Less Than Words Can Say | Page 3

fish, but he wanted
to finish the business at hand. His note read: ``Please be informed that
the Committee on Memorial Plaques will meet on Monday at 2:00.''
I walked slowly to the window, his note in my hand, and stared for a
while at the quad. The oak trees there had been decimated not long
before by a leak in an underground gas line. The seeping poison had
killed their very roots, but they had at least ended up as free firewood
for the faculty. Pangloss might have been right, after all, and, calamity
that it was, this latest message spared me the trouble of writing the
congratulatory note and even afforded me a glimpse of a remarkably

attractive young lady straying dryad-fashion through the surviving oaks.
Things balance out.
You would think, wouldn't you, that the worm or whatever had at last
done its work, that the poor fellow's Hydification was complete and his
destruction assured. No. It is a happy mercy that most of us cannot
begin to imagine the full horror of these ravaging disorders. To this day
that man still sends out little announcements and memos about this and
that. They begin like this: ``You are hereby informed...'' Of what, I
cannot say, since a combination of delicacy and my respect for his
memory forbid that I read further.
It's always a mistake to forget William of Occam and his razor. Look
first for the simplest explanation that will handle the facts. I had always
thought that perfectly normal human beings turned into bureaucrats and
administrators and came to learn the language of that tribe through
some exceedingly complicated combination of nature and nurture,
through imitative osmosis and some flaw of character caused by
inappropriate weaning. Piffle. These psychologists have captured our
minds and led us into needless deviousness. The razor cuts to the heart
of things and reveals the worm in the brain.
Admittedly, that may be a slight oversimplification. It may be that the
decay of language and the desire to administrate are not merely
concomitant symptoms of one and the same disease, but that one is a
symptom and the other a symptom of the symptom. Let's imagine what
deans, who like to imitate government functionaries, who, in their turn,
like to imitate businessmen, who themselves seem to like to imitate
show-business types, would call a ``scenario.''
There you sit, minding your own business and hurting no man. All at
once, quite insensibly, the thing creeps into your brain. It might end up
in the storage shelves of the subjunctive or the switchboard of the
nonrestrictive clauses, of course, but in your case it heads for the cozy
nook where the active and passive voices are balanced and adjusted.
There it settles in and nibbles a bit here and a bit there. In our present
state of knowledge, still dim, we have to guess that the active voice is
tastier than the passive, since the destruction of the latter is very rare

but of the former all too common.
So there you are with your active verbs being gnawed away. Little by
little and only occasionally at first, you start saying things like: ``I am
told that...'' and ``This letter is being written because...'' This habit has
subtle effects. For one thing, since passives always require more words
than actives, anything you may happen to write is longer than it would
have been before the attack of the worm. You begin to suspect that you
have a lot to say after all and that it's probably rather important. The
suspicion is all the stronger because what you write has begun to sound
-- well, sort of ``official.'' ``Hmm,'' you say to yourself, ``Fate may
have cast my lot a bit below my proper station,'' or, more likely, ``Hmm.
My lot may have been cast by Fate a bit below my proper station.''
Furthermore, the very way you consider the world, or the very way in
which the world is considered by you, is subtly altered. You used to see
a world in which birds ate worms and men made decisions. Now it
looks more like a world in which worms are eaten by birds and
decisions are made by men. It's almost a world in which victims are put
forward as ``doers'' responsible for whatever may befall them and
actions are almost unrelated to those who perform them. But only
almost. The next step is not taken until you learn to see a world in
which worms are eaten and decisions made and all responsible agency
has disappeared. Now you are ready to be an administrator.
This is a condition necessary to successful administration of any sort
and in any calling. Letters are written, reports are prepared, decisions
made, actions taken, and consequences suffered.