Out on a Limb

Looking out the window of my stairway landing onto the backyard, I notice a dust of snow dislodged from the tall elm’s branch. A squirrel is inching its cautious way to the twig-like end of a branch of a limb, arriving finally at the gap of space separating it from the equally twig-like end of a branch of a limb across from it. The squirrel eyes that gap, regards it. Its tail undulates. The limb’s end bends under its 2 pound weight. No doubt its four-chambered heart has accelerated considerably beyond its normal 280 beats per minute. And then it leaps, hurls itself into space, across the emptiness, to land sure-pawedly, pausing momentarily as its new perch sags and recovers before scurrying on.

That safe landing is no slam dunk. Squirrels do sometimes slip, stumble at their mark, and plummet to the ground; and while their tail can function as a parachute to cushion a short fall, a fall from the height of that elm’s branch could break bones and spine. The Rodentia condition, like the human one, is filled with quotidian microdramas. Seeing that squirrel poised on a verge, meagerly supported, I’d like to think its racing little heart took on a percussive beat, a rapid and rhythmic contraction that fueled its courage to venture out on a limb.

I have been told at various times by various people to avoid going out on a limb. “Out on a limb” is an idiomatic phrase; its meaning is connotative and figurative rather than literal. Like all idiomatic phrases, it is not used innocently. It suggests a way of thinking and feeling; it gestures toward a normative boundary. Being “out on a limb” means being at risk, vulnerable, and it is almost always functions as a social warning or proscription, as a location to avoid placing oneself at, for social support there is dangerously weak, may snap, and one may fall to the lonely, unforgiving, injurious ground. Better to stay near the trunk, the solid trunk, where the branches thicken and are more compactly congregated and better able to bear one’s weight, where even the stoutest breeze barely registers on their unswayable density.

I was never cautioned against going out on an intellectual or athletic limb. “Truth is conformity of the mind with reality,” the Christian Brothers at my high school told me, quoting Aquinas; so, “sapere aude,” dare to know. They gave me Latin, and I had the key to English grammar and all the Romance languages. They gave me Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and I had the yin and yang of Christianity. They gave me Freud and Jung, and I understood myself and others better. Subsequent teachers at higher levels gave me theology and philosophy and history and literature, told me to think long and hard and critically, with and against the grain of what I read, to add my voice to the great conversation—a wealth of knowledge that I could spend lavishly, like a plutocrat, without fear of bankruptcy. On the athletic field I was told to be a winner, not at all costs, but at the cost of all my effort and energy; to play through pain, to practice and train, to play smart and intuitively. In school and sports I was encouraged and exhorted and pushed to tread out on a limb, to accumulate and expend intellectual and physical capital, to enter the ranks of the elite.

But such was not the counsel I received regarding the social sphere. I was admonished to conserve social capital, to maintain connections, to not be a stranger in the social landscape, to not separate myself from social networks—indeed, the denser the network, the better one’s expectation of reciprocity and trust. A strange paradox seems to be at work here. In the classroom and on the playing fields, the display of individual excellence was expected. In the public square, however, in the everyday moving among and interacting with others, such behavior was experienced as arrogant or narcissistic or an idiosyncratic weirdness or difference, fit only for the margin, for the periphery where social displeasure lies, for a distant suburb to the metropolitan center of social acceptability. On the one hand, we are urged to develop a personal style, an original voice, an individualized legibility, a unique, signatory perspective to inscribe on things and events. On the other hand, we are urged to avoid those very qualities for fear of ostracism or ridicule, for fear of “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.” We are urged to practice little more than a faceless gaze.

I think that, in the social sphere, this unwillingness to exhibit difference can be dangerous, inviting what media theorist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman calls “the spiral of silence.” According to Noelle-Neuman, the social voices that are the loudest and most constantly amplified through various media garner the most attention, even if they express perspectives unshared by the majority of listeners. But hearing those perspectives expressed so often in so many venues convinces the majority that it is, in fact, a minority, a conviction that tends to render it less and less likely to speak out, less and less likely to go out on the limb of public discourse. The majority, in effect, gradually spirals into silence, and minority perspectives become dominant. The marketplace of public discourse becomes a monopoly; the dynamic churn of competing ideas is thwarted, and the truth-seeking goal of argument is stifled.

I believe that out on a limb is where we sometimes need to be. We need the risk, the sway, the feel of our own weight so we do not find ourselves conscripted and uniformed and crisply saluting ways of thinking and acting adopted at the bidding of others. We need to declare the separation point between our selves and the social self, if we feel a point of separation. We need to listen, and then we need to reflect, to hold an inner conversation between our convictions and the convictions of others. It is “irresistibly tempting,” David Foster Wallace observes, “to fall in with some established dogmatic camp.” If it calls, when it calls, we need the courage, and the intellectual integrity, not to heed the lure of the limb’s end.