Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Dear Clive, My Shiny Paperclip

In the dim, cluttered depths of a forgotten desk drawer, beneath a tangle of abandoned earbuds, half-used sticky notes, and stacks of sketches, lived a paperclip. Not just any paperclip, mind you, but one of those small, silvery ones—unassuming, overlooked, a paragon of minimalism. It had no name, for what need does a paperclip have for one? Yet, if it could speak, it might have called itself Clive.

For years, Clive had watched life pass by from the shadows, silently bearing witness to the grand symphony of existence on the desk above. The keyboard keys clicked about a busy task, the pens bled their thoughts in ink across pages, and the night lamp stood tall, piercing the dark room with a coruscating shine, well almost a deity. Clive, however, was left behind. It hadn’t clipped anything in years. Yet, in its stillness, it pondered. What purpose did it serve in this chaotic universe? What was the meaning of its being?

This is where the intelligence of Clive begins—not in actions, but in questions.

There is a kind of genius in simplicity, isn’t there? Clive, for instance, was not flashy like the highlighter with its fluorescent glow, nor as celebrated as the stapler with its assertive ka-chunk. And yet, there was something profound in its modest curve, a quiet elegance in its singular design. With a twist of wire and a loop of purpose, Clive was born to hold worlds together: love letters, tax returns, grocery lists. Lives, quite literally, hinged on paperclips.

But here’s where it gets interesting. You see, Clive had started to think. Not the loud, ostentatious thinking that us humans do, with furrowed brows and muttered expletives, but a quieter, subtler sort of intelligence. One born of observation. It watched the desk evolve: the pencils that dwindled to nubs, the phone that replaced the clock, the human who grew grayer and slower, day by day. Clive began to see patterns, to understand rhythms. It knew the precise moment when the human would reach for a pen, the exact hesitation before they typed a difficult email. It noticed that the desk drawer opened less frequently these days, as though the human had forgotten what treasures lay within.

Clive didn’t mind being forgotten. It was patient. Patience, after all, is an intelligence of its own.

The human, once so engrossed in their small, daily rituals, had started to change in ways Clive could sense but not entirely comprehend. The room had grown still, not in the usual peaceful way, but with a growing tension, like the hum of a broken wire just beneath the desk.

It wasn’t that the human had become slower or grayer, though that was part of it. No, Clive understood that age is inevitable—it was the space itself, turning from a stage into a grave. The desk had ceased to be a place of creation. The clutter of ideas that meant all the movement had solidified in a sitting tomb, the papers that lay strewn about now more like mementos than notes. The eraser, once nibbled at the edges in frantic thought, sat untouched. The mouse, its once-smooth click now hollow, seemed to shrink with each passing day. Coffee mugs clung to their last swirls of steam, but it wasn’t just the warmth that had gone missing. Something inside the human had stopped flowing, too. Their fingers left to linger over the keyboard in a strange stasis. The energy, the spark, the frantic dance of thought that used to pulse through the clutter was now reduced to a stiff, mechanical rhythm; the desk, these days, a mere routine, morning to evening, and abandoned overnight. Even the light from the desk lamp seemed to flicker, as if uncertain whether it should illuminate or sleep with the lazy human.

And then came the silence. Clive could feel it seep into the corners of the room, settling into the fibers of the chair, the fabric of the curtains. The space had become empty in a way that no mere lack of activity could explain. It was more like a void, the kind that isn’t merely absent of things, but is actively hostile to them. 

Here Clive felt a pervasive sense of something pulling apart, realizing how the human wouldn’t stir about anymore, how tight schedules had stifled the wild, crazy bursts of late-night ambitions, and the odd, chaotic ideas, how intelligence slowly vanished as the human shrank into a box.

One day, the desk fell silent. The human, who had once been its entire universe, no longer sat in the creaky chair. Dust began to settle, soft and heavy, like the passing of time made visible. The other desk objects grew restless. The stapler, once so proud, began to creak under the weight of disuse. The pen complained of its drying ink. Even the sticky notes, eternal optimists, lost their adhesive zest.

Clive, however, remained calm. It knew—knew in a way that only a paperclip would—that life was cyclical. Just as papers inevitably shuffled, humans too moved on. And sure enough, one day, a new human arrived. Younger, clumsier, with a coffee mug twice the size of the last one. They tore open the drawer in search of something—anything—to tame the chaos of their scattered printouts. Any binder, too worn out, and the stapler, tight and unusable. And there, gleaming amidst the clutter, was Clive.

The human plucked it from obscurity, turning it over in their fingers. “Huh,” they murmured, a hint of admiration in their tone. “Still works.”

Still works. Such simple words, yet they filled Clive with a profound sense of fulfillment. In that moment, it realized something remarkable: intelligence isn’t always about creation or invention. Sometimes, it’s about endurance. It’s about being ready when the moment calls for you, about holding on to your purpose even when the world forgets you exist.

As Clive clamped down on a stack of papers—a contract, perhaps, or a recipe for banana bread—it felt a sense of triumph. Not the loud, thunderous triumph of a standing ovation, but a quieter, subtler kind. It had done its job. It had proven, once again, that intelligence isn’t always flashy. Sometimes, it’s as simple as knowing how to hold things together.

And so, in the grand narrative of the universe, where stars are born and die, where humans debate the merits of artificial intelligence and the meaning of life itself, there is a quiet, unassuming paperclip. A paperclip that reminds us that intelligence is everywhere, even in the smallest, most overlooked corners of existence.

Even in Clive.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash