The Saga of the Beetle Scrubber: A Cautionary Tale of Deep Philosophy

Once there was a beetle-scrubber named Gilbert Myle. No finer cleanser of insects existed in all the lands of the earth. Annually this stalwart youth traveled to the fish-market of Sansmens to compete in the Ludi Insectae, and every year he won the prize for beetle-scrubbing.

Gilbert’s charges were the shiniest, best waxed, most elegantly combed creatures in the history of the planets. Rich men brought their pet beetles to Gilbert, where he lived in a little backwater village called Rusticor, and paid him fabulous sums for his effort. Master Myle could have claimed his place in a dozen palaces as a permanent staff-member. Moreover, this young man was an attractive figure, straight-spined and bright-eyed, so that he was the object of much female interest.

Yet Gilbert was not satisfied with justice: the doing of that for which he was best suited. He came of a proud old family, and his father had been a man who bred racing butterflies. The lad felt that beetle-scrubbing was beneath him. This made him surly with the village maids, and churlish with the rich men, and, worst of all, sullen with his mother.

Mistress Myle was one of those women whom one could confidently put forth as Exhibit A in any question of beauty. Although fifty-something, she appeared as fresh as a dewy rose, and not a country-rose at that, but a hothouse rose!

Mistress Myle (her first name was Tabitha, but she felt that this was beneath her) did not tolerate sullenness. Being one of the most beautiful living beings on earth, she felt that surely the rest of the world could make a small effort to live up to her own dazzling charms and at least smile.

Yet Gilbert’s mother – who had married his father because Master Myle Senior’s constant contact with butterflies had made him a man of delicate attentions and exquisite manners – agreed that beetle-scrubbing was no life for her son.

“Gilbert, my son,” she would say, “you must take some of this money which the idle rich thrust upon you, and you must give up beetle-scrubbing.” But Gilbert, although twenty-three and unhappy, had been strictly brought up along Platonist lines, and could not quite bring himself to disregard the perfect justice of his profession.

“Mother dearest, my darling and best beloved only Mother,” he would say, for his father had brought him up to be as perfectly gracious as he himself was, before his untimely demise at the hands of a vagrant and drunken bee (Master Myle Senior was dreadfully allergic to bees), “I know very well that beetle-scrubbing seems to be beneath the son of my father, and I do not deny that I am unhappy in my profession. But Mother, ought I not to make myself happy? If I am truly suited to be a beetle-scrubber, is it for me to overturn The Republic and refuse to be happy, as Plato says that all men engaged in doing what they are best suited to do are happy, and this is happiness defined?” And his mother would shake her head sadly, because she agreed with her son, but did not like it.

So Gilbert brooded, and although he was too conscientious to turn out imperfect work, nevertheless his heart was not in it. Young Myle felt that there simply was not enough in the lot of a beetle-scrubber to challenge and uplift the soul.

“It’s not as if I’m asking so much, am I?” He would ask the well-bucket absently, while pausing from labor to splash a little cool water on his face and the back of his neck. “Is man really meant to plod along dully doing his duty, without any liking for the task? Where’s the pleasure, the passion, the overcoming, the zest?”

Then he would mutter a few discouraged words in Greek, usually from that passage in which Odysseus sat weeping beside the bare horizons of the sea. And Gilbert felt that he too, in his deep heart, had somehow strayed from home.

One day, the area’s itinerant bookseller came to Rusticor. Mistress Myle heard of this while chatting up her butcher for details of his daughter’s housewifely skills, for she had begun to think that only a pretty girl could serve to distract Gilbert from his malaise. Tabitha Myle had no illusions; she knew that there was nowhere in the world a young lady as beautiful as herself. Nevertheless, she had a secret shame. She could not make a good pie-crust. Thus Gilbert’s mother inquired minutely into the pies of the butcher’s daughter.

As she was engaged in this careful questioning, the bookseller’s cry came hazily across the corner of her ear, and this good lady let out a veritable yip of joy. Books! A new book would give Gilbert some blessed relief, for the lad had been brought up well. That is as much as to say, he loved books only slightly less than life and breath.

“Libellum!” She called. “Libellum! I must see your books at once!” Master Libellum waved his fat hands and shook his fat jowls and beamed a smile from every curve of his rotundity.

