"The context in which my own friend then had the narrative
related to him by his acquaintance is unknown to me
as anything more than, again, quote
'quotidian' or 'everyday'.
They would all line up before the dais
to offer the child a yam, and ampoule
of blow-dart phytotoxin, et cetera.
And in return, the child would undertake
to answer their question.
As exempla of this sort of mythopoeic cycle so often go,
this arrangement is represented as the origin of something
like modern trade in the villagers' culture.
Prior to the child's evection, everyone
had made their own clothes and lean-tos
and spears, and had gathered all and only their own family's
food.
And while certain foodstuffs were sometimes shared
that equinoctial religious festivals and so forth,
there was evidently nothing like an actual barter or trade
until the advent of this child, who could and would
answer any question put to it.
And the small child, thereafter, lived atop this platform
and never left it.
The dais had its own lean-to with a pallet of plantain
leaves, and a small hollowed-out concavity
for a fire and primitive cooking pot.
And apparently the child's entire childhood
was thenceforward spent on the central platform,
eating and sleeping and sitting for long periods,
doing nothing, presumably thinking and developing
and waiting out the 29.518 synodic days
before the villagers would again line up with their questions.
And as the village's trade-based economy
became more modern and complex, one novel development
was that certain especially shrewd and acute members
of the shaman and midwife castes began
to cultivate the intellectual, or as it were, rhetorical skill
of structuring a monthly question in such a way
as to receive a maximally valuable answer
from the extraordinary child.
And they then begin to sell or barter
these interrogatory skills to ordinary villagers who
wished to extract maximum value for their monthly question,
which was the advent of what the narrative apparently terms
the village's consultant caste.
For instance, instead of asking the child something narrowly
circumscribed such as, quote, 'Where in our village's region
of the rainforest should I look for a certain type of edible
root?'
close quote, a professional consultant's suggestion here
might be that his client ask the question something more
general, along the lines of, for example,
'How can a man feed his family with less effort than we now
expend?', or 'How might we ensure a store of food that
will last our family through periods when available
resources are scarce?'
and so on.
Whereas on the other hand, as the whole enterprise
became more sophisticated and specialized,
the consultant caste also discovered
that maximizing the answer's value
sometimes entail making a certain question more
specific and practical.
As in, for instance, instead of, quote,
'How can we increase our supply of firewood?'
a more efficacious question here might be,
'How might a single man move to whole downed tree close to his
home so as to have plentiful firewood?'
And evidently, some of the village's new consultant caste
developed into rather ingenious interlocutors,
and managed to design questions of historic cultural importance
and value, such as 'When my neighbor borrows my spear,
how can I make a record of the loan in order to prove that
the spear is mine, in case my neighbor suddenly turns around
and claims that the spear is his and refuses to return it?'
Or, 'How might I divert water from one of the rain forest
streams so that instead of my wife having to walk miles with
the jar balanced on her head to haul water from the stream,
the stream might be made to, as it were, come to us?'
and so forth.
Here it was not clear whether my friend or acquaintance were
providing their own examples, or whether these
were actual examples enumerated through the dialogue you
overheard on the United.
He said certain very general conclusions
about the passengers' different ages and economic status
could be deduced from their respective hair's color
and cut, and their postures and the backs of their necks,
but that was all.
There was no reading material, except the seat pocket's
customary in-flight catalog and safety card,
and the wing's engine's constant noise
would have prevented him from sleeping
even had he taken a tablet.
And that there was literally nothing for him
to do but lean ever so subtly forward and try,
as unobtrusively as possible, to make out
what the darker-haired young passenger was relating
to is less educated seatmate or companion,
and to try to interpret it and fit it into some context that
would, as it were, ground the narrative and render
it comme on dit illuminating or relevant to his own context.
And then, at a certain points it became
unclear what was part of the cycle's narrative,
Ding an sich, and what were the passenger's own editorial
interpretations and commentary, such as the fact that it
was evidently during the child's decade
long occupancy of the special raised platform
that the village's culture evolved
from hunting and gathering to a crude form of agriculture
and husbandry.
It discovered as well the principles
of the wheel and rotary displacement,
and fashioned their first fully enclosed dwellings of willow
and yam-thatch, and developed an ideographic alphabet
and primitive written grammar, which
allowed for more sophisticated divisions of labor
and a crude economic system of trade and various goods
and services.
And in sum, the entire village's culture, technology,
and standard of living undergo a metastatic evolution that
would normally have taken thousands
of years and countless paleolithic generations
to attain."