Mite Wise

Sept. 20, 2018 — One time in my dorm room I drew a yellow highlighter circle around a tiny spider walking across my desktop, taking away all its good choices. For a minute I enjoyed this — enjoyed my power, enjoyed the little twitches that showed me the spider was thinking or agitated, enjoyed the magnified intensity of each second as my mind ping-ponged between where I was and where the little spider was. It felt like a fair game to be playing.

And then suddenly it didn’t. Another minute of it would have been not playing, but torture. I erased a part of the wall with my finger and set my innocent prisoner free.

I think I had been for-armed for this little crisis by Robert Frost, whose poem, A Considerable Speck, came back to me as I sat there looking down like a god. The poem describes the situation we’re talking about almost exactly — a man, a mite, a weapon of ink — and concludes:

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.