Oliver Benjamin
beautiful sunset,” the four-year old said to his mother. She stared at
him in astonishment.
“Red, orange, yellow, blue, purple,” he said, pointing to the
colors in the sky.
“Green!” his mother cried with joy, “What about green, my little
angel? What about green?”
“There is no green,” the child informed her soberly, “There is
never any green in sunsets.”
Shortly after that he learned how to write. But while children in his
kindergarten class were still learning their ABCs, Yak was penning
complete stories. When they were learning how to spell the names of
animals he was already perusing Dickens and Twain. His classmates
didn’t know what to make of him and he had no interest in winning
their affection. Every day after school he returned home alone and
wrote until he went to sleep at night. This went on for years. By the
time he was ten, boxes of his strange tropes lined the walls of their
attic.
Despite his precociousness, Yak performed terribly in school. He
rarely did his homework and on the rare occasions he bothered, the
boy proved blithely unconcerned with the imperatives of academia.
“This was supposed to be a paper on the Civil War,” his sixth-
grade teacher grumbled, stabbing a knobby finger into the center of
the typed page.
“I know,” Yak answered him.
“So why did you write a paper entitled ‘Hemoglobin’?”
Yak sighed and scratched his prematurely large chin. “We used to
live in trees,” he explained, “Animals who live in trees have color
vision so they can see red fruits against green backgrounds. That’s
why we pay special attention to red things. Berries, blood, fire,
sunsets.”
The teacher was frustrated by Yak’s willful impenetrableness. He
raised his voice, “But what…” he paused to collect himself, “What
does that have to do with the Civil War?”
“Because red doesn’t actually exist the way we think it does. We
lump those things together under red because they’re meaningful to
us. For instance, lots of red things are actually purple, which looks
reddish to our eyes. But that’s an illusion. Red and purple are at
totally opposite ends of the spectrum. What we see is wrong. If we
had chlorophyll like plants instead of hemoglobin, we might even see
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