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# Mite Wise
- URL: https://tombeaverbooks.ghost.io/mite-wise-3/
- Published: 2026-06-15T22:58:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-15T23:02:18.000Z
- Author: Tom Beaver
- Tags: Animals, #Import 2026-06-27 21:39

**Sept. 20, 2018 —** One time in my dorm room I drew a yellow highlighter circle around a tiny spider walking across my desktop, taking away all its good choices. For a minute I enjoyed this — enjoyed my power, enjoyed the little twitches that showed me the spider was thinking or agitated, enjoyed the magnified intensity of each second as my mind ping-ponged between where I was and where the little spider was. It felt like a fair game to be playing.  

And then suddenly it didn’t. Another minute of it would have been not playing, but torture. I erased a part of the wall with my finger and set my innocent prisoner free.   
  
I think I had been for-armed for this little crisis by Robert Frost, whose poem, *A Considerable Speck*, came back to me as I sat there looking down like a god. The poem describes the situation we’re talking about almost exactly — a man, a mite, a weapon of ink — and concludes:

> 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.