I get up at 5AM. After making coffee, I go to the room in back where I write. I sit down, turn on the computer and usually stare at the blank screen. It stares back. “Well,” it seems to say, “looks like you have nothing to say. Again.” Very dispiriting.

So I sit there. Staring at the screen. The computer screen is going to win this staring contest, though. It always does. “Still got nothing?” it seems to say. “Have you thought of a career in sanitation?” I look away, start to daydream and come up with all the things that need to be done instead of trying to write.

This morning I’m joined by a tiny flying insect. It’s so small I have to look twice to believe it’s there. It lands on my blazing empty screen. It ambles up and then down. It’s light brown, with wings nearly as long as its body. I have no idea what it is. It moves along rapidly and then flies off for a bit. Then it returns to the screen, which, applying moth-logic here, it’s probably drawn to by the screen’s brightness.

Whatever is motivating it, it’s got things to do. It’s busy. It seems to have a purpose. More than I do, that’s for certain. Wait—I’m envious of an insect? Apparently.

Robert Frost wrote a poem, which I allude to in this post’s title, “A Considerable Speck,” about a similar incident with an insect. I was too lazy to come up with my own title, so I stole his. I’d like you to note, though, that I added the word, “very,” for originality. It’s quite different.

In the poem, Robert Frost is writing away when he sees what, at first, he thinks is a speck of dust on his white page. It turns out to be an extremely small insect. (His poem has a parenthetical subtitle, “Microscopic”.) He observes the creature moving across the page, watches it make what he concludes are decisions: “Plainly with an intelligence I dealt,” he writes. He decides, “Since it was nothing I knew evil of,” to let it alone.

Frost ends the poem in a droll way, taking us far beyond the speck’s movement across his page. Drollness is often a Frost trademark. I’ve always thought this ending is a sly way of Frost responding to his critics. In any case, it’s a deft way of taking something ordinary and turning it into a kind of wily commentary: “I have a mind myself and recognize / Mind when I meet with it in any guise / No one can know how glad I am to find / On any sheet the least display of mind.”

Like Frost, I have no desire to kill this tiny creature that moves, with focus and determination, up and down my screen. What would be the point? Because it slightly distracts me from my writing? What writing?

Besides, today, so far at least, the only mind working on this computer screen is not my own.