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Inch by Inch
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I looked up from my newspaper and noticed an inchworm making its way along the top edge of the page I was reading. I was sitting on my patio in the shade of tall trees behind my house. I have no idea how the tiny creature got onto its precarious perch. It might have dropped down on a silken thread from the trees above, except I was sitting at a patio table with its umbrella unfurled. I was briefly absorbed by the inchworm’s painstaking high-wire act as it hunched across the top of the newspaper, hind legs anchored to the page as it reared up with its front legs, probing blindly for its next foothold. The inchworm eventually reached the corner of the page. Finding no foothold in front, it groped to the left and then to the right before discovering the only path forward was down the side edge of the page.
I gently brushed the inchworm off my newspaper. Inchworms, I later learned, are not worms at all. They are one of more than 35,000 species of geometrid moth, who spend several weeks inching blindly along as caterpillars before achieving mothdom and fluttering away. Contrary to appearances, inchworms are not actually blind but come equipped with four rudimentary eyes that can detect light and darkness. Their main defense against predators is to remain perfectly still and hope they will mistaken for a twig. My little inchworm apparently detected no threat from me, since it continued its meticulous labors across the top of my newspaper as I looked on. Whatever patterns of light and darkness registered in its minuscule brain, I suspect it grasped little beyond the pathway immediately before it.
The biologist Jakob von Uexküll applied the German term umwelt to describe the world as it is perceived by a particular species. The inchworm’s world is encountered inch by inch, the span between what is grasped with its rear legs and what it can reach as it hunches forward. For the inchworm, my newspaper exists solely as a temporary foothold, without any comprehension of the pictures or stories printed on it, much less of the gigantic creature reading it. The newspaper cannot be munched on, at least not if you are an inchworm, and the person holding it does not appear to be a threat. The still larger frame of patio, nation and universe do not enter into the inchworm’s calculations whatsoever.
We naively assume that humans have a comprehensive awareness of the world they inhabit. But the family dog can detect sounds and smells that would put our feeble sensory powers to shame. An eagle can spot a mouse from three miles away and can detect UV light that would be invisible to humans. A bat equipped with echolocation, which works like sonar, can navigate pitch-dark caves with the assurance of an inchworm balanced on the edge of a newspaper. We imagine ourselves at the apex of animal evolution, but the truth is we would fail miserably if we were to swap places with any of our fellow creatures.
Whatever our comprehension of the wider world, we are bound by our own particular umvelt no less than the inchworm as we go about our business from day to day. It occurred to me as I contemplated my tiny companion that his progress across the top of the page was not unlike that of a bricklayer or even a writer, the latter of which I know a bit something about. A writer lays down words the way a bricklayer lays down bricks, one after another in neat rows. The difference is that a bricklayer normally follows a blueprint, whereas a writer often has little more to go on than the words already laid down. He must trust that a structure will emerge as he goes along. He has much to learn from the lowly inchworm as it carefully secures a foothold with its hind legs before probing blindly for its next landing spot. Like my inchworm when it reaches the corner of the page, a writer will eventually come to the end of his train of thought. Then he may grope around for a bit before setting off in a new direction — or, as in this instance, he may simply decide to stop.
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