The order of "The Idea of Order..."

Early blue and white ware,
first half of 14th century

In Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," the narrator and his friend Ramon Fernandez listen to a woman singing in imitation of the sea, the narrator reflecting on the metaphysics of the situation before they turn back toward the town and the narrator asks his friend why the lights being turned on as night descends seem to demarcate the vista, at which point the narrator realizes that it's because of their "rage for order"—the same rage that prompted the woman to sing.
    The poem's seventh (and last) stanza:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Stevens's act of making the poem sprang from the same rage. The poem expresses a human's drive to understand and represent what he or she experiences.
    As I understand the "rage" Stevens was talking about (the biological promptings of the human brain; in the poem, the sea has no such promptings and is therefore not singing), my blogging springs from the same source, and so, I think, did the idea yesterday (even if a joke) that the blue & white porcelain pen had magical properties.

By the way, the hypothesis about the pen has already been falsified, alas. This morning, I erred in attempting the third Sudoku using the pen...But there is, I suppose, the "magical" possibility that the failure was really the pen's indicating to me that my interpretation of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is also wrong. Could that be the true way to order my experience here?

...but I did read the book

On Saturday, in my post about high school biology, I failed to mention that even though I dropped out of the course, I did read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in high school. I'm now wondering whether I read it after dropping out of biology (perhaps as some sort of atonement), or before and the book prompted me to sign up for the course? If the latter, then it appears that I must have found the actual task of acquiring the vocabulary of biology less exciting than reading the story of Darwin's discovery.

I have, in fact, always seriously doubted that I had a working scientist's temperament. Scientist after scientist has reported that doing science is mostly very hard work. The discovery of the structure of DNA (or of evolution by natural selection) comes to few scientists.

If only I hadn't dropped out of high school biology

I'm finding it a bittersweet experience to read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. It's sweet because I trust that I can look forward to reading Dawkins's other books, and books he cites, and be continually rewarded with the intellectual thrill of evolutionary biology. But such reading is also bitter, in that if only way in which people can indulge when looking back on their lives.

I've been thinking about how I dropped out of high school biology after a week or two, mainly, I think, because I didn't want to work hard enough to learn all of its technical terms. I switched to physics, which turned out to be taught by an evangelical Christian who, though he let me write a paper on the relationship between religion and science instead of doing a standard science project, took the opportunity to put in a plug for God's divine plan or something. Mr. Wilson. I didn't realize until now that I remembered his name, and I can still see him—tall, blond, and boyish, and probably fifteen years younger than my children are now.

In dropping out of the biology course (of whose teacher I have no recollection, but I'm confident he or she was excellent), I effectively closed the door on what might have been an exciting life as an evolution theorist. Unfortunately, during those teenage years I came across no book like Dawkins's brilliant, creative work. (At the time I was dropping out of biology, he had just entered college.)

But I did in those years come across books on metaphysics—books that attempted to answer the questions, What is man? and Why? And they, at that time, I found no less thrilling than I find Dawkins now.

But now there's the bittersweetness that comes from reading this on page 1 of The Selfish Gene:

Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is Man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely."

That was the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.