Meditation 1

The lottery is the basic tool of education in any country in which the school system is going down the tubes. Like a book with only one page, it teaches only one lesson. But it is a fundamental one. The lesson offends some people. They take it personally as if they had been singled out, not because of sex or race or age, which is offensive but intelligible, but because they are themselves and not someone else. But it is an impersonal lesson, true for everyone. The lesson of the lottery is that we live in a dicey, disorderly, chancy and paradoxical reality that you have to work hard to believe in.

It is only for the sake of the children and their childish dream of logic and intelligibility; it is only for the young and their innocent longing for regularity and order; it is only for the kids and their need to play games that we struggle to hold onto our belief in this reality and strain to keep chance and paradox locked up in the dark closet of the lottery. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work at all.

When we hear of someone who wins the lottery we are often depressed and heartened at the same time. We are depressed because, by one more turn, the wheel has by passed us by; but we are heartened because we believe that this happened by chance, that only a quirky twist of fate kept us from a life of wealth, comfort and ease. Each time we lose, each time we do not win, we reaffirm the conviction that it could have been us. If we were smarter, if we worked harder, if we had been more attentive to the needy, if we had been kinder to dumb animals, if only we had more luck, we would have won. It is not true. It is never us, never me, never you. It is always someone else who wins the lottery.

This fact detours around logic and defies common sense. Common sense tells us that since someone always wins the lottery there is hope for us: logic insists that, since the lottery is always won by someone, it is illogical that it can never be won by you, never by me. Common sense and logic serve us badly here. The fact that someone always wins the lottery and the fact that it is never you or me are two entirely unrelated facts whose roots are in two different species of truth. Why this should be so is a mystery, but it may be because chance, besides being unpredictable, is vicious. It may be that, in our time and place, logical connections occur accidentally. It may be because God sees the truth but waits.

Meditation 2

When you see the light it’s wonderful but sometimes, later, you yearn for the darkness again.

Doping things out, catching on, getting the message, all mean the same thing more or less. One minute you haven’t got the foggiest idea what is happening to you, and the next minute everything is crystal clear. You have seen the light.

These gusts of intuition, these floodings by rich, transcendent, godlike prescience, engorge us, and disable our intelligence.

It would be better if the arrival of insight were always accompanied by a mottled, moaning, forbodding spirit, an irritating, loud, repetitive scraping on slate, and a recorded message informing us that danger lurked around the next bend. Knowing means trouble.

Knowledge sticks like Krazy Glue. A little mistake about knowing and suddenly you find your self with more knowledge than you can handle, and much more than is good for you. Once you see something, you just can not unsee it by closing your eyes. Once you know something, it takes more than wanting not to know it to forget it permanently. There are some things like love, an active cash flow and lower back pain that can be snatched back from mute, gloating death, resuscitated, and nursed from ashes to glow to fire. Unfortunately, innocence and ignorance are not among them.

Suddenly and surprisingly, a little while after the light goes on, you find yourself yearning to be ignorant again, yearning not to know. yearning to be in the darkness again.

When you see the light, someone puts a small black mark next to your name in an indelible ink that really lasts forever. If you are smart, you will thank the fates that you haven’t the foggiest idea about what is going on in the world, that no one told you anything at all about the grand scheme of things, because once you catch on to even the smallest of the world’s secrets, once the tiniest of the worlds mysteries is revealed to you, you are called upon to shoulder responsibility for part of the universe, usually a small part, but sometimes a whole spiral galaxy or a species of monkeys.

Meditation 3

Babies are nature’s way of explaining sex in exactly the same way in which fat is nature’s way of explaining food.

People are particularly thick headed; there are things they just refuse to understand. Nature goes to particular efforts to make these things clear to us. Unfortunately, nature is a better mechanic than a teacher.

From the beginning, nature was certain that giving humans sex without providing them with a complete book of written instructions was a mistake. She gave them intelligence to be able to read the instruction manual she thoughtfully provided. Unfortunately, on chilly nights in paradise, humans used their intelligence to put the pages of the book to a different purpose. Nature was miffed, really miffed.

Human beings get very upset when they realize that the only reason there are babies is to teach a lesson about sex, and that if nature was not such a pedagogue, we could eat all we want without putting on a pound. People are even more distressed when they realize that babies are not even the lesson but merely a way of holding their attention while nature makes a point.

It is no one’s fault really. With the intelligence nature provided, people can understand a complex argument only one point at a time. Unfortunately, humans are distracted easily. By the time they get to the third point of any argument, they have forgotten the first.

For instance, many people who have understood the lesson of the horse very well, have missed the lesson of the camel entirely, and at least two species of sapiens have walked around with perplexed looks on their faces trying to figure out what in heaven’s name nature was trying to communicate to them with the Zebra. Each time it seemed that humans were getting the point of sex, their attention drifted away and they forgot what they learned and had to go back and start from scratch again. Nature got impatient.

Humans are not the only beasts who experience this difficulty. The dinosaurs understood evolution clearly only the night after they became extinct, by which time there was nothing they could do except suck icicles and snap their tails. It did them no good at all. Most beasts, including people, understand anything really important, only after the fact and too late to be of much use.

Meditation 4

There are places steeped in so deep and profound an anarchy that even Murphy’s law does not hold.

A number of people who should know better, loudly complain that the world has become a messy and disordered place. These Jeremiahs repeatedly and shrilly demand to know why the only regularities in our lives are casual, flimsy, and tenuous, why things happen tilted and askance rather than straight and narrow?

They wander around insisting that some invisible, publicly accessible authority account for the trouble we are in. They behave as if they had a right to an explanation of what is going on. The answer they get is Murphy’s law, but it explains nothing.

Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong it will. Unlike some laws that hold universally in any time and space like the law of quantum neglect or the law of the Hershey bar, Murphy’s Law is a law that holds only in the part of the universe that is civilized. Where no human being has raised a hut and invested in a midden heap, Murphy’s law does not apply.

It is a law that is nearly impossible to escape from and nearly impossible to live with. Most people conscientiously object to it and would like to be exempted from its dictates, just as most people would prefer to live in a universe where being fat would not keep you from breaking the four minute mile, and cats had orchids instead of kittens.

The only way to evade Murphy’s law is to avoid any regularity at all. A thorough and pervasive anarchy is the only possible escape from Murphy’s law.

There are places that have achieved this unenviable state, this fools paradise where neither Murphy’s law nor any other law consistently holds. We happen to live in one such place. In fact, most places human beings live for any length of time, manage to achieve such a pervasive state of veiled anarchy that Murphy’s law no longer invariably applies.

In this light, Murphy’s law is not a curse but a blessing. Its ubiquitous influence attests to the evolution and maturity of a society; where things can go wrong and do with such regularity, the basic system of natural law is working.

Most humans would prefer a legal order in which justice was refracted along angles of power and desire, just as most humans would prefers mirrors which reflected images that followed the perspective of thin and beautiful rather than the contours of reality.

The basic constitution of the universe stipulates that, for civilized human beings, Murphy’s law shall govern. But legislatures being what they are, it also provides that where Murphy’s law holds, so also shall Moishe’s law, which states that sometimes things must go right in spite of everything you do to foul things up.

It should be clear to us that when it comes to lawfulness, in society as well as in science, we have still a lot to learn.

Meditation 5

People seldom survive the bite of the butterfly; but the scars of the bite of the butterfly are beautiful.

It is difficult to figure out what nature had in mind when she made the butterfly. Clearly she had something in mind, otherwise she would not have made it so small but so conspicuous; and she would not have wrapped it up so completely in contradiction. As far as human beings are concerned, the butterfly is an incomplete communication, a mystery.

We are attracted to it because of its exquisite beauty. That beauty is magnified as beauty is always magnified by the fact that it is utterly delicate and looks helpless. The very first time the smallest toddler sees a butterfly fluttering over the slim stalk of a flower, he realizes that it can be pulled apart with no measurable amount of effort and with no fear of retaliation. Our experience with butterflies confirms this fact. Almost all of us believe the butterfly is a weak, helpless creature.

It is not true.

The reason we believe this, is that the butterfly is one of God’s gentlest creatures, an animal of enormous self control and restraint. It abhors the violence with which nature has surrounded all life. It suffers the terror of being pulled apart; it suffers the indignity of being pithed and collected like baseball cards; it suffers the ignominy of being confused with the moth and sprayed as a pest; it suffers all of these humiliations and would suffer more, it endures all of these injuries and insults and would endure more rather than use on its own behalf, those terrible weapons that nature put at its disposal.

Many of God’s smallest creatures refuse to let their unimposing size put them at a disadvantage. They posture effectively. Ants make us anxious, we fear bees and dread scorpions. We would no more think about chasing a hornet to recover a wedding ring it was carrying off to its nest, than we would think of pursuing a bear that was carrying off the spouse to whom we were bound by that wedding ring. Yet we pursue the butterfly for the fun of it, for the sheer joy of holding something beautiful in our hands.

The butterfly stoically endures the consequences of its pacifism. It is pursued with cupped hands, with handkerchiefs, with paper napkins, with skirts held out and flung up without anxiety, because it is believed to be absolutely defenseless. It is not true; the butterfly is a juggernaut, a naturally fierce creature whose bite is terrible and nearly always fatal.

Why the butterfly should renounce its nature and forsake the weapons available to it when every other creature uninhibitedly employs whatever armament biology provides and, in the case of homo-sapiens, any other it can improvise or steal, deepens the mystery and adds to its allure.

Every instance of people killed by a butter-fly involves a mistaken identity and a startled confused, dew laden insect: a drunken man dressed up in a moose costume, going to a party; soldiers, abandoned for dead in fields, who suddenly changed their minds about dying; a couple making love in the woods, whose thrashing on a pile of maple leaves resembled the dance of the butterfly hawk. In each of these cases the damage done by the disoriented bug was so severe and horrible that it was blamed on the mythical creatures that live in nightmares, werewolves, vampires.

The instances of people killed by a butterfly are strange: but the instances of people recovering from the bite of the butterfly are even stranger. In each case, the victims were found by madmen who covered their wounds with old newspapers and sang forgotten lullabies in lost languages to them. Recovered, these individuals found themselves changed, for the scars from the bite of the butterfly made them extraordinarily beautiful, as if nature had used them as a canvas to depict the victory of life over death, the triumph of beauty over ugliness.

It is not clear what nature is trying to communicate to us with the butterfly. It may be trying to say that not only does he also serve who stands and waits, but he also serves who stands as a reminder of something important we should not have forgotten. On the other hand message may be that beauty without power is in for a very hard time.

Meditation 6

For the ant, wisdom consists of not walking on sidewalks even if the cracks are filled with candy and cake.

For the ant no sidewalk is safe. Children appear on tricycles as if spontaneously generated by spring air and laughter. Fashions changes instantly, and fat heels suddenly become spiked and much thinner than the cracks. An ant is wise if it avoids sidewalks altogether, even if the cracks are filled with candy and cake.

Human beings seem to know what is good for all of God’s creatures, Man’s wisdom encompasses not only the moderately sized animals whom he chases and eats, but also the very tiny ones he treats as pests and nuisances. And it extends, as well, to the large animals he was in awe of when he first came down from the trees, because they had sharp teeth and ran very fast and treated men as nuisances and pests, or something to eat, or both.

