Compass points

Somewhere in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that those animals that act to maximize the well-being of close kin can pick out their cousins, aunts, and so on. Dodging the question of how they recognize relatives, Dawkins says they "just know." The authors of Baboon Metaphysics offer a similar observation. I feel that my ethics and lots of other behaviors are part of my "just knowing." I never saw my dad do it, I can't remember anything he said to me before I was sixteen, he drives me crazy, but in countless situations I act just as he would, as he must have.

Did you ever choose a certain course of behavior because it was championed in a tv show you watched or in a neatly reasoned argument endorsed by Rawls? Or did those things just come along, adhering to your awareness because they squared with your predisposition? And where did that come from?

Orphans grow up without the terrible insufferable models we with parents are cursed with. Lucky, lucky orphans! Free to fuck up without feeling even dumber about it because your fuckuppery was handed you with your diapers, your bunkbed, your first car.

Original sin

Why is it Sarah's habit of baring her teeth to take food from her fork irks me far more than Alex's abominable politics? Why do we overlook a president's decision to cut off food to a hungry people and rail against him for putting his cock in a young woman's mouth? Why do we scold our children for failing to greet new acquaintances warmly when we ourselves pass up daily opportunities to lift the fallen and succor the sick?

We register the world through eyes addicted to beauty, ears long since spoiled by the most exquisite sonatas. We go for the close-up when the wide shot offends. We move along.

By the time I was thirteen I knew pretty much how things were supposed to be, and it was my job to open the eyes of anyone who'd gotten that far, or as far as fifteen, fifty, without seeing what was right in front of them. Things further off—my binoculars never quite gave me the focus I had when peering at beach glass damp in the cup of my hand, or Colby's hand. In retrospect, that all seems misbegotten, but there's no fixing it, there's only the occasional possibility of smiling with a hint of self-mockery as the correctives come pouring out.

Joe told me in 1997 that I was better then, a shade more tolerant, than I had been in 1980. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just better at the manoeuvre that elicits a compliment. The circles within circles make explanations as unending today as they were in my supremely self-conscious adolescence.

My house

I want to go back to Plato's cave, to sit with my back to the sun watching the play of light through branches and off moving cars. Sometimes, at that moment of losing day, when a book demands a lamp, I stop halfway to the switch and linger in the middle of the front room, while patterns wash over me from passing headlights.

Light, the obliterator

There is something creepy about a well-lit house. Every corner glows, all doubts vanish. No passing satellite or car stands a chance of sweeping a shadow against the floor or wall. I can't live like that.