender opposites up and down the evolutionary scale from earthworms to homo sapiens, although the vision of a camp gorilla or a gay hippopotamus is one that frankly boggles the mind.
Anyway, I only introduced the sex motif to illustrate that something so commonly perceived as polarising as gender is only in the eye of the beholder. We have an entire range of human types, ranging from psychotic war-mongering females to male interior designers and hairdressers and right back around the continuum of psychological and personality profiles.
In the reductio ad absurdum case where you take two similar sized animals – say a horse and a cow of either or any gender – and break them into their constituent atoms, there will be no difference whatsoever. You will be looking at two similar heaps of dust, and closer inspection of those heaps will show they are effectively interchangeable. The relative proportions of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen and the various trace elements and metals will be almost identical. No opposition whatsoever. A carbon atom doesn’t really care whether it is currently a component of a horse or a cow or a whale or me.
What got me thinking about opposites and our simplistic approach to same was the reflection that two of my favourite writers could be defined as opposites. Asimov and Wodehouse have loomed large on my literary horizon for most of my life, and, objectively, you could argue that a taste for one might preclude the other.
Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born Jewish American from a relatively poor background with a doctorate in Chemistry who wrote some of the most influential science fiction stories of the twentieth century. He also wrote non-fiction on a hugely diverse range of subjects from Shakespeare through world history through science to the bible.
He was a polymath and a renaissance man in the best sense in the world of writing, and had a huge influence on my own early interest in science. His science fiction writing style was sparse and almost completely devoid of descriptive passages, relying mainly on conversation and argument for exposition of plot. Virtually all of his stories are puzzles or whodunits under the guise of science fiction, and his hard science – allowing for the intrusion of plot devices such as faster than light travel or time travel or his famous ‘positronic’ robots – always hewed to the line of the best and latest science available at the time of writing.
Asimov’s science essays, which I discovered by accident because I bought a book of them thinking they were more of his science fiction, were models of crystal clarity, simple explanations, and genuinely interesting anecdotes about the sidebar stories of science. To my mind, he did more to inculcate a genuine affection for science in me, and probably thousands of others, than an entire six years of Secondary education did.
Asimov’s ability to breathe life into the apparently dry questions posed by science was amazing. In a few short sentences, he engaged the attention, posed the question, and showed how it could be looked at so the answer and the question both made sense to a child of twelve.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, or P.G., or Plum, on the other hand, was a quintessentially English writer who wrote light, frothy comic novels and musical comedies and churned out in his lifetime the Jeeves and Wooster stories, the Mulliner books, the golf stories, and the Blandings Castle series. If you don’t recognise these works, don’t worry. Just go and look for a volume or two of this remarkable oeuvre, start reading, and your artistic and spiritual scoresheets will be restored.
Wodehouse wrote elegant, witty, wonderful prose about the misadventures of well-to-do idiots in an eternally idyllic, carefree landscape of ancestral castles, suburban refuges, and pastoral never-never lands. His work is permeated by an innocence and unworldliness so complete that, outside of children’s literature, no other writer I’ve read can approach him.
The thing about these two authors is this: Asimov wrote brilliantly simple prose about absolutely everything, while Wodehouse wove elegantly witty and convoluted plots out of nothing. Asimov’s prose was lean and sparse to the point of minimalism, while Wodehouse’s wordcraft was all about putting a topspin on an elegant aphorism and letting it fly. Asimov dealt with science, literature, the world, history, religion, detective fiction, science fiction, and just about anything that engaged his encyclopaedic interest, while Wodehouse confined his entire body of work to the misadventures of generally well-to-do carefree denizens of middle England or America, woven around the most insubstantial of plot points.
And yet, notwithstanding the apparently polar natures of these two writers, both of them engaged and held my attention at about the same time in my life, and have held that attention and affection ever since. The reason is that, despite the many apparent differences, both writers held in common an absolutely generous and open spirit, free of any trace of mean-mindedness or bigotry. Both also epitomised the sheer versatility of the English language as a medium for education and entertainment.
The point I’m getting to here is that, in the world of human thought, opposites do exist, but only as points in the greater continuum of the complexity of human personality. People may seem to be opposites, but that’s only because we are very quick to spot obvious differences, and much slower to appreciate subtle points of commonality, What Asimov and Wodehouse shared was greatness of spirit and talent.
Regrets are something that you accumulate as you go through life, and all you can do with them is learn to live with them. I’ve acquired my share of regrets, some more significant than others, but among them I’ve carried a minor pang of guilt that I never communicated to these men in their lifetimes how much I enjoyed their work. An artist deserves to know his efforts are appreciated. I know my plaudits would only amount to a single handclap in the thunderous ovation they both received in their lifetimes, but, for what it’s worth, this is my salute.
I didn’t start this essay with any real endpoint in view. It really is just my mind freewheeling around an idea. However, on rereading what I’ve written to this point I can say that if it proves anything, it proves how profoundly both of those authors influenced me. Their literary genetic fingerprints are all over my verbiage, and for that I can only be grateful.
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