Cone of Enlightenment

By Crispin Sartwell

Mankind's greatest discoveries and achievements can be enumerated on one hand: the wheel, fire, splitting the atom, the computer, and of course the ice cream cone, which this year celebrates hundredth anniversary

Like calculus, which was discovered independently and simultaneously by Newton and Leibniz, the ice cream cone has several origins and several Edisons.

But no one will quibble with the centrality of Charlie Mences, the Archimedes of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Running out of dishes in which to sell his ice cream, he bummed some waferish Syrian pastries called zalabia from his friend and fellow peddler Ernest Hamwi.

The result of this profound cultural interchange was a thing of transcendent beauty, one that changed human life forever.

Indeed, of all the great inventions enumerated above, the ice cream cone is immeasurably the greatest. Contemplate the results of the wheel next time you're on the Schuylkill. Fire burns whole cities. Atomic power brings with it the specter of nuclear annihilation. The computer entails the Windows Operating System.

But the ice cream cone is a purely positive development, one with no backlash of evil. It is useful for nothing except pleasure, for cooling you off on an insufferably hot day, like this one.

If you thought back to the ice cream cones you've eaten, they would tell the sweetest story of your life: the softee, the ice cream truck, the midway, a little bit of your parents' money, the fairly innocent pleasures of orality, halfway between the binky and the martini.

Most of the great advances of humankind have come at a cost that equals or exceeds their benefits. They are attempts to harness the world to our purposes, to increase our domination. This is both good and evil, and each imposition of will is accompanied by a new dimension of powerlessness and pain.

But the ice cream cone - even within its profound juxtapositions of cold and not-so-cold, round and pointed, dairy and pastry - transcends all dualisms. It shows what we are capable of when we let go of purposes more profound than the desire to sell cold confections and devote our ingenuity to mere pleasure. The ice cream cone is a brief return to the garden, to a state before pride and its fall.

Indeed, perhaps human fulfillment consists, not (as Aristotle, for example, believed) in achieving our purposes, but rather (in the mode of Lao Tzu) of letting our purposes go.

So stick the younguns in the minivan. Go get them a scoop of cold chocolate enlightenment on the waffle cone of spiritual truth. And grab some for yourself while you're at it.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.