There’s something in the water. There are a lot of things in the water.
Sometimes it’s fluoride, sometimes it’s glyphosate. If you live in New York City, like I have for a number of years, and you drink the tap water, which I have for a number of years, then it’s also very small shrimp called copepods.
You do not generally taste these impurities. Some of them are beneficial, and some are harmful. If you’ve been drinking from the same tap, bottle, or gallon jug for years, it’s probably fine.
Why, then, is it important to know that they exist?
It’s not, not for most people, not in their daily lives, just as it isn’t necessary to know exactly what’s in the food that you eat, or exactly where it comes from.
But it does help to build up enough of an understanding that you can identify what’s truly extraordinary. No one with alternatives drinks obviously rusty, brownish water. Everyone who can drinks clean, clear water.
If you can notice when the water seems to be changing colors or tastes, or if you have some more advanced method of detecting elevated levels of impurities, you’ll end up drinking a lot less metal.
“The Mysterious Benedict Society” is an excellent children’s book by Trenton Lee Stewart. An unnecessary but likely quality of a book well worth reading for children is that it still contains value for the even mildly childish. This one is suitably arch, clever, and concise in its descriptions, much like the book with which I opened a recent post.
I tend to be a fan of ideas over themes, which in part explains my bent towards science fiction and fantasy over fiction that takes place in the modern day without much extra scaffolding.
That goes double for media made for children, when I happen to read or watch some.
One idea stands out to me on a re-read, because it works on two levels, and it’s best encapsulated by the following quotation:1
“Poison apples, poison worms.”
The first level is this: if you remember having read the book in any detail, you’ll recognize the concept. As the nefarious Mr. Curtain lectures:
“...every package contains an incredible amount of information… One package, many thoughts. If you have mastered the material, then the proper phrase will conjure it — like the magic words that coax a genie from a bottle.”
Our heroes’ reaction to that four-word phrase, by the way:
“…for in a single moment an entire lesson — an entire class period of listening to Jillson drone on and on about bad government — had blossomed in their heads.”
Even having heard that lesson, and having recognized the metonymy therein at the time, the information holds no significance until it’s activated, because its contents are irrelevant.
What’s crucial is the information’s compressibility.
The second level is this: an attentive reader recalls the events of earlier chapters in almost exactly the same way that the characters do.2
Remembering the concept is diegetic, and it’s abstract. That the example serves as the concept in itself makes it salient.
Packages or, similarly, fnords, or, similarly, revealed instructions aren’t always present, and when they are present, they’re often not meaningful.
But it does help to recognize when you read a post, or a book, and feel a sharp change in your opinion; when you watch a clip, or a movie, and your mood wrenches; when you have a conversation and come out of it changed.
In short, it helps to try and sense when you’re being acted on by outside agents more than you mean to let them.
Conversely… well, you can figure out the converse.
It’s twenty-twenty-four. Do you know where your mind is?
Orion
The block quotes in this section are from “The Mysterious Benedict Society” (again, linking to Wikipedia) and in my copy (the first paperback edition) come from page 321, in the chapter “The Whisperer.” (I can’t find the section in Google Books; hopefully this will suffice if you want to find the context, though I think these quotations should make sense in the post without it.).
And perhaps recalls an earlier response to the simple mention of ‘bad government,’ though that’d be external to the text itself, and I’d guess the intended audience is (in line with our heroes) lucky enough to have few immediate reactions to such a notion.