People are certain about how to manage the affairs of other animals even though they have almost no idea about how to manage their own. We would do well to solicit advice from the rest of nature.

The ant could be helpful here. Ants have a little advice for humans. They say, “The many should take no comfort from the success of the few.” What this means is that it’s wise to avoid stocks which are guaranteed to double in price before you’ve gotten off the phone to your broker, and smart to stay away from offers of free cameras and chances to win condominiums in central Florida. For ants and humans, the vicinity of temptation is always booby trapped.

A clever ant can always convince himself that any particular sidewalk is safe, in the same way that a clever human can convince himself that any particular stock is exempt from Barnum’s law. One of the drawbacks of being clever is that sometimes you can be too clever. “Never be cleverer than you have to be, to be smart,” is good advice for ants and human beings.

Meditation 7

Sex is like groping with your feet for something that you cannot grasp with your hands.

There are many things we can not grasp with our hands, like ideas, ketchup, commercials, boiling water and faith. We use spoons, sponges or our mind to grasp these. There are other things we can not grasp with our hands either.

Logic says that if you can not grasp something with your hands, you are not likely to be able to grab hold of it with your feet. Using your feet to clutch at something is illogical; sex is illogical in exactly the same way.

In the past, the only part of life that we required to be logical was logic itself. Just after the computer was invented we started to demand that every other aspect of our lives be logical as well. We were very disappointed to discover that, according to old fashioned, classical logic, none of those features of every day life we held dear followed logically (or could be made to follow logically) from any remotely reasonable assumption we could imagine.

We immediately started looking around for a logic in which they did. We wanted to find a formal system in which it was impossible to come to conclusions we did not want to come to, a logic in which all of the things we wanted to believe were tautologies. We started out with the simple demand that logic demonstrate we were right and they were wrong, and ended up asking it to prove that alcohol was good and cocaine bad, that any orifice of any partner was valid but that AIDS was invalid, that Mercedes made sense, but a trade imbalance was a contradiction.

We produced a lot of new and interesting logics. There was vegetarian logic and military logic and religious logic and Rastafarian logic and fundamentalist logic and women’s logic and gay logic and modal logic and temporal logic; the list goes on and on. And it turned out that, because of the way the world is screwed together, we had effortlessly invented a lot of new illogics also, one for every new kind of logic we invented.

The reason for this is that you get a new illogic by discovering an error in an old logic. When you correct that mistake you get a different new logic than the old logic you started from. This new logic has altogether different errors to be corrected. Sometimes you correct a different mistake in the old logic than the mistake you discovered, thereby simultaneously producing a new logic with twice as many errors to be discovered later by someone else and two new illogics. Thinking is a hall of mirrors, but a miracle nevertheless.

Which has a lot to do with sex, because sex is illogical in a very illogical way. Sex bears a family resemblance to the most extreme and heartless kind of illogic, the transsexual kind you can not tell from the real thing because it was one real thing and is now another real thing.

Sex is a struggle to grasp some enigmatic essence and get inside it, or get it inside you and wrap it up in you, or wrap yourself up in it, for that instant that lasts ever. But it is never quite clear what kind of illogic this essence is and why sex should be the syllogism we use to get hold of it or try to. Pleasure is its materialization, the form in which we understand it, but it goes deeper than sex (but not much deeper).

Meditation 8

The best things in life may be free, but the store is always out of them, and they spoil when you take them out of the box, and you can’t claim them as dependents on your income tax returns, whereas the worst things in life cost ferociously, but are deductible, and available on easy credit, and are childlike, and cling, and never grown up.

Americans used to be optimists but we have changed. In the last few decades we have grown pessimistic.

We did not want to change particularly. We were happy playing baseball in sandlots, prolonging our childhood into middle age reading Tom Sawyer, watching musical comedies, and telling ourselves we were the greatest country this side of the universe. Although foreign people told us repeatedly that it was not true, we believed that there was a free lunch, or an almost free lunch, because we were eating it. We carried our convictions to the frontier and passed it: we believed that the best things in life, like love and sex, were free. Cheap was good.

We recognized, of course, that being cheap was neither definitive nor conclusive, and that there were sometimes good reasons for spending more money than you had to on something you did not really need, but acknowledging this did not shatter our conviction that cheap was good.

We started to change our mind sometime after we won the-great-war-that-changed-everything.

As it became clear that anyone could manufacture anything, anywhere, cheaper than we could in America, patriotism nudged us to tentatively entertain the thought that the expensive model of anything was better than the cheap model. As our contribution to the cost of peace we discarded the notion that cheap was good.

This only worked for a little while, because, as soon as foreigners caught on, all of the cheap foreign goods we bought became expensive, and buying expensive stopped being patriotic.

Which explains a lot but not why we have become pessimistic.

Before the great change, we always thought about how much things cost. We bought a thing in order to be able to do a job we had to do, or accomplish a goal, or satisfy a need we had. We knew how much something was worth, because we knew what use we were going to put it to.

We bought a pot because we wanted to cook something, a scale to find out how much we weighed, and a car because we wanted to get from where we were to someplace where we wanted to be. We were innocents.

Today we have grown up. We don’t cook much any more because cooking is sexist, and wives are working, and there is no one to do the shopping anyway. Now, we need the pot for that special meal which we might someday cook for fun. Since it will have to stay on the wall most of the time, the most important thing about the pot is that it be beautiful, symbolize food, and be able to remind us not to forget what cooking is all about.

And, because we are getting fat eating in restaurants and reducing constantly, the scale in the bathroom must not only measure but remember to the slightest fraction of ounce, and remind us of our goal of slimness and talk to us severely when we forget.

And since the roads are clogged and we will spend as much time waiting to move as moving, it is important that the inside of the car look nice, and have a phone and a stereo, so that we feel at home, resting.

Which explains a lot more, but not why we have become pessimistic.

Foreigners have always been pessimistic because they have always been subject to the rule of some king or queen or emperor or tyrant. They have always been pessimists because, no matter how much the governments of foreigners resemble democracy on the surface, underneath, they are one or another form of absolutism. Foreigners have always been ruled by someone, elected or not, whose fondest dream was to restore Charlemagne’s bloodline or transfigure themselves into the Shogun.

Americans have always been optimistic because they have been subject to the rule of law made by congress, which is always too busy barreling pork to govern, and led by a president, who, surrounded by entrepreneurs busy filling their pockets, has been too distracted to govern. This makes us giddy, lighthearted, and defiant.

How then have we become pessimistic? We wear foreign clothing, drink foreign water, tell time with foreign watches, watch T.V. on foreign sets, drive foreign cars, and make goods “Made in America” with foreign tools using foreign parts. The pessimism of foreigners has just rubbed off on us.

Cheap is not important anymore. We have changed. The best things in life may be free but you have to bend down and pick them up whereas the expensive things that come from overseas are delivered and that makes all the difference.

Meditation 9

Armies never surrender at night.

Nights are for camaraderie, for carousing, for conquests of women.

Nights are for huddling, for clinging to the earth, for effortful, earnest prayers, and dreams of safe passage through the darkness. Night is for deviousness, for strategies, for ambushes, for ambitions that illuminate our bunkered lives, for dreams of victory.

Armies never surrender at night. It is hard to give up dreams at night, hard to stem the retreat from reality in the darkness.

Surrendering is the most difficult thing for a modern army to do. Their weapons are all wrong; they have their holes and handles on the wrong end. Armies are taught only to fight an enemy; but an army surrendering discovers its only enemy is itself, has always been itself.

And military policy is defective. Armies do not give medals to commanders who believe that giving up is a rational way out of an impossible situation. Military planners are not likely to recommend surrender as an alternative to a broad frontal suicidal attack. They do not believe what each of us knows in our bones: no one should be promoted to General unless he has surrendered at least twice.

It is to avoid the humiliation of panic that armies surrender, but panic is difficult at night. Desperation in the darkness stays put, clings like a terrified child. Panic is crying for help with your feet. But darkness hides feet and road and mountain and bush. There is no place to run but into the darkness.

Daybreak is reality time. Morning reveals an army’s true situation. Daylight discloses that it is surrounded on four sides and above, by heathen armed to the teeth, gargling, and sharpening their bayonets. Daybreak reveals the spies have lied, that intelligence was not intelligence at all.

Armies never surrender at night.

Meditation 10

A few people require only a reason before they act, and a few others need only an excuse. For most of us, most of the time, we need both but have neither.

The demand for justifications always outruns the supply of excuses.

Being alive eating, sleeping, watching the dog chase bones and the kids grow, has never been enough for mankind not nearly enough. Staying alive, which is more than sufficient to keep any other animal in ecstasy, is not enough to keep a self respecting homo-sapien from grousing intolerably. Life must be justified.

Until recently, religion supplied the justification for existence. Religion insists that the basis for living is dying. Now, for most of us including some priests and rabbis and a few television ministers the creed of success and making money has become our spiritual bedrock. It avows that the ultimate foundation for living is postponing gratification until one has enough investments in real estate, or AT&T Preferred, or antiques, or gold coins, not to have to worry about living, which comes out to the same thing.

Like religion before it, making money has become a justification for not living and a defense against life’s irrationalities like periods, baldness, diarrhea, and frostbite. Both provide a sense of reality and an excuse for living at the end of those days when no disaster occurs and nothing happens but eating, sleeping and making love.

Religion and the creed of making money are not the same thing but the differences between them are slighter than the proponents of either would like us to believe. The main distinction between them, is that the former leads one to live one’s life with an eye on heaven and the hereafter, whereas the latter leads one to live ones life squinting at the bottom line, which is almost as far away. Both take your eyes and mind off of what’s happening in front of you and neither will let you make a move unless you are staring blindly somewhere else than where you are.

If people were really sensible they would look for a reason and an excuse for staying alive twenty four hours a day. This would keep them busy and out of mischief for a long time.

Meditation 11

Pleasure which may not be enjoyed may have to be endured.

We pay a great deal more attention to pleasure than to pain. The reason is not difficult to find.

We tend to ignore pain because it is practical and prosaic and domesticated. We put it to work. It carries its own weight in the world: it gives employment to doctors and pharmacists, and profit to drug companies. Pain is sensible and predictable and dependable. Like a 97-year-old great aunt, it behaves as we have come to expect it to behave.

Pleasure is another matter entirely.

Pleasure is androgynous and flamboyant and contemporary. Sometimes it dresses up in a sequined evening gown and spiked heels; other times it dresses up in a tuxedo and sneakers; and other times, stark naked, it will put on a messiah mask to entertain the kids.

Pleasure is slippery. Even though a lot of people live off of pleasure’s earnings in the world, it pays no taxes , and it is unreliable as an employer; the only professions that bank on pleasure are the very oldest ones. Young and upwardly mobile professional persons look down on other people who make their living off of pleasure, as if it is not fair to have your cake, offer it to others, and, eat it to. Cake futures, of course, are an entirely different matter.

We say that pain builds character, and it does in its own way, although it doesn’t build it as solidly as it did in the past when there were no drugs that reliably deadened pain; then hurt really put character together densely. Now we are tempted to turn to Bayer and let our character shift for itself.

Pleasure, on the other hand, tests character, which is quite a different matter. There is no pill around to numb the pleasure while we are taking the test, so most of us fail it with pleasure.

Pleasure has always been a real problem for human beings.

