GURU

The warming of the early morning Sun filtered down through the trees and rode a gentle breeze across the ground where Walter "Sparky" Sparckes lay buries. His only son, Walter III, stood beside this simple grave for a simple man and thought about what had been and what might yet have been. Walter III was not truly a III, but Sparky had disliked even numbers and the word "Junior." Though Sparky's tastes and interests were indeed simple and he lived disencumbered by few material possessions, he had gained respect as a deep thinker in his hometown of Woods in the Woods, population 2000.

It had been five years now since Sparky had died after being attacked by a horde of killer butterflies. Even in death he had contributed to the betterment of humanity. When his body was found, it was surrounded by hundreds of dead butterflies, and it did not take long to determine what had happened. Sparky had put up a valiant but futile fight.

While everyone had heard of killer bees by this time, no one had ever heard of killer butterflies before this attack. Scientists rushed in to study the evidence to determine what could have caused this behavior. What they found overturned everything they thought had been known about the aggressive behavior of killer bees.

After all the results were in, the best conclusion that could be reached was that the aggressiveness of killer bees was not the result of genetic makeup, as had long been thought, but was instead brought about by a virus. This virus had been transmitted to a butterfly when stung by one of these bees, and the butterfly had spread the virus throughout the butterfly community. There was still a question as to why butterflies were so susceptible to this virus, since its effects seemed to be muted in most other species.

However, medical researchers had been able to identify the virus in a fairly short time and quickly developed a vaccine, which now meant that no one need fear the attacks of bees or butterflies.

Sparky had first begun to be thought of as a thinker one day when he was standing around shooting the breeze with some of his neighbors. One of them had muttered "well," and another had replied with the cliche "That's a deep subject." Sparky had noted that if the well were shallow, that statement would not be accurate. No one had really thought of that before, and they were impressed with Sparky's powers of observation and reasoning.

Then one day Sparky had been sitting on a creek bank with a fishing line dangling in the water and just about to doze off when he was startled by a loud crash not too far behind him. He turned around to discover that a tree had fallen and fortunately had missed hitting him. But this got him started thinking about a question he had heard some guy on television ask recently about whether a tree falling in a forest made a sound if no one were present to hear it. At first, he thought the question sounded pretty stupid on its face. But as he pondered the question further, it began to really bother him, and he had devised a plan to answer the question.

He decided to leave a tape recorder in the forest to see if it would pick up the sound of a falling tree. Initially, he felt this would provide a definitive answer to the question. But as he developed his plan, he stared thinking. First of all, the recorder could only operate for an hour at a time, so it would only be functioning during a limited period of each day as he had opportunity to reset it. Second, what would it mean if the recorder did not pick up any sound resembling that of a tree falling? Did that mean no tree had fallen, or had a tree fallen but made no sound because no one was there to hear it? Did the tape recorder count as being someone there to hear it, or would it simply not have recorded the sound if it didn't occur because there was no one to hear it? The more he thought about this, the more confused he got.

But in the end, he gained even more respect, because just when he seemed to be defeated by the question, he made a quantum leap to a new philosophical insight. He noted that the question dealt with only one aspect of a much broader perspective, and he developed a hypothesis that acknowledged the significance of considering the question in larger terms. Rather than limiting the question to the concept of sound, he asked the question: If no one is present in the forest to see a tree fall, does the tree exist? If the answer to this question is a negative, there can be no tree to fall and consequently it cannot make a sound.

Walter III had built on his father's foundation in this instance. He had written his dissertation in psychology on the question of what is the sound of one hand clapping, and through a brilliant interpretation of his father's speculations on tree sounds in forests, he had equated the sound of one hand clapping with the sound of a tree not falling. He had become widely acclaimed as a result of publication of this study.

On another occasion, Sparky had been asked the question: Is it possible to cross the same river twice? Now he realized he could let himself get all tangled up in considering whether a river one crossed twice could be the same river if the water running through it at that point was not the same water it had been the first time. Rather than get trapped in this net, Sparky again devised a brilliant solution. There was a river that ran a few miles outside Woods in the Woods, known as the Water River. Sparky made application with the appropriate authorities and had the name officially changed to the Same River. Now it was possible to cross the Same River not just twice, but as often as one wished.

All these memories flooded Walter III's mind as he sat at the gravesite of his father. He knew that Sparky would have much appreciated Walter III's accomplishments that were largely built on Sparky's ideas. Walter III had recently gained new fame as the result of a beautiful musical piece he had written titled "Symphony of Silence." This consisted of one hour of a series of esoteric sounds to include the flapping of a butterfly's wing and the wafting of an elephant's foot through the air.

It also included several moments of silence. The piece had generated some controversy at first because a number of reviewers claimed that these moments of silence were really subliminal efforts to present religion under the guise of something else. However, when Walter III stated that these several moments of silence originated from several different sources, some religious and some non-religious, and even included an atheistic moment of silence, most of the critics were silenced.

As Walter III walked away from the grave, he began thinking about the ozone hole in the sky and the report that frogs were disappearing in massive numbers, and wondered whether there could be any connection between the two items.

But that was a thought to occupy another day.