The blind hear best because their ears lack competition; the deaf see best. Lovers close their eyes to concentrate on touch. Like wind through a narrow pass, the world enters us more forcefully when it must squeeze through a single sense.
]]>A few years ago I bought a house, having previously rented apartments. I recall the naïveté with which, upon moving in, I crafted my to-do list. I must seal the dripping tub faucet, repair broken tiles on the porch, paint the kitchen door, re-mortar a section of foundation, replace storm windows, insulate exposed pipes in the crawl space. I vaguely imagined, at the end of my list and labors, an eternity of sitting back and enjoying my home, sipping Chardonnay on my re-tiled porch. Instead, I never completed my to-do list, for as rapidly as I cross tasks from the top of the list, I add new tasks to the bottom. My house was not so much broken as breaking. Every year I repaint a section of siding, and every year another section chips and fades. While patching cracked caulk in the kitchen last weekend, I noticed that a cabinet door beside the stove had pulled loose--next weekend's job. I suppose that someday I will have repaired every board, joint, rib, and surface in my house, but by then the first parts I fixed will be re-broken, and I must repeat the sad cycle to infinity. People talk of real estate as an investment, but all I do is sink cash into my investment--not a source but a destination of my income. I bleed equal proportions of money and time. The American dream is to spend every Saturday as a repairman?
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]]>We call facts like flight extraordinary because they violate ordinary facts like gravity. But ordinary facts are only extraordinary facts we have grown used to.
If we took nothing for granted, there would be no dullness to highlight the wonderful. Wonder rests on lack of wonder.
]]>I've sometimes felt a milder version of this estrangement from expectation when arriving at a vacation rental that I had visualized incorrectly based on photographs. Imagine, too, the soul's alienation when, the veil of mortality lifted, it beholds God and discovers that the God it loved in life was only a fantasy, and it must now learn to love all over again.
]]>True, my wife had to carry our child for nine months, and together we must guide and raise her for eighteen years, but these are outward and trivial aids. My wife in pregnancy, though I honor her suffering, was more acted upon than acting, a Petri dish for our fused cells to grow in. I am installing gates to keep our daughter from tumbling down the stairs, but she is mysteriously engineering her own ability to crawl. We parents are mere managers, facilitating rather than performing the critical work. We provide milk and play mats and cribs for naps, and out of these raw materials our babies assemble brains, speech, movement, emotions, and consciousness.
Why pore through parenting books as if a child's development hinged chiefly on our methods? Overzealous parents are like software managers who don't know how to program yet think projects will fail unless they tinker with the few superficial details they understand.
]]>The mind is a phasic receptor, only noticing a sudden stimulus. We are unconscious of who we've become because we became who we are too gradually. Forgetting is a trick for remembering.
]]>This return to normalcy sets me up for surprise when I read reports that people are dead. Though the waters no sooner rose than receded, the victims they briefly drowned did not revive with the next day's sunrise. The world before and after the storm was livable, and deadliness only encroached upon life for a moment, but life, a featherweight, once knocked down stays down. Surely the victims' lives, like the electricity, should only have been interrupted, not ended. The cause was fleeting: shouldn't the effect be?
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