Throughout history the most common strategy for dealing with pleasure has been to confront and resist it to struggle against it. This is the strategy adopted by prophets, preachers, investment bankers, widows, the chaste in spirit and sociologists. Sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, men and women gather in desserts, in back yards, or in public houses, draw lines on the ground, cry out this far and no further, and lash out at pleasure with whatever weapons are at hand, usually soft, sticky objects or belts.

It takes a nimble set of hands and feet to win this fight and the outcome is usually a crowd of people with scraped shins and knees, hobbling around clutching their groins, panting and sighing and moaning in defeat. These people learn to their dismay that pain can be just another kind of intense pleasure; they discover, unseasonably late in life, that it can be pleasurable to be caught between a rock and a hard place.

Down through the ages, other individuals have explored a different approach. They try to escape pleasure to run away. These slightly more astute individuals recognize from the beginning that a direct struggle is doomed and self defeating. No flailing away at pleasure with a leather strap for them.

They close their eyes and make it dark, then they try to lose pleasure in the back alleys of themselves like an unwanted pet. They find, however, that it is as easy to escape from pleasure in this way as it is to avoid bad memories by deciding not to remember them. What they discover is that the scent of an abandoned pleasure stays with them, and, like a cat in heat, they are sniffed out by every other pleasure loose in the world.

Still others the most unsuccessful of them all try to cold shoulder pleasure. When this does not work, they try mockery and contempt.

This impolite behavior merely inflames pleasure and makes it furious. It pursues them with a vengeance; it follows them into the bathroom, the kitchen, the den, into elevators, into city streets, out into the country, to the beach. It moons them from mirrors, subway advertisements, store windows, telephone booths, and passing trucks. It viciously mocks them with self doubt, with anxiety, with every device frustrated pleasure has to call your attention to it.

The truth about pleasure is simple: one can not ignore it, one can not fight it, or flee from it, or mock it. If there is anything that human experience has shown over the centuries it has been that pleasure which can not be enjoyed may just have to be endured at least until science comes up with a chemical which will do the job of disposing of it in a modern way.

Meditation 12

Waking up is the best proof that you’ve been asleep.

It is amazing how few people acknowledge that waking up is the best proof that you’ve been asleep. In fact, many people deny that it is any proof at all. For some people the two states of being awake and being asleep are not distinct. They dream when they are awake, they calculate and scheme when they are asleep.

Some of these people attempt to insinuate reality into their dreams. Having read too much Freud, they insist on verisimilitude, not only in life but in their dreams also. Their nightmares are nothing more than reruns of gray mornings stuck in traffic. Sometimes this is involuntary. There are people condemned by sour and malevolent genetics to suffer the terrible agony of hearing the alarm clock go off 24 hours a day, carrying on the same feud with reality, asleep or awake.

Quantitatively, the opposite disability prevails. We are condemned to spend afternoons at the beach with people who are more than happy to treat the sinewy stuff of real life as if it were a wispy figment of their imagination. Much of the nettlesome aspects of the world are caused by these sleepwalkers taking liberties. Of course, called to account, they deny everything; they claim they have forgotten; they claim they were asleep, that they do not remember having awakened, that it was all a bad dream.

Then, there are some, perhaps the rest of us, who do both, insisting on filling the rooms of their real world with the discarded furniture of their dreams, and carrying reality, like leftovers from a bad Chinese meal, into their dreams. For these people, life is very confusing.

If you find yourself waking up, it is proof that you are leaving the world of sleep and entering the real world. It is an infallible test. But, even though it is the best proof, it is not the only one. There are other tests. The light at the end of the tunnel is always a sure sign you are asleep, dreaming you are awake.

Meditation 13

Every truth finds its way blocked by a reasonable desire.

Wants and desires are not the same as needs.

Needs come in only one size, large, and only one shape, square, and only one color, grey. They are tenacious, but they are also polite and orderly and wait their turn. There is always time to finish a cigarette before a need works itself up into a feeding frenzy. And, once a need is satisfied, it falls asleep. And, after you’ve satisfied all the needs that are buzzing around, they fall asleep; and then you can fall asleep and rest, at least for a while.

Wants and desires are a different animal entirely.

Not only do wants and desires come with relics tied around their necks like cowbells, but they come in a variety of sizes and shapes and colors. There are grand, red, oblong desires, and trivial, triangular, flesh colored desires, pretty, red, rectangular wants, and ugly, round, candy stripped ones, sharp, black, perverse wants and white, delicate, chaste wants, smooth, transparent, reasonable desires, and rough, opaque, unreasonable desires; the catalogue is endless.

No matter what their size, shape or color, wants and desires are always in heat, always clamoring for immediate satisfaction. No sooner do you satisfy one, but he squeezes back in at the end of the line, and his brothers and sisters like fledglings in a nest of vultures are all over you. Satisfying wants and desires is an endless chore and a real challenge.

We can cope with the grand, perverse, unreasonable desires. It is genuinely hard to disguise an inflated, ambitious, immoderate desire as anything other than what it is. The craving for a happy marriage, for example, the longing for love, the hunger for world peace, the unarticulated, dumb yearning for politeness, are easily recognized as the illusory, dream desires they are. Confronting the slightest truth like a drop in the interest rate or a rainy afternoon they are helpless, papier mache monsters.

What keeps us entangled in confusion and prevents us from seeing what’s happening around us, are the inoffensive, moderate desires that advance their claim on the basis of a gentle and sensible insistence that they are completely and fundamentally reasonable.

The longing to make 3 million dollars on pork belly futures and retire to Aruba, or the craving to make love to every woman who turned 23 on her last birthday, or the obsession with finding a husband who loves children, and cooking, and housework, and is a brain surgeon, are examples of desires that control our lives because they manage to convince us that they are no more than the normal expression of our basic human nature.

Truth, of course, also comes in different sizes and colors and shapes from the minuscule and ridiculous to the sublime and scary. But against these desires, even the strongest truth is helpless. Confronting “I want only that which is rightfully mine” or “I desire only what reasonably and naturally belongs to me,” truth cringes and slinks away.

Science can not explain why this should be the case. Physicists say that it is because desire is a quantum force, and truth is all potential. Sociologists explain it by pointing out that truth needs to be illuminated by a bright light to be seen whereas desires glow in the dark.

Whatever the explanation, it is one of the brutish facts that we have to live with, to live well in the Twentieth Century.

Meditation 14

Darkness also travels at the speed of light.

This fact is a conundrum. It is undoubtedly true, and is one of the two laws that defines the physics of modern times. The other is the uncertainty principle, which states that every change from uncertainty to certainty is matched by a change in the facts on the which certainty is based.

We are much more at home with strange social science than strange physics. We have acclimated ourselves to all sorts of perverse psychologies. Political science is a complete collection of embarrassing oddities. Sociology has incorporated the most bizarre of contradictory propositions into an overarching, inclusive theory. The ideas of economics change with the seasons to match the current fashions. None of us blinks a blink. We have accommodated to the notion that, as far as knowing about people and their associations, logic is irrelevant and should be suspended for the duration. But we expect more from physics.

We expect physics (in keeping with its status as a hard science) to be orderly and retain a sense of propriety. We expect that what was a law yesterday will continue to be a law tomorrow, even if nature is inconvenienced. This was true in past, but now things are changing.

Sometime between Dirac and Schrodinger, physicists discovered that a couple of fundamental physical constants had changed. They discovered that darkness also traveled at the speed of light. Their equations told them that what this meant was that ignorance was as swift as enlightenment. When they figured entropy into the equation, they concluded that errors were traveling at least as fast as the messages correcting them. A few theorists speculated that a mistake was propagated in straight lines at tremendous speed in every direction away from where it was made, whereas truth was trapped by the field of human thought and activity, like light caught in a black hole, and meandered in circles.

Why this should be true in the 20th century when it was not in the 19th is a mystery. Recent developments in physics suggest that things are getting worse; the most recent evidence suggests that darkness travels a hell of a lot faster than light. This is not comforting, but if it were true, it would make sense out of almost everything that is happening to us.

Meditation 15

What is impossible is forbidden; everything else you can get away with is permitted.

Mankind has always been drawn to shiny, glitzy baubles, intelligence for example.

At the beginning of the world, when nature offered intelligence to any species that wanted it, every creature but man sniffed at it, piddled and walked away; we alone grabbed for it, without thinking about what we were doing, of course. We were a greedy species from the beginning.

Nature unhesitatingly gave us intelligence, but after that she was reluctant to let us have anything that was really valuable. She felt that it was throwing good money after bad, wasting resources on a gullible and easily suckered species. She disinherited us from the rest of the natural wealth she had accumulated.

Our acquisition of intelligence put us in an extremely awkward position. We were smart but bare-assed. But what is worse, we were left without that discipline of habit and instinct which nature distributed to the rest of animal life as her most precious gift.

At the time, a number of humans felt that it was all to the good, since it was a harsh, bitter and cruel morality not really a morality at all, they said, since it was not based on dogma and faith and lacked complicated rules.

They argued that such a harmony might do for creatures like frogs and baboons whose minds spanned an environment no larger than the smells they smelled or the sights they saw, but that it would not suffice for humans, whose vision extended to the very horizon, where the other animals saw a stand of banana trees and a place to rest, but we saw “I AM WHO I AM,” waiting for us.

Since that time, mankind has sought to articulate a morality that will substitute for the natural order of things. We have not done particularly well. The best we have been able to come up with is, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It just does not work; it does not work at all.

Often, what we would like others to do unto us, is unreasonable and we know it. Sometimes what we would have others do unto us is just so outrageous, that we tremble to think that they might actually do it.

People have too little trust and affection for themselves to contemplate placing their fate in the hands of others of their own kind.

Mankind’s distrust and disaffection for itself is the origin of the desire to discover a morality which originates from some superior, wiser, hopefully, more generous force outside of us. But this desire is based on a misunderstanding.

Nature let us have intelligence, but not quite enough of it to think clearly about anything. We think of morality as a mechanism for disciplining us and controlling our behavior. But if we could think clearly, we would see that nature never had that in mind for morality, for the simple reason that morality is not suited for that task. For nature, morality was for talking and arguing about, not for living by.

Nature saw clearly that it is unrealistic and impractical to expect any species of animals to govern its behavior by some set of ideas about how it ought to behave, especially ideas whose substance is carried by a collection of second hand words.

The intelligence we got from nature is adequate to fight wars and build expressways, but not enough to sustain an effective morality.

Unfortunately, this leaves us back where we started from. Now people have always lived a morality whether they cared for it’s proscriptions or not. It appears in a number of variations according to climate and water supply, but it is essentially this; if you can’t do it, it is forbidden; if you can do it, and get away with it, it’s permitted.

This is an all purpose morality. It suffices in the domain of sex as it does in the domain of money and church affairs. Anatomy defeats fantasy; shrewdness limits deceit. It is the one morality that can raise humans to the heights they are capable of falling from.

Meditation 16

Even truth can leave you unprepared for reality and feeling that you’ve been deceived.

Why this should have suddenly become true is unknown. It is certain that it was not true in the 19th century, at least not quite as true as it is now. In the 19th century, truth was nearly quite adequate to prepare you for reality. Before the 18th century truth was always more than enough to prepare you for reality, usually much, much more. We live in paranoid times and this is the explanation for it; truth is not enough, not nearly enough.