“Mistress Myle! How exceptionally pleasing, and how multifaceted a joy this is, to proffer my meager booklings for your superlatively beauteous examination!” He drew himself up to an incredible height of five feet and an inch. Then Master Libellum (whose first name, I regret to inform you, was Mordred) dared a thing which he had long wished to dare. He said, “May I comment, may I indeed comment, Mistress Myle, that the pulchritude of your complexion is such as suggests a dewy rose?”

Tabitha, who had heard this comparison applied to herself upon countless occasions, smiled tolerantly. Master Libellum was dazzled. He resolved upon the spot that Mistress Myle should have only the finest and rarest book in his collection. “Try this one, my dear lady.” His perspiring hands left damp marks on the slim volume, but Tabitha could see that it had a limp purple-leather cover and a scripted title, in what must once have been gilt letters.

“This,” she said to herself excitedly, “this must surely be a work of great excellence and importance, for its title was once gilt!” Without pausing to decipher the lettering, Mistress Myle paid the bookseller and ran to her son’s workshop.

“Gilbert!” She cried, “Gilbert, here is a new book!”

Gilbert Myle looked up from his beetle and his tiny scrub-brushes. The expression in his brooding dark eyes (over which the young village girls would sigh for hours together) was that of a man who does not dare to hope.

“A… new book?” He gasped, opening his mouth to goggle more effectively.

“My son, indeed it is!”

Gilbert left his beetles and seized the book which his mother held out to him, snatched it with eager fingers and devoured the first page in twenty seconds. “This is a wonderful book!” He cried.

“What is the title?” Tabitha asked with a slight feeling of guilt, for she had remembered her maternal duty to guard carefully Gilbert’s reading habits.

“It is called Ethics.”

“A most proper book,” approved Mistress Myle, well-pleased. All thought of the butcher’s daughter and her pie-crusts flew from the good lady’s mind.

And so it was that Gilbert Myle came into possession of Aristotle’s Ethics. Had the name of the author not been rubbed from the cover by long usage, and had Tabitha been less anxious to please her son, she might have discovered her iniquitous crime sooner. For she had committed a sin no greater and no smaller than this, that she put her Platonist boy in the way of discovering Aristotelian philosophy.

The result you may easily conjecture. Gilbert devoured the book, and pondered it deeply. He was nearly torn in two by the agitation of his own mind. At last, however, inclination for an escape from the life of beetle-scrubbing, coupled with a profound conviction that Aristotle (because he was so much more systematic and particularized) must have apprehended the truth more nearly than Plato, brought Gilbert to a momentous decision.

“Mother,” he said to his mother. “Alma mater, who brings forth light in her arms for men and frogs alike, whose eyes are the very distillation of the celestially blue skies, whose face in its austere beauty represents the visions that men of old called goddesses…”

Tabitha, who had been born neither yesterday nor the day before yesterday, immediately said, “My son, what unpleasant things have you to relate to me?”

“Mother, I no longer believe that Plato was right in his definition of justice, and I think that he was mistaken also, most grievously, in his understanding of man’s happiness.”

Mistress Myle instantly fainted, and remained insensible for twenty days. At the end of this period, she was recovered enough to receive from her son his impassioned discourses on the virtue of Aristotle, to curse her own lack of foresight, and to resign herself to consequences.

“But Gilbert,” she ventured only once to ask, “What have you now espoused as the proper end of man, of your own life?”

“Why Mother,” responded the youth with surprise, “I thought you knew! Clearly, as Aristotle says, the only perfect thing for a man to do is to think about thinking. To this task I shall now devote myself.”

Tabitha fainted again.

Shortly thereafter Gilbert sold his beetle-scrubbing emporium and became a potato farmer, for the specific reason that potatoes do not require much looking after, and thus he was free to devote the majority of his time to thinking about thinking. In short, he turned Aristotelian. And Gilbert no longer did what he was best suited to do.

This was melancholy. It remained melancholy until Gilbert fell in love with his Phlogistonian fifth cousin, a very comely young girl, whose hairbreadth escape from consanguinity with the love of her life never failed to be, in her words, “a source of constant amazement, for in this we see not only the fixed nature of ether, but fluctuation of the other four elements!”

The only obstacle to their union was, of course, the matter of the fifth cousin’s pie crusts. But that is another story.