OBJECTS OF INVESTIGATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 9

OBJECTS OF INVESTIGATION

(From a Brief Inguiry Into the Decline and Disappearance of Certain Academic Disciplines, published under protest-circa 2054by the Canterbury University College Press, lately moved from Riccarton to Springfield. ) "| HE march of mind continued well ‘" into the 20th Century, as an army of trained investigators jostled for objects of investigation, all convinced that to explain a thing was not to explain it away. The pressure of their inquiries reduced every man to a statistic. Against the established norms he could measure his glands, his footwear, his work, his wife, his dry rot. It was considered valuable to know how many bacteria were exchanged in the average kiss. An example will show the trend. In Timaru during the ‘forties a man built himself a rock pool and introduced two goldfish into it. He simply wanted to have goldfish in a pool. But such was the energy of the zeitgeist that within a month he was receiving correspondence from rock pools all over the country. He was caught up into goldfish societies, and in addition to mecting his goldfish for meals on Mondays and Thursdays he found himself meeting other goldfish feeders on Wednesdays. (And Saturday brought the official organ, In Stagnant Waters.) They discussed The Problem of Sludge, The Liver Fluke’s First Year, Tarnish on the Ventral Plating. One day the gold-

fish were gone from the man’s pool, leaving only the sludge. They had been explained away. Now the same thing happened with every activity that humans in the country undertook, They worried themselves sick with ‘The Problem of. Pleasure. They couldn’t go to picnics or a barn-dance without being aware of their contribution to The Problem of Leisure. In fact, they couldn’t even build the barn without vast and penetrative analyses of the Recreational Behaviour Patterns of the Sub-Industrial Community. After a time nobody kissed or worked or danced or kept. wives or goldfish any more. They simply kept problems. A few children were born, but they arrived in a battered state, haying already furnished information on Pre-Natal Problems of the New Zealand Mother, Feotal Frustrations, and so on. If they grew up, they became The Pre-School Child, the Juvenescent, The Pubescent, The Adolescent, The Adult Male. . . Finally, of course, like the monkey in the story, nobody could espy anything but another eye through every keyhole in the country. Then they all laughed. They began living again a decent, illregulated. abnormal. maladiusted life.

Augustus