→Storybook 4: On comparing one type of love with another

[seol_plumfall]

This is a story about a king who had one daughter. This young princess was famous throughout the small kingdom for her gentleness and wisdom, and the farmers and merchants would request her help with their disputes whenever she toured the towns and countryside. The people loved and trusted her judgment, and the king, too, loved her very much.

The eighth decenniversary of the princess's birth approached, and her father wished to host a banquet in her honor. But he found himself in a quandary. He wished to import the finest, rarest luxuries for her – the blushing peaches frosted with moonlight from the northernmost forests of Kalimdor or the fragrant violet berries plucked from the mountains of southern Terokkar. But his was but a small kingdom, and with his limited wealth, he could only furnish the banquet one of these two delicacies. Only the sweetest fruit in the world would do for his peerless daughter, and he did not know whether to trust the bards of Darnassus or those of Shattrath, who both sang paeans to the bounty of their respective homelands.

And so one day he summoned his daughter to the castle gardens. They sat down there amidst the lilies and sweet peas, and he presented her with two lacquered plates, one with a single peach, one with a single bunch of mountain berries. "Dear child," he said, "you have surely heard of these fruits, legends of Azeroth and Draenor. Now, tell me your opinion, which I trust more than any other: which of these fruits would you praise as the most sweet and rare?"

The princess tossed her small head and laughed. The king was puzzled, for from her expression he could tell she already had an answer in mind. But she humored her father and bit into the plush skin of a peach. It was indeed sweet; perhaps the princess had never tasted anything so sweet before. Honey-like, heady, and full, its flesh was creamy and melted, like a mouthful of powdery snow, into nectar. She tilted her head, most thoughtful, but did not yet speak, setting the peach down.

Next, she picked up a bunch of berries and, plucking one, tasted it. These, too, were sweet, but entirely different; they were sharp and bright, with a sparkling tartness absent from the peach. The smooth flavor of the peach could have lulled her to sleep, but this taste made her sharply inhale, such was its liveliness. These fruits recalled not powder snow but crisp flakes of ice laughing down from the sky, shimmeringly, piercingly sweet.

She set the berries down, too, and stretched out her legs, pondering her father's question. At last she looked back at him, and asked, "You wish to know which of these fruits I would praise as the sweetest?"

The king nodded.

"Sweetness," the princess then began, "is not something one can describe with a measuring rod or a scale. It is true, I have heard from the philosophers, that an extract of kelp stains apple-flesh blue. But the intensity of the blue does not give an exact measure of the apple's sweetness. Indeed, even if you dissolved the apple into its constituent substances and weighed its sugar against the remainder, you could not tell me, from the ratio alone, how sweet it tasted. 'Sweetness' is something that only exists in the mouths of mortals – a quale. And so any measurement of the relative sweetness of things must be carried out by taste.

"But the worlds contain a vast variety of tasters. Perhaps the night elves, those children of the stars, have bred their peaches over the centuries to best please their particular tastes. To their moon-nourished tongues, no fruit is more perfect, more suitable. They would not understand the peasants of Tuurem who venture south, daring mountain paths and the wrath of the arakkoa to pluck these alpine berries, just ripe. Those young adventurers carry bushels back to the elders, who, upon tasting them, shed bittersweet tears – for the taste reminds them of the mountain fruit of Argus. The mouths of the elder and the orcharder might disagree, but they are, after all, different mouths, from different lands, of different people; they might disagree on which fruit is sweeter, and yet both could be completely right.

"Even within a people, tasters will differ in their evaluation. Indeed, even within a city, two people may not find the same fruit to have the same sweetness. Perhaps one bites into a peach and remembers stealing one from her mother during the jarring, and tender memories flood her breast; to her, no fruit is sweeter. Perhaps one bites into a peach and remembers the taste of the peach-wine she drank with her beloved the day before he was slain in battle; for her, its flavor will be marred by bitterness."

The king nodded. "You are as wise as you always are, my pride. Indeed, we cannot pretend to be as naaru and make claims about the certain truth of sweetness. But surely we are not powerless to make some assertions about the merits of one fruit relative to another. Surely we can analyze the properties of one versus those of the other and give some uncertain suggestions about which is most likely to be the sweetest to a given taster. Fine, exacting, philosophical minds ought to be able to edge towards the truth. So posit for me, my dear, with your great wisdom: which fruit is superior in sweetness? Which do you praise?"

"I am not sure my mind is as fine as you say," the princess replied coyly, "but I suppose I could weave, for you, a theory or two. I could say that in its honeyed gentleness, the peach typifies the ideal of 'sweetness,' but its richness dulls the tongue to the sensation after two bites; I could say that with its interplay of soft and sharp, the berry allows a longer, more complex, but more impure experience of sweetness. I could speculate about the drinks that would complement each fruit, the settings, the smells, the sort of person who would best enjoy each. I could speculate upon many things.

"But my speculations will always be but speculations. Sweetness remains sweetness. No matter how well-reasoned my theory, some child may come and taste the pair of fruits and exclaim, 'Your Highness, you are completely wrong.' Who am I to say that she is confused, that her tastes are aberrant? – who, even, are the naaru to dismiss her opinion as an outlier, an insignificant exception? For she tastes the sweetness upon her tongue; she adores her favorite, with love and pleasure in her chest.

"And so I cannot do as you ask, Father – I can praise neither as the sweetest, the most rare. I can describe, speculate, recommend, but I cannot value one over the other. I cannot declare one better than the other in the court of absolute truths, for no matter how well I reason that one is the greatest of sweetnesses, that child will know, in her heart, it is the other. And she knows hers, too, is the truth."

The king laughed. "My dear, what they say is true: you are as gentle as you are wise, defending that contrary child to the very end. Perhaps you are right, and it is not fair of me to ask you to exult one as absolutely sweeter than the other. But," he sighed, and leaned back with his hands on the grass, gazing at the peach and the berries. "But, if no amount of reasoning will teach me which is best, whichever shall I order for your birth-day?"

Without hesitation, the princess's fingers extended towards a plate. "The one I like best," she said, and plucked another purple berry, sticking it into her mouth.

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1: Credo
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4: On comparing one type of love with another