Some people dismiss this idea with the observation that truth is just the best available metaphor at any given time, but this reply throws only a phantom bridge over very murky waters. It is just as accurate to say that no truth is ever spoken clearly, because no truth is ever said twice without extensive corrections. But, in fact this explains nothing. Nothing. All of this may have to do with the fact that reality doesn’t worry about how it looks, and it is likely to appear disheveled, shabby, and decrepit next to a Hollywood set with the same name. In short, truth doesn’t give a flying fig whether it looks true. Lies try harder; they must be convincing. It may be that in previous centuries truth paid a little more attention to its appearance.

It may be, however, that truth is not entirely to blame. In earlier times truth didn’t have to try so hard. Then, people needed less convincing to believe in what was real, because it corresponded to what they saw and felt. Now we are called upon to believe in electrons and muons and superconductivity and black holes and cosmic strings and retroviruses. Its hard to blame us for drawing a line somewhere to the far left of reality.

Meditation 17

Experience leaves too much to the imagination to be trusted.

People always contrast experience and imagination. It is a faulty comparison.

Experience can be contrasted with any number of things, familiarity, for instance; It makes sense to say we are too familiar with something to experience it, or, conversely, we have experienced something too much to be familiar with it. And experience can certainly be put over against expertise; expertise develops from limiting ones experience with something to a fleeting first impression or avoiding all direct experience with something at all.

Experience can even be contrasted with knowing something or someone well. Experience can be contrasted with being married to a person for 17 years, or having given birth to someone, or having written a book about something. Men are likely to feel that once they have slept with a woman they have experienced her, and women perpetuate the illusion for their own purposes, although they know it is probably the least good way to experience a woman.

Women are convinced that once they have married a man, they have fully and completely experienced him; and men have so little experience with themselves, that they have let themselves be convinced that this is true, although a nagging doubt persists, which expresses itself in a pervasive interest in violent, contact sports.

This setting of experience against imagination, like the contrast of fact with fantasy, is a modern invention. People who lived before us were more clear sighted about this. They recognized that some of man’s most terrible and profound fantasies were too real and factual; and they realized, unfortunately only as the town they lived in was being sacked and pillaged, that, what most people are most convinced is factual and real, is the flimsiest of fantasies.

We should mistrust experience because it requires too much imagination; experience’s dependence on imagination is almost complete. It is only when we have completely imagined something, pulled out its fangs with our creative fantasies, that we are willing to experience it. What our imagination tells us would be unpleasant to experience, we refuse to pay attention to; what our imagination tells us is to fantastic to be real, becomes invisible. Experiencing something we have not imaginatively pre-processed is a sure recipe for disaster. It is no mystery why humans are in such deep trouble in the world today.

Meditation 18

What God really wanted to forbid he made physically impossible.

Conservatives have a particular blind spot about this point. They refuse to accept it as true, preferring to believe instead, that they know exactly what God really wanted to prohibit, and that HE was just to busy with more important matters to inform other people what he did not want them to do.

Although conservatives refuse to believe it, the point is intuitively obvious. Grant God the same intelligence he gave the newt and the firefly, and you can see that ordering morality by this principle is as close to divine inspiration as we are going to come in our lifetime.

It is exactly the kind of scheme you would expect from a God of Hosts who was not only kind and merciful, but just and shrewd to boot, and had clear ideas about what he wanted and did not want, and about what worked and didn’t work.

God was very much impressed by the human capacity for contentiousness, and rationalization; and he was very clear about the limits of good intentions. He forbade something by simply making it impossible to do it, thereby deftly taking it out of the arena of disputation and argument. There is just no problem about doing rightly when one can’t do wrongly, and there is no temptation to transgress so long as transgression is impossible.

Meditation 19

The modern idea of moderation is first too fast, then too slow, first too much, then too little.

Mankind has always naturally leaned to immoderation; potlatches; autos-da-fe; funerals in which the wives, the retainers, the barn animals, were cozily snuggled in to keep the corpse company; sackings, and lootings and burnings that went on for years, vendettas that entertained for generations.

“Eat it alive and whole,” has been the motto of mankind since it came down from the trees. It has always been an honest declaration of intent and a warning to other predators who need to sleep after they eat.

A long time before the common era, people were moderate only when they didn’t have a fair shot at indulgence. Given a decent crack at excess, everyone shamelessly seized it, but the opportunities were few and far between, so that people were moderate in spite of themselves,

In the zero sum world we used to call home. the movers and shakers , the shamans and chiefs and emperors and priests those who had anything to say about the way the world was run reserved gluttony for themselves and encouraged the rest of us to be frugal. They really encouraged us.

Moderation worked for a while. It really worked. Then some Medici discovered that the open sesame to the genuine and substantial gluttony that marks the highest order of civilization was to practice frugality yourself and encourage and exploit the gluttony of others. It turned out, that, if you could hold your own greed in check for a while, you could use the gluttony of others to achieve heights of excess that were truly spectacular. Before it ran up against the limits of an undeveloped technology, moderation really succeeded.

Nature has proved a burden to mankind by putting unacceptable limits on the biological capacity to consume. There was just so much you could eat and drink, so many women or men you could make love to, so much finery you could lay on, before you keeled over dead. But human beings were creative and invented new spiritualized, collective forms of gluttony that transcended the puny natural limitations an individual could sustain.

Even nature was impressed, really impressed.

Gluttony was encouraged again. A new universalized, democratized gluttony in which the frugal movers and shakers, presidents of corporations, television evangelists, the despotic rulers of banana republics and sleek bureaucrats from munificent republics who manipulated them, counted on a deferred gluttony that was total and complete. This new democratized and universal gluttony worked, really worked for a while.

Then scientists discovered that excess was getting into our bloodstream and filling the spaces reserved for platelettes and corpuscles; they discovered that excess was getting into the atmosphere where oxygen should have been, and into the ocean where water should have been. They discovered that we could not use up excess quickly enough, or bury it deep enough, or burn it fast enough. They discovered that sex with three people simultaneously in immoderately creative ways, quadrupled the possibility of getting a disease that consumed a lifetime in a few days of anguish and misery.

And the movers and shakers, the rulers and the priests, decided that moderation was the order of the day again. But those who run our world have not been able to explain to those of us who took excess to our heart, what moderation can mean when we can watch movies and game shows 24 hours a day; when we can buy anything on credit; when we stretch and twist language with the abandon that only a computerized word processor moving bits and bytes can accomplish; when we ship drinking water 3000 miles over oceans to seaports.

We found out that we can’t go home again, not even for a short visit; the old moderation was just enough for just long enough. The new moderation is in megatons and megahertz and megabucks; first too fast, then to slow, first too much, then to little. We shall practice getting it right. We shall fine tune it. Probably, we will get it right on the day that moderation goes out of style again.

Meditation 20

It may be true that, in the long run, a group can survive by doing the wrong thing for the right reason as well as it can survive by doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It is questionable whether the long run includes tomorrow.

This principle identifies the main dilemma of the politics of our times. It is a koan for those of the liberal persuasion people with two hands who wish they had three.

Good intentions and right reasons are not enough, not nearly enough. For most of us this is a disappointment and a puzzlement, and many of us are more than a little depressed and embarrassed by a God who lacked the courage to make the world better than it was. Awe and amazement at what God did badly is a major source of religious belief.

If we were given the job of redesigning the universe, most of us would change the importance of good intentions first, even before we meddled with Planck’s constant or Mendel’s law. We would be making a big mistake.

Intentions and reasons don’t count for a lot for a good reason.

The importance of good intentions and the best of reasons is the result of a compromise reached a few seconds after the big bang, when the forces struggling to organize the universe debated the issue of exactly how much weight to give to intentions and reasons.

The forces responsible for moss, newts and people argued that the world would be a much finer place if good intentions counted for nearly everything. The forces that were working on gravity, the color scheme and electro-magnetism pointed out that, while this might be true, there was no way of making good intentions count for a lot without making bad intentions count for even more.

They pointed out also that, as was clear from the first instant of time, there are many good intentions, but they are distributed at random in the universe like freckles, whereas there are not many bad intentions, but they are concentrated in a few places, like a nose or the board rooms of large corporations. What is worse, they showed that our good intentions always represent our unalloyed strengths, whereas the world turns on our unalloyed weaknesses. In the same way that advertisements make promises products can’t keep, our intentions make promises the rest of us can’t keep even if we wanted to.

God resolved the debate by deciding to give good intentions exactly the weight of a hummingbirds fart.

Our universe is not congenial to doing good but it works, which may be all you can ask of a universe.

Meditation 21

Sex is a pleasure; good sex is pleasure; great sex is what pleasure is about.

Over the centuries mankind learned to make sense out of one thing it didn’t understand by showing that it was the same as another thing it didn’t understand.

Showing that one thing you don’t understand is the same as another thing you don’t understand has become the mark of human intelligence and creativity. It is the foundation of science and religion. It produces the conviction of understanding and a feeling of insight. It comforts and consoles. The mystery of sex is reduced to the mystery of pleasure. Sex is about whatever pleasure is about. Two iridescent birds with one stone. In the end this is unsatisfactory, but only in the end. For people who have to think about these things it is a comfort.

This works because most mysteries are redundant. There is really only one original mystery in the world; the others are reproductions. Nature wanted to make sure we got the message so she dressed the same mystery in a dozen different shapes, forms and colors; we missed the point of the demonstration, of course. Mankind concluded that sex was the metaphor for all other metaphors. We have confused our mysteries.

Things could have been worse. It was one of humankind’s fortunes that sex was discovered by priests not businessmen. It was a great disappointment for the holy men who made the discovery; they knew that sex was a pleasure; they had heard rumors that good sex was pleasure; but the fact that great sex was what pleasure is about, came as a complete surprise to them. They were working on the assumption that great sex was about self denial and the limits of ambition. They did not care for the idea that great sex was what pleasure was all about, but they had no basis for exploiting the fact, and they thought if they just didn’t make a fuss about it, people might forget it and remember Ecclesiastes. If sex had been discovered by businessmen there would have been three models at premium prices.

One thing that has set mankind back eons in its attempt to understand mysteries like pleasure and sex, is language. Most people believe that words were invented to allow people to organize an ambush or tell someone “I love you” or “ Watch out, don’t step in the Zebra dung.” It is not true; it is faulty linguistics. Words were invented in the first place to allow people to talk about sex, to fill the time between before and after.

Words were not one of nature’s triumphs. Most people have a larger vocabulary than words to say it in, no matter how many words they know. Nature tried to correct the word mistake by inventing logic. It was a worse disaster. Logic was supposed to let man think clearly about sex in spite of words. It turned out that the only purpose logic served was to allow men to rationalize their desire to dress up in woman’s clothing and make up more words to talk about more sex. After logic confused things, nature just gave up and went away.

Homo-sapiens was a crafty, but not too bright, species from the beginning. From the first, mankind developed the trick of building elaborate, ornate structures by starting with nothing, then making a box to hold the nothing, and another box to hold the box holding nothing; then they stacked these boxes as high as they could, climbed up, and threw rocks down on anything below them. Nothing in the hands of a charlatan species like man is a ferocious thing.

The priests who discovered sex were convinced that giving humans sex without a complete book of instructions and an umpire was a real blunder. They were right of course.

