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Some
Portraits Of Early Ideas Leonard
Feeney, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1941) V. LESSON
FROM THE LITTLE MOSQUITO My favorite word
is “little.” At least I use it more than I do other words. It occurs so
frequently in my earlier work that I have been tempted to go back and delete
it here and there. It occurs in the title of one of my books: In Towns and
Little Towns; in the titles of many of my poems, such as “The Little
Kingdom of Thingdom”; and in the titles of several of my sketches: “My Little
Minister” and “This Little Thing.” In the writing of my biography of Mother
Seton, called An American Woman, I resort to the word “little” so
often that it is practically an impediment in my speech. One of my critics
was quick to notice this and sent me a devastating parody of my own style,
which ran as follows: “Dear
little Leonard Feeney. I read your little book on America’s first little
sisters-school nun, little Mother Seton. I think she is the nicest little nun
I have ever read about, and you do say the most charming little things in her
praise. Won’t you please write us other little books on kindred little
subjects, so as to make our little hearts a little more happy?” A
man can survive such ridicule only with the aid of prayer. Another of my
critics, a married lady, writing in one of the weekly reviews, scores not
only the frequency of the word “little” in my vocabulary, but its essential
inappropriateness to some of my ideas. “The author,” she says of me, “refers
to a nun as ‘a little lady all consecrated to God,’ whereas we all know that
many nuns are large, impressive persons, born to command.” I
did not answer this enormous matron, for I believe in free criticism; but had
I, I could have defended myself to some extent. I
think that “little” is definitely a Catholic epithet, used not in a
dimensional, but in an appropriative sense. We call anything little that we
like so much we want to make it small enough to consider it our own. There is
an order of nuns in the Church known, one and all, as The Little Sisters of
the Poor. But they do not weigh their postulants before receiving, nor send
them reducing exercises so as to establish vocations. Our Lord speaks of the
whole Church as His “little flock.” Saint Francis of Assisi is known as “The
Little Poor Man,” and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux as “The Little Flower.” Even
Saint Ignatius, perhaps given to diminutives least of all the Saints, refers
to the regiment of his spiritual soldiers as “this little Society of Jesus.” I
have a further propensity for the word “little,” because it is mostly in
small things that I am largely interested. Had I become a scientist, I should
have been an astronomer among the biologists, with microscope for telescope,
peering into worlds beneath me, studying my heavens upside down. At
any rate, I think that not even the most captious of my critics will object
to the word “little” as applied to a mosquito. Of
all the world of little things a mosquito makes the loudest noise. If you,
proportionate to your weight, could make as loud a noise singing, as he does,
proportionate to his when he whines, you would sound like all the factory
whistles of Bethlehem Steel going off in a simultaneous blast. You would
literally blow the roof off. I
first became acquainted with the little mosquito (he always seems to be the same
mosquito) when I was a little boy lying in bed. First I shall tell you
what he did to me harmfully, and then what he did to me by way of help. By
way of harm, he cost my father hundreds of dollars. It was the summer I
contracted malaria and was quarantined for three months. This malaria was the
work of one mosquito. He*
raised my temperature five degrees, and sent me into such a series of fevers
and chills that our neighbors, alarmed at my plight, and fearing contagion,
would not let their children admit to ever having known me. This
same mosquito caused my mother to invest in innumerable hot water bottles and
in at least a thousand pounds of ice. I wore out two ice men in the course of
the summer. My
parents went scurrying to neighboring stores to purchase soups and broths of
such exotic kinds and flavors that the grocers advised my mother to buy her
canned goods wholesale. Still
the work of one mosquito. And
what he did to me by way of upsetting my environment was nothing to what he
did to me inside my head. Have
you ever seen an elephant uproot Bunker Hill Monument and hurl it like a
javelin across East Boston Harbor? Well,
I did, thanks to one little mosquito. Were
you ever lost for a thousand years in a dark, lonely forest, and did you eat
lobsters with a giant who had street-lamps for eyes? . . . Then you
never met the mosquito I met. Were
you ever, in a delirium, the only being in existence, without father or
mother or friend or any one to know you or love you; with your whole body
seething like a furnace, your head a conflagration of distorted ideas, your
soul cindered down to the last ash, your will clinging to the last remnants
of religion . . . calling to God, to Mary, to Jesus, to come and either
deliver or destroy you, asking where everyone was but yourself, promising
never again to be naughty . . . if only, if only, if only, if only,
you could have ice on your forehead, ice on your feet, ice to hold, ice to
listen to, ice to eat . . . Do
you wonder that the subject of the mosquito impresses me, and that I dedicate
to it a chapter from the pages of my youth? The little mosquito is hatched in the afternoon,
in the warmth of a pleasant swamp. Ten
minutes later he is a finished aviator, ready for flight. He
is merely a bit of gauze informed with animation, and so delicate you could
not weigh him on a pharmacist’s scale. Yet he knows to a nicety all the
currents of air and can balance himself skillfully in the most formidable
breeze. After
less than an hour of personal tuning, he begins a flight more remarkable than
Lindbergh’s. He sails to the nearest dwellinghouse to await the retirement of
the sleeper. Disregarding the basement and the bedless lower floors, he finds
the sleeping-chamber and the slumbering little boy. Daintily
he alights on some susceptible part of the body, and studies carefully the
mechanics of the operation. He braces himself solidly, summons all his
strength, and inserts his dagger accurately in a narrow little pore. He
deposits his poison, and extracts his toll of blood. He
makes another take-off, whining contentedly, and is wafted by the wind to his
sources in the swamp. By
midnight he is the father of a hundred little mosquitoes, who will follow on
the morrow the example of their sire. It
is an astounding performance. It
is one of the most remarkable feats in the history of the world. |
* The scientists tell me it is the female mosquito, not the male, that carries disease germs. But I prefer, chivalrously, to blame it on the male.