The Icarian Impulse

As the ancients tell it, Daedalus was no mere bench scientist. Yes, he invented tools, such as the ax, the hand drill, and the wedge, but he also made statues that moved as if alive. He was not a god. For example, he had a personality disorder. There being no psychotherapists to fix it, Daedalus, in a jealous rage, killed a nephew. Forced to flee Athens, he took his skills and his son, Icarus, to Crete, for whose monarch, Minos, he built a labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur. But that confinement allowed Minos's queen, Pasiphae, to satisfy her unnatural lust for the monster. Wherefore a vengeful Minos immured Daedalus and Icarus in the maze. Ah, but such a prison is horizontal. A scientist can think vertically: so the old artificer made wings for himself and his son and attached them with wax. They took off and all might have gone well, but Icarus, ecstatic in flight, soared too close to the sun. The wax melted. He plunged to his death in the Aegean Sea.

Did anyone care? No. W. H. Auden, taking his cue from Pieter Brueghel, shows us our terrifying indifference,

how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster: the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

We fail to notice; or if notice is taken, we shrug. Sensible people, like pigs, do not fly, do not wing heedlessly upward in sunlight. There is a day's work to be got through. But the Icarian impulse lives in a few scholars, E. O. Wilson among them. Will they fly and land safely, or plunge with a forsaken cry into the green?

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