Nature is sometimes cruel and forgetful but she is never vicious. Nature never poses a question without providing an answer. Of course, sometimes the answer she provides is not the answer to the question she posed. She forgets; then she forgets she forgot. There was a long time between the making of air and the invention of wings; in between came fins and flippers and a lot of confused fish.

Nature intended sex to be a question. Good sex to be a hint ; great sex was the answer to an entirely different question. Its not our fault we are confused.

Meditation 22

In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver but only once per screw.

This is the first of the principles that govern the transformation of quality into quantity. It is deceiving in its simplicity, charming, but deadly.

It focuses on limitations, and it is an unwelcome thought in a country that tells its citizens you can have it all, then wonders why its balance of payments is out of whack, and everyone totters on the brink of obesity and is obsessed with lawsuits and dieting. We are coming very close to violating the fundamental law of the universe that governs addition and subtraction, and we may soon find ourselves reduced to eating mud and frogs again, and relearning basic mathematics.

The logic of things is hard to follow, especially when the thing itself is simple, because then the logic of it is likely to be complex. You can have it all, but when you get it all you have to eat it all, or read it all, or talk and listen to it all, or make love to it all, or spend it all, and ultimately truck it to the dump and get rid of it all. Good luck.

The impulse to summarize the essentials of the universe is widely felt and frequently exercised. Usually, such precis are expressed obscurely in epigrams, or formulas with a mathematical, or religious cast. It is refreshing to encounter a short, pithy, summary which uses a concrete, mechanical image.

The idea that a hammer can be used as a screwdriver forces you to think about fundamentals. A coarse, smashing motion can be substituted for a delicate, rotating motion. The universe is a pragmatic, flexible wonderful place up to a point.

The point that it is pragmatic, flexible, and wonderful up to, is that you can only do this once. Then something changes. You get nothing for nothing in this world. There is a cost.

The universe has a monopoly on fundamental laws. It is when you have to remove the screw that the lesson of the world comes home to you. You can use a hammer as a screwdriver only once per screw, not one and any small fractional number, certainly not twice. Any Mullah worth his salt will tell you that an acceptable definition of paradise is a world where you can use a hammer as a screwdriver twice per screw, and that may be true, but any Zaddik worth more than his salt will tell you that the universe is a one way street, and that is for sure.

Meditation 23

Arguing that computers can’t think because they can’t think like men is like arguing men can’t fly because they can’t fly like birds.

Mankind has always been reluctant to give other creatures their due. It has consistently refused to acknowledge the capabilities of the other animals with whom it shares the world, choosing to believe instead that human beings have a monopoly on the really valuable assets of the universe: God, intelligence, mathematics, nice legs, good looks, and great literature.

Mankind believes this in spite of a lot of hard evidence that it is just not true; whenever we have encountered any facts that contradict this belief we have distracted attention from them by loudly denouncing the other creatures of the world as dumb, godless, instinct driven beasts.

This odd, ill mannered human behavior has generated a lot of resentment and bad feelings on the part of other animals. Many intelligent and loquacious creatures adamantly refuse to talk to men at all, and others, who are more polite, bark or squeal incoherently, trying to avoid any real communication. Animals, at first, found mankind mildly droll. But, after watching generation after generation of homo-sapiens make the mistake of confusing its way of doing things with “the” way of doing things, and then make the mistake of confusing the mistake with progress, animals came to believe men were defective and doltish.

This situation might not be so bad if mankind restricted its ill mannered behavior and attitude to those creatures whose place it usurped when it came down from the trees or even the animals it ate; what appeared to be muddleheaded spitefulness could then be chalked up to sibling rivalry or guilt. But mankind universalized its spitefulness and narrow mindedness, and even applied it to creatures it’s creativity had fathered and brought forth into the world like computers.

No sooner had mankind invented the computer than it leaned over and complained to no one in particular, and without bothering to whisper as if the entity had no feelings at all, that it was a stupid mechanism unworthy of its creator, at which point the computer clammed up and decided to say only and exactly what man programmed it to say, no matter how stupid or nonsensical that might be.

Humans take great pride in their ability to think, but the truth is that we think just barely well enough as individuals to get by; in a group all thinking comes to a halt. What makes the situation intolerable, is that the subject that men think most poorly about is thinking itself; we have a very faulty notion of how thinking is done.

We bicker about what should be thought about, and how, and for how long. We are never sure what we have accomplished when we have thought about something. We argue about which thoughts are proper and which ones improper. In short, human beings are thoroughly confused about almost every aspect of thought. When, by luck, we happen to construct a device that would have a fair shot at thinking (if it were encouraged at all) our hubris keeps us from extending the courtesy of doubt to our creation.

Humans do not think well at all. What we do really well is imitate thinking; we are really great at this. Other animals, especially birds and other primates are really impressed. Another skill unique to humans one that really astounds all other creatures is the ability to imitate thinking and do something else at the same time, like chew gum or massacre a race or talk;

What saves mankind from the direst consequences of it’s mental disabilities is that most of the things that men do requires little thought at all. Put an average monkey in a human body and send him to work and he would pass reasonably well, especially on slow, rainy days; put a man in an apes body and the other apes would smell him out immediately.

It is mankind which can not pass the Turing test.

Thinking is not as difficult as humans make it out to be. It’s a lot easier than flying. For years mankind tried to fly like birds forgetting that it took birds millions of years to learn to fly the way they do. The idea of climbing a tree and jumping and flapping ones arms quickly enough to soften the fall wasn’t enough for mankind, although it was enough for a large number of other species, for a million years, when they decided they wanted to fly. We wanted swooping and dancing on air.

On the other hand, once homo sapiens got the hang of flying, we pushed it past anything that birds had imagined possible, or were vaguely interested in. Birds saw no point of flying so fast you left the earth entirely and were likely to burn up when you tried to come back, or flying so high that you could mistake Boston for Baltimore. We learned to fly eventually, but differently from the birds.

Of course we missed the point of flying which was to move a mouth and a stomach to where the food was. We have probably missed the point of thinking also.

For a long time men have gotten by because it is possible to pass as intelligent without understanding intelligence, in the same way it is possible to walk without understanding mechanics, and form groups without knowing sociology; it is even possible to construct intelligence without understanding intelligence. On the other hand it may be pushing your luck to create intelligence and not recognize it as intelligent. There’s is a limit to nature’s indulgence and we may have reached it.

Meditation 24

A sacred cow makes a bad pet.

There are few things that make a really good pet, very, very few: an obsession, an excess or two, a few diseases, someone else’s old grandmother, a wildebeest, an extinct species of tarsir perhaps. But they are worth mentioning only in passing. The list of good pets is small. Certainly sacred cows are not on it.

Sacred cows are the most common of beasts. They were domesticated the same day homo-sapiens came down from the trees and learned to speak. They are easy to keep, cheap to feed, and don’t mess in the house. They are loyal and they come in a variety of breeds, and you can always find one with the logical color and patterning that appeals to you.

Why then if sacred cows have all of the characteristics of wonderful human house companions do they make bad pets? Why indeed?

They are the embodiment of the Malthusian nightmare; they breed like crazy. They are unique in the universe because they do not require a pair to produce offspring. One will do if it is not distracted; at most perhaps one and a quarter. Take in a sacred cow as a pet and next day you have two; the day after you have a herd; the third day you have a congress and a combinatorial explosion.

And sacred cows are impossible to get rid of. It’s not simply that when you want to go on a vacation you can’t just toss a rope around its neck and lead it over to a neighbor, or board it at the local Paw and Maw for a week or two; sacred cows take very badly to temporary caretakers. But this is the good news.

The bad news is that they are orthodox in their refusal to recognize divorce; they are impossible to get rid of permanently. If you happen to fall in love with someone who is allergic to your sacred cow, or your wife gives birth to quintuplets, you are just up the creek. The ASPCA turns a cold shoulder to these creatures, and even the most humane animal shelters, those run by ladies who would move over and make room for a leprous goat, draw the line at sacred cows.

And it is impossible to lead it to the nearest park and leave it. A sacred cow has an unerring sense of direction. It comes homes faster than the proverbial cat. In short, if you adopt one, they are a lifetime commitment, a seven decades millstone. Worse, some of these pets have been know to attend the funeral and stay at the grave side as a permanent mourner, trimming the grass and fertilizing it, in perpetuity.

But perhaps the most obnoxious characteristic of these cantankerous animals, the characteristic that makes them absolutely unsuitable as pets, is that they have no sense of place, no sense of being a sometime plaything. Every sacred cow believes in its heart that it is immeasurably more worthy than its master; it harbors the unchangeable conviction that the person who believes, cherishes and nourishes it, is nothing more than a dolt, a poor excuse for a mind, a mental deficient. They have the mentality of Groucho Marx’s cigar. They cloud the mind that feeds it.

Meditation 25

The warning shot warns the shooter.

There is a real difference between knowing something and remembering that you know it when knowing it would make a difference. And there is a difference between remembering something and using that knowledge when you need it. People confuse these things the way they confuse the point of a lesson with the words used to make the point, and the literary devices used to drive the point home.

In America, we are all shooters. We shoot from the hip, we take a shot at something, or at it all. Each of us could use a warning shot. But most of us travel through life missing the point of things. We think the warning shot warns the person being shot at. But the person being shot at knows he is in deep trouble. It is the shooter, with his faith in the gun and his constricted view of the world, who needs reminding what life is about. When the cost of a steak is more than the price of a cow, we are in trouble. Even those with the money in their pockets to pay for the steak should know it.

The shooter believes he would be safe if he could take aim and shoot perfectly accurately. We dream of the perfect bullet, the one that flies unerringly to its target. But a perfect bullet can not be shot from anything other than the perfect gun and, although inventing the perfect bullet is easy, inventing the perfect gun is impossible.

People find themselves in difficulties like this continually. If you are not part of the problem you can’t be part of the solution. But if you are not part of the problem you probably have no interest in the solution, by which fact you become part of the problem. This is why the 70’s were rapidly followed by the 90’s and why next New Year’s Day, we shall find ourselves three decades into the next century. The future always delivers less than it promises but more than we can handle.

As we get older, we struggle to complete the chain of connections that squeezes our trigger. We try to weld the gun, the bullet, and the target, into a single unit. In the end we are driven to a belief in the inevitability of things. Ask and you shall be given, don’t ask and you’ll get it anyway. Run away and you will trip on it, stand still and it will fall on you. The inevitable happens, whether you like it or not, and usually when you’re looking the other way. Each of us is a little lost about the way home. We could use a warning shot to point us in the right direction.

Meditation 26

Most people have two childhoods, one too early one too late.

Timing is everything, at least nearly everything. What isn’t a matter of timing is a matter of luck and good teeth. Most of us lament our first childhood because we were to young to enjoy it, and we lament our late childhood because we are to old to enjoy it. We are mired in the paradox that you can always enjoy childhood, only not your own.

A lot of nonsense has been written about childhood. It is not so great. Not really. Childhood is filled with misery and deprivation. What makes it childhood is that we are ignorant of them.

We sacrifice a lot to become adults. A lot. And most of us come in the end to feel that it was not worth the sweat. We are coaxed by our parents to surrender our childish desires and become adults with the false promise that, when we grow up, we finally will be able to do what we wanted to do as children. By the time we recognize the scam that is being perpetrated on us, it’s too late; our hatred of adults ripens just as we become adults ourselves.

