Everything is Obvious: A review

William of Ockham

I saw an article not long ago on the Americans with Disabilities act that said that the older you get, the more disabled you become.  I hadn’t known that, until I started aging and becoming increasingly disabled.  Then it was obvious.  

Which reminds me of the book my niece got me for Christmas a few years ago - Everything is Obvious*: *Once you know the answer, by sociologist Duncan Watts, on the pitfalls of common sense, which I had been enjoying and absorbing until it disappeared one day, which happened to be the same day that my wife had hired a maid service to come clean our house before the visit of a friend from out of town.  Having a few moments for reading that evening, I searched the house for it with no luck. How disappointing! It's not a big house.  It had been on the surface of things just that morning.  Where could it be?  I racked my brain; retraced my steps until a notion bubbled up from the depths.

My theory was that the book had been resting on the lip of the waste basket in the bathroom. Some new bric a brac in the bath-chamber had made the customary place for books in progress, the toilet tank lid, off limits and for want of a better idea, the waste basket rim had become the de facto (and piss poor I might add) substitute for it.  Anyway, I was thinking I or a maid had maybe inadvertently tipped the book into the trash can, and the maid, perhaps not being a book person, had not the tools to recognize a book in a trash can as anything other than trash, so had dumped it along with the other trash in a receptacle where, evading discovery, it was left on the curb the next day and removed for good by employees of the public works department in their usual efficient manner.  While I was disappointed at the turn of events I was very pleased with my powers of deduction for having figured that out.  

My daughter protested that it was classist and maybe even racist to think a maid wouldn’t know what to do with a book.  I countered that it wasn’t racist; it was a fact of life that some people, people of all walks of life, are not book people and for them a book is not an object to be totemized and venerated but an object that in a trash can is indistinguishable from other objects whose original identities and purposes have been superseded by that of “rubbish”.  I cast no blame; on the contrary, I was pleased that with my powers of reasoning and a mind open to the world views of a stranger who happened to be engaged in a cleaning activity in my house, I had been able without prejudice to understand where the book had gotten to.  

Oh sure, the coffee cup that I suspected a maid must have broken without telling us that same day showed up a day later on the bookcase in the bedroom where I’d left it, as did the bag of dog food that I was afraid might have tempted one of the maids (whether for her dog or her family or herself I did not care to judge or to speculate) when I couldn't find it right away.  So of the 3 missing items, 2 turned up within a day, but not the third, and somehow my confidence in my powers of deduction remained bolstered by the stories I’d concocted for the 2 missing items, even when they were proven wrong.  I mean the stories were good.  But as I say the book remained gone and I kept feeling that pang of knowing a tragedy that maybe could have been prevented had occurred in spite of a premonition I seemed to remember having that day.  

You probably can see where this is going-- last week, my wife was digging around behind the computer for something and found, right where I’d left it a month before, the book.  Of course it was behind the computer!  That’s where I put it to avoid any mishaps with the maids.  The end.