In 1964, I read that Bob Hayes ran, from a flying start, the final 100 yards of the Men’s 4 X110 Olympic Relay in 7.8 seconds. In 1966, I knew the names and LP releases of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Doors. In 1967, the beginning of my teenage years, I heard two facts about the head of a pin: that Catholic clerics had debated on how many angels could stand there; and that a man had engraved the Lord’s Prayer on one.
When the game, Trivial Pursuit, came out in the ‘80s, trivia about sport, pop groups and music emerged from where they had lodged with me for two decades, but never did those pinhead facts come my way. Not that both were necessarily true. That a discourse on the substantiality of the angelic host was held while the Turks besieged Constantinople is probably apocryphal, but that Godfrey Lundberg, working mostly in the dead of night to avoid the reverberations of passing trolley cars, did spend over two years engraving the Lord’s Prayer on a gold pinhead was proved at an exhibition in San Francisco in 1915.
Though somewhat tarnished by virtue-signalling, “small is beautiful” has long been a popular slogan. Its message, of managing well with less, continues to gain ground as the world seems to grow smaller and its human population denser. Calculations, which once required mainframe computers supported by a reinforced concrete floor, can now be managed by a cell phone in the palm of a hand. Given this human potential of concentrating an initially vast operation into so small a space, it leaves one wondering what could be achieved by applying such ability to a broader canvas.
An echo of this notion is heard when people talk of artists, scholars or athletes who die young. “If only Keats had lived beyond 24, imagine what he would have written…or Schubert…or Lennon?” Such deaths are seen as lamentable because they rob the world of the works of creative genius. Though an understandable sentiment, its focus is wrong. Keats’s poetry is known, not because he was so young when he wrote it, but because its beauty is unique. That a longer life would have led to as good or better work changes the point of reference from the quality of art to an aggregation of years. Referring to Mozart, Ledger or Hendrix’s deaths as being “untimely” forgets that “untimely” refers to the average person’s life span. But these were not average people: had they been so, we would not have heard of them. What one hears in Mozart’s music is not its future potential: it is his art. Though it is possible he would have composed more beautiful music, it is also possible that the energy expended to create such sublime work exhausted his body and mind beyond its limits of endurance.
The greatest example of power being located in the small is the atom. If the move from the reinforced floors of mainframes to the inside of one’s pocket is astounding, how much more so the fact that, under the right conditions, certain particles contain the potential to destroy life on earth? Complementing the theory that the universe we live within originated as a single point of energy, the power of the nucleus is incomprehensible and frightening.
A final fact from those pinhead years: we use only 10% of our brain capacity. Unfortunately for most, that “fact” has been discredited, ending the hopes of our hidden genius. But it does not end the possibilities of our potential and the paradox that big things can be achieved through small creations.