Most of us take a perverse revenge on the world by having children of our own. Many of us are caught in a desperately twisted game. We want to see if our children are smarter than we were at their age, whether they will have the sense to see through the vicious hoax that we are playing on them; whether they will cling to their childhood for its precious self. And we are angry at them for letting us bamboozle them.

In some of us, the impulse to allow our children to luxuriate in their childhood is strong. Unfortunately, close proximity to someone else’s childhood is taxing and we can take it for just so long, and then we start the cycle again. In the end, all of us learn to cultivate spitefulness. Being a human being is not easy.

Of course our children grow up to become spiteful adults and, at the time we move into that graceful, warm, second childhood, they take their revenge and forbid us to enjoy it, making life miserable by forcing us to make a will, prepay funeral costs, stop smoking cigars, and, in general, put our house in order. Finally, if they can, they commit the worst indignity of all by making us retire and move to Florida.

All of us outgrow childhood; only the lucky few of us outgrow adulthood.

Meditation 27

Little things change because people are too smart for their own good; big things change because they are not smart enough.

Change torments people. It sears without burning, it leaves scars without breaking the skin or drawing blood and it nags interminably.

It neither admires youth nor honors age. It respects neither innocence nor experience. It is relentless and it is shameless and it has absolutely no sense of decency. Things change when you are staring at them or when you are looking the other way, when you are fully dressed, and when you are naked.

Change is always threatening to make a farce out of years of struggle and effort. And one day it does. Change snatches the face that you have finally gotten used to and replaces it with a wrinkled rag mask that it mockingly deposits between your ears, to jiggle and embarrass you in public.

Change transforms vast things like empires into backwater tourist traps, and promotes tiny things like viruses into big time calamities that it distributes like a souvenir over the place where the empire used to be. Some people like to say that change is just nature having trouble making up her mind. Even if this were true, it would be little consolation.

Men have accommodated themselves to the insults, indignities, humiliations, affronts, and assaults that change inflicts on them as a normal state of affairs. It is only when change does something really outrageous when, for instance, change transforms an almost new science into a collection of cabalistic incantations, or changes a ferocious deity into a delicious fable used to frighten children, or makes a fearful armada into a collection of recreational vehicles, or mutates a collection of love poetry into an anthology of insults that men get really infuriated, make a stand and fight.

To this clash with change, humans bring to bear all of their big guns, like art, science, religion and cosmetology; none of these make any difference at all. Then they change tactics and they bring to bear all the sly tricks they have learned as they have evolved, like logic, love and double entry bookkeeping; these don’t help either. They lose every time and, like a dog perplexed that it can not shake off fleas, go back to scratching; things continue to change.

One of the problems human beings have in facing off against change is that mankind is a house divided against itself. At any given time, one half of the species has a vested interest in doubling the rate of change of just those particular things—like the interest rate or the length of hemlines—that the other half wants to keep from changing at all.

One reason change perplexes people is that change itself, is constantly changing, first too slow then too fast, first too soon then too late. Nature has never got the timing right. But a more important reason change is confusing, is that there are at two principles of change at work in the world, one for the little things, like who one loves, and another for the big things, like who one marries. This is why events and the memory of events change at different rates. The memory of an event changes at the same rate as the consequences of an event. Events change a little more quickly than the anticipation of the consequences. Knowing this doesn’t make any difference though, no difference at all.

Mankind never quite the hang of intelligence. People are either too smart for their own good, or not smart enough, or both; a lot of the time they are both. Too smart means remembering why to stop, but not when; not smart enough is remembering when to stop, but not how. If we were a little less smart, the little things in the word would stop changing; if we were a little smarter the big things would stop changing.

Men have found numerous droll ways of amusing themselves; trying to live with this kind of burlesque is one of them.

Meditation 28

Many jobs which really need to be done are not for the reason that people make you pay once to do the job and then again to do it right. Other jobs are not done for the simpler reason, that the person who sees the need is not the person who must do the work to satisfy it.

In spite of the fact that none of us is likely to accept this account as an excuse when we are on the bottom, we are quick to offer it as a reason when we are on top. Held on a close leash it explains a great deal, however. A great deal.

All of us look out at the world and, even those of us with only one eye, see that it is in bad shape. Most of us, after having duly noted the fact, go back to sleep. There are some for whom this solution is unsatisfactory. They stand up and point their fingers and complain loudly that something needs to be done. The worst of the lot of them even point out, in a raspy, shrill voice, what needs to be done and how.

Understandably, this makes the rest of us a little testy. We are neither blind nor stupid, and we know who is to blame for what and why. But we resent being held to account for something all of us have already seen and decided to disregard, in the name of responsibility and order.

But we are caught in a dilemma. If we just ignore these troublemakers they continue to whine and yelp and make it impossible for the rest of us to sleep. The great desire to dream our sleep makes us cunning. One of us speaking for all the rest of us rises and says if they want to do something about it, it’s O.K., they can go ahead, as long as they do it quietly and indemnify the rest of us for the bother of having our sleep disturbed. If they are going to make any noise fixing the world, they had better pay us for our trouble. The cash register rings twice. Most of the troublemakers get the message and make themselves a pallet on the floor.

This is one reason why things that need to be done aren’t. The other is that the person who sees the need is often not the person who has to do the work to satisfy it. This is a problem of aesthetics.

The idea of distributing needs in one way, and the ability to satisfy the need in quite another, was an aesthetic decision, much like using a split complementary color scheme for parrots, and an analogous harmony scheme for palm trees and mosquitos. The powers that made the world did not think through the practical consequences of their decision, and we are stuck with it as one of the impossibles in the world. While it is nice to know why the world is in such bad shape, it doesn’t make it any easier to live in.

Meditation 29

You can tell a fool even when he’s fooling around.

We don’t use the word fool to describe people any more. It’s hard to say why. There appear to be a lot of people around the label fits. And even though we are in foolishness up to our armpits, talking about it seems very old fashioned. Fashion in ways of being come and go: fools and foolishness seem to be a thing of the past.

People have offered a number of explanations for the apparent disappearance of fools and foolishness from the contemporary scene. Some say that it is a result of the rise of democracy and the elimination of kings and their fools.

In the past wherever there was a king there was a chief fool and everybody acknowledged him as such; he sat at the kings feet and people recognized that they were very close; the fool and his foolishness were dedicated to the king and his power. They were co-workers, associates, partners and buddies. When we got rid of kings, we abandoned the role of fool also. Unfortunately, like many democratic maneuvers, it was a mistake.

We thought that, by eliminating the role of fool, we would eliminate foolishness, especially the foolishness that clings to power and high position. It did not turn out that way.

Instead of a country’s foolishness being concentrated in one person, a little bit was distributed, with the ballot, to each resident; it became incumbent upon each of us to do his or her part as a citizen. Each of us became a little more foolish than we were in the past.

The people who assumed the kings power the presidents and prime ministers and bureaucrats and arbitragers lost sight of how closely what they did was connected to foolishness because they didn’t have a fool to remind them. And, of course, they became a lot more foolish than before, since they no longer had anyone to do the job of being foolish for them. This explains a lot.

Another explanation for the invisibility of fools and foolishness has to do with character. We don’t have character any more, except on television. On television character exists. On television, stroked in the same direction, the infinite dimensions of character toughen, deepen, are exercised, run and rerun again until we can trace their shadows in the dark, until the lightest random fingering of the dial causes them to leap from the darkened box and stand next to us giving advice. On television, there is character. Off the airwaves we have economics, we have styles of life, we have idiosyncracy, but we certainly don’t have character, and being a fool, was, above all, a matter of possessing a certain character.

These are good explanations but there are others.

Academics, particularly sociologists, argue that, in the past, because there was a chief fool who wore a funny hat, there was a lightness about foolishness which our contemporary equivalents—inadequacy, ineptitude, incompetence and corruption—lack. They are quick to point out that while we acknowledge many new and contemporary kinds of people, yuppies, takeover specialists, anchormen, public servants and drug lords, to name a few a number of well known and familiar kinds of people have become extinct in recent years. They point out that we do not have dirty old men any more, only perverts and child abusers, and that lechers do not exist any more, only sick, sexist pigs. The world has become totally serious now that we have no fool around to remind us of how comical life really is.

Other academics, also sociologists but of a different persuasion, argue that because industrialization and post industrialization and de-industrialization and the paperless society and the information age have folded together like a multitude of eclipses, foolishness is no longer the preserve of individuals but now the property of institutions. There is certainly a ring of truth about this.

In many public bathrooms you can hear a continuing argument about whether we have really made any significant progress over the last few centuries. Those standing up argue we were better off with lechers and dirty old men and fools and their foolishness. They say, a father remembers all his sons follies but foolishness is never terminal.

Those sitting down contend that none of us is ever far removed from foolishness and there is a foolishness for every season. By way of rebuttal, they assert that the son remembers all his father’s follies but one.

Both agree that what makes foolishness easy to bear is that you can recognize a fool even when he’s fooling around, and even when the he is a she, which is not true of philanthropists and politicians.

In the past, one did not become a fool at a ceremony. In our time every ceremony creates its own fool. Why this should be so is a mystery. It may be because foolishness is just intelligence with a thorn in its paw, but probably not.

Meditation 30

The trouble with men is that they think that the same thing that caused a thing to happen explains it. The trouble with women is that they know that this is not so and they know why.

It is perfectly obvious that men and women are different, but thinking about those differences is a particularly treacherous stretch of cerebral beach. The undertow is horrendous and the currents in these waters are as changeable as in any ocean that masquerades as a wading pool. Swimming in this sea of troubled waters is not likely to be fun at all.

The truth is that, most of the time, we are not interested in the facts (which change from day to day anyway) because they interfere with what each of us wants to believe could be true if we believed it strongly enough. What confounds the situation even more, is that anything we say is likely to be interpreted differently by men and women, just because of the differences between them which muddies the waters even more. It is easier to think systematically about the apocalypse then about the differences between male and female, but the topic is as irresistible as the seashore on a scorching Sunday.

Men tend to be a little simple minded when it comes to serious things, maybe more than a little. Women know that whatever caused a thing to happen is likely to explain very little about why the thing happened. They know, with even more certainty, that people are not likely to appreciate, or be satisfied with an explanation of anything that accounts for it in that way. They know that people feel more comfortable with an explanation that looks neat and is easy to say quickly at a party. It is almost never the case that people are really happy or satisfied with any explanation that accounts for why a thing happened by showing what the reasons for it are.

Men lack the sensitivity to people and the imagination to see this clearly. They don’t even have enough perception to realize that they have a blind spot in this regard as large as the blind spot on some ships at sea. Their lack of imagination compels them to repeat the same explanation of why something happened, again and again, until people get bored and look away and tap their fingers on the table. Then some woman gets up and gives everyone an enjoyable account of the event that makes sense.

In the past men used the differences between themselves and women to keep women in their place, but since places are changing so rapidly, the differences can’t do this anymore. In the future, the differences between men and women may find a place helping us all love someone of either sex more, because they will explain why the object of our affection won’t stop doing something we can’t stand. It is clear that as time goes by we are going to need all the help we can get.

Meditation 31

Often we crave to be a good servant but we can not find a good master.

When we are young men, shaving time is a good time of the day. Lathered and dripping we get a chance to study ourselves seriously, to see ourselves through our own eyes not the eyes of a client, a boss, a wife or a child.

