If it were not for ambiguity, for the sense of strangeness, that words
in all languages provide, we would have no way of
recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be
spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into
the sun.
One of the many wonderful sentences in Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell (1974), this one makes the same point as many of the others in the essay "Information." Thomas, distinguished scientist and essayist, uses redundancy for good reason: his purpose is to bridge the great gap between the specialist's and the non-specialist's knowledge; his points need repeating. The preceding essay in the book is "Social Talk"; both essays reveal Thomas's shrewd familiarity with the principles of communication and modern linguistics.
For instance, he makes a directly relevant statement about the subject of our discussion: "The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences, is innate in the human mind" Both this sentence and the one we are about to discuss make shocking revelations about the nature of language and the nature of the human mind. He has led up to our sentence with observations about the honey bee and the lymphocyte. Both the bee and the cell have the power of discrimination. The bee can discriminate between sugar and not-sugar, the lymphocyte between polymers that match its receptor and those that do not match. But with their primitive sensitivity, bees and cells can zero-in on only one thing. The bee finds honey; the cell enlarges, begins making new DNA, and turns into a 'blast." There are no shades of meaning in what bees and cells sense.
The human mind, on the other hand, senses much of its world through words, which are innately ambiguous. Hence comes the magic of language, "the sensing of strangeness" we experience when a single word points us to more than one significance. We call our sentence shocking because it challenges our stock response to the concept of ambiguity, something we are trained to avoid in communication. Thomas's phrase "layers of counterpoint" demonstrates the very point he is making in the sentence. The metaphorical nouns when used together have the strangeness that leads to other words--"creativity" for one--that gives "ambiguity" a resonance and reverberation that leads far away from the everyday synonyms of ambiguity one finds in a thesaurus: uncertainty, imprecision, vagueness, obscurity.
The crowning beauty of the sentence lies in the concluding phrase, "staring into the sun." Thomas did not compose it thoughtlessly. It alludes to an image of a honey bee a few sentences previous: "When a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower." The roving eye of the human being, on the other hand, is creatively sensitive even when it is only staring. Our sentence helps bridge the gap that separates us from the bee.
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