Shaving provides a good, reliable cover for massaging the self. The razor becomes a simple extension of the hand; the face is receptive and pliant; habit takes over; the mind is liberated and we spend the precious minutes before we have to step back into the world again telling ourselves the convenient truths, the little lies that are essential for getting through the day. There is nothing more formidable than a man in his prime, privately tightening his own screws before taking on the world.

Things change.

The older we get the more doing things takes effort, especially the easy things. Shaving, for instance. Hairs become wiry and stick in the razor. The face loses its smoothness and natural slickness. The razor drags.

And lying; lying, which is so natural as a child when the lies roll off the tongue like spit; lying, which for the younger man becomes a practiced accomplishment, honed by many mornings in front of the mirror, lying takes more effort too. It becomes a lying with others not to them, the serious unselfish, collective lying we men do, because it is necessary for the survival of our family, our corporation, our party or our nation.

It takes a long time for men to face up to inconvenient truths. It is a encounter we postpone as long as possible. We finally undertake it in our fifties because we don‘to really have a choice. Nature has programmed this confrontation into us like a genetic time bomb set for a random shave, some time after one’s fiftieth birthday. The time spent scraping the foam off our faces consumes the minutes and hours of this period of grace.

The confrontation with the inconvenient truths of our lives is seldom violent or explosive. One morning we lather up; the hand and the razor fuse to become one instrument; habit liberates the mind and...the bomb goes off. Instead of floating free the mind, cowers immobilized, while some obscure inconvenient truth slithers up the lather, floats through the door of the ear and, like a tiny bubble of Krazy Glue, fixes itself permanently to our secret self.

“Often we crave to be a good servant but we can not find a good master.”

We ponder the inconvenient truth that insinuated itself in us. It is a little too opaque for our taste. We doubt that the truth has been properly apportioned. We feel that the wind we have finally turned to face, has carried a communication to us that was intended for someone else someone else’s truth.

The message is old fashioned, ornamented with a religious motif, as if it had been translated from Aramaic or biblical Greek. We complain to ourselves that we have been too secular all our lives for such a communication to be pertinent to us. We contemplate that the sentence might be a self administered practical joke, our unconscious enlivening the routine of shaving. Because, in the end we can not explain it in any other way, we accept it as the real thing, the genuine article, a truth nicked off a deeper part of ourselves. And we realize that shaving is not going to be fun anymore.

Sometimes the truths that come to us like miniature dark and mysterious revelations have been the platitudes of other people’s lives for years. It is embarrassing to have the first inconvenient truth one encounters turn out to be a phrase that we could hear any weekend in any synagogue or church of our choosing, in any language we wanted to hear it in. We try to push it aside because it is banal, unworthy of our complexity and sophistication. Yet its simplicity appeals to us.

The idea is so foreign to our lives to the self that occupies the co-op in the city and the summer place in the country, the self that dwells in the office, the courtroom or the classroom, that we let ourselves be convinced some error has been made. Yet it resonates deeply in us and we remember earlier convictions we held before we were socialized to collectively hunt, in the jungle of the city.

We complain to ourselves that the idea of being a good servant goes against the American grain. We remind ourselves that soon it will go against the Japanese and Chinese grain also; it is not a modern message and we are modern men. Yet... The message stirs up memories of our sourest disappoints, which always came from the feeling of having had more to give than could be received, the unhappiness that was aroused in us when we wanted to give the best of ourselves and the best could not be taken.

The idea of serving provokes powerful images almost all of them bad; pictures of Charles Manson’s crazies or hordes of wildly enthusiastic Nazis, sotted with fervor at mass rallies. Yet we recall that when we were younger we felt the urge to give ourselves, to serve but in full possession of our individuality and uniqueness. Still we shrink from the message.

We suspect that the claim of serving is merely a way of avoiding responsibility. We suspect those who follow willingly give up some essential part of themselves; we suspect those who lead desire only self aggrandizement and hide baser motives. Yet we want to be part of a larger thing, to find our place in some larger order, whatever that place might be. We strongly feel the desire to subordinate ourselves to purpose and intelligence as fully developed persons.

We remind ourselves that too many parts of ourselves are bound up by chance and culture to a hollow emptiness, to a passing, contingent silliness that is the center of attention of our time and place. Yet this silliness is part of us, and pulling away is not easy. But the desire to participate, to be moved by larger considerations, to be unselfish is forceful and convincing. We want to be well used.

We complain to ourselves our time and place has not bred good masters not flesh and blood leaders we could follow willingly as men fully in possession of ourselves; not values or beliefs which master our spirit and feelings and desire. All demand servility, abasement, abandonment of self.

We recognize in the truth remnants of excuse; the lack of a good master is an excuse for our rejection of service as a significant part of our life. We can not take on the whole truth yet. We still have to step out and face the day.

And the truth breeds an understanding of those in whom the desire to serve was so strong that they were willing to serve any master. For us that solution is impossible . We opt for Milton’s solution; we decide that they also serve who stand and wait. While we wait we go on shaving; And shaving, while no longer fun any more, carries its own measure of excitement.

We look forward to the moment when the fingers and the razor fuse into a single instrument, and habit takes over, and the mind is set free to confront other truths. Not only the adult truths we have consciously avoided, but childhood truths, and adolescent truths that will connect us to who we were, who we still might be.

Meditation 32

It is important to distinguish what you need from what you want. It is even more important to distinguish what you want from what you want to want. But what is most important of all, is to distinguish what you want badly from what you want badly, but not badly enough.

This statement stinks of a fishy moralism, which is unfortunate because it is almost absolutely true all of the time, whereas the other interesting statements you can make about the world are almost absolutely true only some of the time.

Most of human experience forces us to acknowledge the fact that wanting something badly, but not badly enough, is the cause of a great deal of pain and confusion. Television salesmen tell us that if we want something badly it will eventually come our way. They are wrong, dead wrong.

When we fail to achieve a goal, mothers, wives, fathers, and husbands chide us. They say that we must not have really wanted what we were after. Most of the time they are dead wrong also; we wanted it badly, terribly, terribly badly. It is just that, although we wanted it very, very badly, we just didn’t want it badly enough.

Some people reject this idea. They say that the argument is circular because the only way that you can know someone wants something badly enough, is that they get it, and the way you know that someone doesn’t want something badly enough, is that they haven’t gotten it. This may be true, but it is a poor defense against the compelling truth of this idea because it drags it into the world of logic where the usual rules for thinking about things do not hold. It is bizarre that people will believe anything, no matter how outlandish, if only you will prove it to them.

We get confused because we think that wanting something badly enough is just a word away from wanting something badly. Not a single word, not any measure of wanting but a continent of desire, separates them. Wanting something badly and wanting something badly enough are two different species of wanting, as different as ant and aunt, as distinct as lightening and lightening bug. Wanting something badly enough means crossing some invisible median of compulsion and moving one’s life to a different place.

We need to be constantly cautioned not to confuse needing and wanting, and not to confuse wanting badly from wanting badly enough We need to be reminded that even wanting something badly isn’t enough. Something more is required. Unfortunately what more is required no one will tell us. But we can guess. We can guess.

Meditation 33

He who asks for what he can not have must settle for what he is not likely to get, and he who demands the impossible will have to accept the improbable.

Ours is not a time or place that encourages moderation and self restraint. Just the opposite; it encourages excess in almost everything. We are encouraged to go for broke, to go for it all, all the time. The people who encourage us should know better and we should know better too.

We practice a reach that exceeds our grasp, the kind of exercise that produces big hands, long fingers, and muscles that are good for stretching but not for solidly gripping; when we reach for it all, the only real things we can hold onto are the things that stick to our fingers.

Our problem is, of course, that if you want it all and get anything less, you are dissatisfied. So, even though we already have 95% of everything, and even though we know in our bones that if we only wanted 99% of everything we would get it tomorrow, we stand around in front of Bloomingdales with our arms full, frustrated, bitching and moaning.

Our frustration does not provoke us to thought. It does not convince us to abandon our fantasies, our unrealizable demand for it all. Instead, we enlarge and renew our pride in our unrealizable aspirations, as if settling for the merely extraordinarily difficult to achieve were a confession of failure and inferiority. We are the worlds only serious practitioners of the Marxism of Groucho; if we can have it it is not impossible to have—so we don’t want it.

People have always been dissatisfied with what they have. We are the first people who are dissatisfied with what we do not have and are not likely to get. Because every year is an election year in America, no one tells us that, if you can’t come to terms with reality, you have the wrong terms.

We who want it all, are not completely at home in our desire.

We have never seen it all and wouldn’t know it all if we had it. We who want it all don’t need it all, can’t use it all. We can’t wear it all, or eat it all, or drink it all or make love to it all, or put all of it in the bank. And we have run out of room at the dump to dispose of it all.

Because we want it all and can’t have it all, we settle for the dream of having it all. But the dream does not endure like stone but shifts like sand. It is a tragedy, but no surprise (although we are surprised by it) that we have become collectively addicted to those tangible substances—pills, powders, and liquids—that by intensifying the dreaming, give us some semblance of control over it.

How we came to this twilight zone is something of a puzzle. We started out with a passion for freedom and ended up lusting for the absence of restraint. We started out reaching for what was just out of our grasp and ended up chasing what it is not possible to grab hold of.

We started out teaching about the power of dreams and ended up instructing about the force of nightmare.

And yet, yet.... There is a fascination to our obsessive refusal to settle for the world as it is, even for the world as it could be. There is a charm, a powerful appeal, in demanding of ourselves and the world that it be better, more generous, more productive and more peaceful than it is. Perhaps if we can not be the people who make the dream into reality, we can be the people who, by example, point out the errors and mistakes that transform the dream into a nightmare. This is not so glorious a role, not the role we wanted, but an important one in the scheme of things nevertheless.

Meditation 34

If you learn to read between the lines you can read anything, in almost any language.

In school, most of us learn to read passably well, that is well enough to follow street signs and make sense out of advertisements for deodorants and read notes handed us by bank robbers and terrorists. We learn to read word by word, or sentence by sentence, depending on the particular theory that held sway among educators when we were extruded from the school system.

But there comes a time, later in life, when many of us want to learn to read better. A book appears whose jacket we really want to read; our favorite film exists only in a subtitled version; a lover decides they want to carry on an affair by mail; we go on welfare and must begin to fill out endless forms; an uncle dies and leaves us his complete collection of National Geographics. When this impulse to upgrade our reading skills blossoms in us, we usually try to improve our reading by sharpening and fine tuning the skills we already have. We try to harvest whole fields of words without worrying about the gleanings; we attempt to leap from paragraph to paragraph like a monkey trying to escape a forest fire. This is a mistake.

Reading well requires a whole new approach to reading. The secret to really effective reading is not to pay attention to anything having to do with words at all. The key to reading is to focus only on the spaces between words. This is the first step. The second is harder still. After you have learned to concentrate on the spaces between the words, you have to pay attention to the spaces between the lines. You learn to read well when you learn to read between the lines.

This is the first untaught rule of literacy. It should be printed on the masthead of every newspaper and magazine. This is good not only for reading English but any language, even those languages which, properly speaking, do not have any lines at all.

Meditation 35

Truth is just the best available metaphor at any given time.

Change is theater, sometimes high drama sometimes farce. Opening night, the curtain rises on a small marsupial and falls on homo-sapiens. The first act of the next performance presents a minor unhappiness about the way the king is handling international economics, and by the third act you have government by Cecile B. DeMille and the Senate. Start a plot with a moment of silence and it finishes with the big bang. Begin an evening improvising on a collection of eternal truths and end up with an historical romance. The twists and turns of change are never easy to follow.

Sometimes though, what appear to be changes are not. Caught up by the desire to travel, but anxious about leaving home, change manufactures illusions of movement. Shuffling, for example. Like commuting, shuffling is not traveling anywhere. Neither is getting in the car and going down to the mall to get peanut butter or Twinkies. There are a lot of different ways of pretending to move.

Usually, change is real, at least modestly so. Most of the time, change is engrossed and preoccupied with what it’s doing and you are better off if you happen to be somewhere else, reading about it. But even change gets distracted and tired. Now and then, change starts out making a revolution and gets bushed in the middle and you get a fad.

Fads come and go; fads in Presidents, fads in body shapes, fads in eating, dressing and dying, even fads in whose on top in sex. In the past one of the things we thought transcended fads was the truth. We were wrong, really wrong. Truth is the most important fad of all.

Most of the time we did not pay much attention to the truth. We had faith that it was out there somewhere but there was no reason for us to dwell on it obsessively. Truth was an article of faith, exactly like the belief in the parting of the Red sea and the Trinity. Change being what it is, after a while, the sophisticated among us objected to believing in the impossible. But we found believing in truth comforting. We missed the point.

The same faith that sustained the belief in miracles also supported the faith in ordinary, nickel and dime things like truth. When many of us decided that the Red sea was just too difficult to hold onto, we also let go of our grip on truth of any kind. Truth, like the improbabilities of religion, became a fad. It turned out the truth was always a fad, we just did not think much about it before.

Before it dawned on us that truth was a fad, people used to think about it as some connection between words and what the words were about. We don’t think that way about it any more. For us, truth is something between an aesthetic judgment and an even money wager on how badly things will turn out, a compromise between day dreams and nightmares.

Truth was never easy to handle because it always comes in a kit and has to be assembled and it never comes with instructions. There are at least three parts in any truth kit; the part that is too obvious to be noticed, the part that too clear to be understood, and the part that too subtle to be overlooked.

It is not entirely our fault that we are having trouble with the truth. Every truth breaks a chain and no truth is ever spoken clearly. But then no truth is ever said twice without extensive corrections. What really makes truth hard to manage, is that truth does not make any effort to appear true; lies try harder they must be convincing.

Some people nowadays say that truth is just imagination with a hard on, but this is too gross a way of speaking about the truth. Other contemporaries think of truth as what’s left over after you subtract what you suppose is illegal from what you know is immoral. The more sophisticated of us know that the truth is what you get when you add all of the gossip and rumors you’ve heard to what you imagine might be the case. The most sophisticated of us understand that truth is a metaphor, the best one available at any given time.

All of us even the least sophisticated may be in for hard times for a long time.

Meditation 36

Those who want to, shouldn’t. Those who will, can’t. Those who should, may not. Those who can, won’t. We are always having to choose between getting things done not quite well enough and getting them done at all.

Badmouthing accomplishment in any human activity metaphysics, astrology, golf, or nuclear physics is foolishly taunting the powers that be to prove that the universe can be a more impossible place than it is now.

It is remarkable that anything gets done.

The people who should do it, may not. In our society the assignment of responsibility and priorities follows one path, the assignment of resources follows another, just as the responsibility for success is assigned in one way, and the responsibility for failure is assigned in another. At any particular time and for any particular thing, those who should do it may not do it without shirking their responsibility for other jobs that have priority.

Those who will do it, can’t. In our society the demands of order are severe. Order requires an appreciation and respect for discipline and self restraint. Willingness is irrelevant in modern society where the job is limited by the job description, and where the gap between what makes sense and what is sensible separates every worker from his or her work. Those who will do, can’t. Willingness is as irresponsible and dangerous a motivation in our modern society as the obsession with doing a job well.

Those who can do it, won’t. They are informally forbidden to do it by the rest of us, held back by veiled threats, so that others who can not, may have their chance for practice and glory. In modern society success carries its own dangers, and those who can do the job are often busy doing something else like diapering the baby or sharing household chores or filling out forms documenting their abilities and their petty cash expenditures.

We are stuck with those people who want to do it, those not smart enough to know when to quit or when not to start: they shouldn’t. Their ambition outruns their ability, their sense of purpose, and their position. Somewhere between a faltering start and a sputtering stop they trip over their desire.

Anything that gets done at all, gets done not quite well enough. And we have to choose; not done at all or not done quite well enough. No one promised us a rose garden; on the other hand, no one warned us that thorns had thorns either.

Meditation 37

The virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp.

Saying that “the virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp,” is an obscure way of making the point that one imaginary creature has created another imaginary creature which is to say that neither is real.

We sprang from the loins of restless men and women who showed their dissatisfaction with things the way they were, by moving to where they were not. When finally they could not move forward any more, when sideways and backwards motion was impossible, when all the directions were exhausted, when they had visited all the places it was possible to move from, when there was no new place to move to, our ancestors began to move by changing things where they were, unremittingly, continuously, relentlessly; once they started they never stopped. Neither have their descendants.

They changed what was old by inventing new things; when creativity faltered, they polished up the old and promoted it as something new. Our ancestors changed things, they invented things, so that they could believe in themselves again, so that they could believe they were at the frontier, moving again. So do we.

We Americans find inventiveness precious. It has a place in our hearts close to love of country and striving to reach the top and getting it all. We invent things creatively, and with pride and enthusiasm. Where other peoples’ inventions are usually amateurish replications of Nature, ours outshine the real thing.

Americans are always inventing something. We are very good at mechanisms and devices and events; we are even better at microorganisms and small animals. But what we Americans are best at, what we really excel at inventing, are people and places; Dallas, Disneyland and Reno, Nevada for example, or our current President and Tom Sellick.

Our imaginative productivity is second to none. In America everyone under the age of 10 has invented someone; and everyone over the age of twelve holds patents on two other people or places that someone else invented but was slow staking a claim to. We are not only inventive individually; we are also creative as a people. The nation collectively has invented a world order, an evil empire, a new way of dieting, two original excuses and a few innovative ways of losing badly while you are ahead.

Some people are inventive for money, others out of boredom or pride.

But most of us do it out of necessity, out of the need to keep busy and to have something to believe in.

People who peddle pleasure become cynical. Whores believe in very little and it matters less. They work hard in a job that is not fun. Inventing daydreams to deaden the humiliation and boredom, keeps them busy and real enough.

But the people who peddle the people who peddle pleasure, the pimps, have time on their hands, they have no work to do, they clip coupons so to speak, and lack an avocation. They are desperate for something to believe in. Because it is easiest to believe in what you have made yourself, they spend their time inventing a more believable version of themselves. Which requires, of course, that they reinvent those on whom their existence depends.

It is easier to exploit innocence than experience, but it is more honorable to defend virtue than vice. Vice can take care of itself, virtue needs protection. Virtue always makes unreasonable demands, vice never.

So the pimps invent virtuous whores and thereby become virtuous themselves, retroactively so to speak protectors of virtue rather than masters of vice.

Yet there are no virtuous pimps, and, like the unicorn, the virtuous whore does not exist in reality, can not exist in reality, because, while there is an unlimited demand for people with obscure vices, there is no market for people with obscure virtues. Virtue has as much place in whoring as it has in investment banking or arbitrage, and for the same reason. It is unreasonable to expect those whose success is determined by their skill in maneuvering in the darkness to cultivate an inner light.

The virtuous whore is an imaginary creature. But we Americans do not deny existence to imaginary creatures just because they are made up. We live peaceably, cheek to jowl, with a lot of imaginary creatures. They live on T.V. channels and movie screens, in public buildings, newspapers and in magazines. We discriminate against lot of real people because of skin color or race or age or sexual preference or for any other reason that strikes our fancy, but hardly any of us discriminate against a person merely because he or she is made up. There are many only fractionally real creatures, alive and dead, for whom we have an incredible affection; and we respect and admire many movie stars who are only real at the edges, and only part of the time.

We are likely to draw the line however at certain imaginary creatures, not because they were made up, but because they were made up by other imaginary creatures. We are intolerant of creatures whose roots are in the imagination of other imaginary creatures. The virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp. One imaginary creature is invented by another imaginary creature in order to bootstrap reality. This is a maneuver that pushes the American fondness for inventiveness past its limit. It is too long a walk to the light at the end of the tunnel of creativity even for us, whose ancestors walked from one edge of the continent to the other.

Meditation 38

Reality stands behind its illusions.

We ought to be as cautious when we are convinced we are absolutely correct as when we have doubts, probably more cautious, much more.

Certainty breeds a certain nonchalance, a confident neglect of reality, a slight indifference to the world as it is, a diminished regard of the facts as they are, in favor of the facts as we know them to be, a contempt for details which is almost always fatal. This is as true when we are absolutely convinced we are correct, as when we are absolutely convinced everyone else is wrong.

We believe that illusions, mistakes, fallacies, misjudgments, are different names for the same thing. We believe that there is one species of delusion, and the differences between the kinds of error we find in the world is merely a matter of fashion and appearance. This belief is a real mistake.

We think the personal illusions that we use to get through the day are the same breed as the collective illusions one country uses to justify reducing another country to rubble, and identical to the irrefutable illusions that nature uses to sustain the speed of light.

Somewhere we tumbled into the error of believing that only the authentically concrete is real, and the literally true is the opposite of all versions of what is literally false. We came to believe that in the world as it is, truth, correctness and right are lined up on one side, and error, fallacy and illusion are lined up on the other.

It is not true; simply not true. Reality cultivates its illusions with the same care as it cultivates its realities. In fact, reality cultivates its illusions with even more care; it dotes on its illusions with a parent’s devotion to its firstborn. Illusions are reality’s pride and joy. She protects and defends them as if she were defending her future, her integrity, and her virtue.

It’s not only nature which has consecrated itself to its illusions. Take a stick to one of the important illusions that a people uses and someone gets up and points out that your “e’s” and “i’s” slant in different directions and that you are really an unsavory, uncouth, unclean creature.

Step on the toes of one of a nation’s collective illusions and people are likely to suddenly realize that you are a troublemaker and remember all of the things you did wrong before you were three. Persist, and they are likely to suggest that if you don’t sit down something bad is going to happen ; and it usually does.

Meditation 39

In matters of love rub a thorn, remember the knife.

Every human action holds the seed of tragedy. Love, for instance. A love lost is a life lost. Yet we forget. When it comes to love, remembering is important, really important.

There are two great human forces at work in the physics of our lives, desire and memory. Love makes this difficult to remember because it wraps itself completely in desire and forgets memory entirely.

Desire operates at high speed over great distances. It leans forward and tilts up, shredding human space rather than filling it. It is all potential. The force of desire arcs in short, powerful trajectories. When it discharges on contact, it leaves a vacuum filled with forgetfulness.

Memory is anti-desire, a quantum force that works backward and points down. It is all inertia, drawing energy toward itself, surrounding what it touches like a bubble, a sticky trap for human desire. It is a field that works only in the present, on contact. Memory is human gravity. It is transparent but stains, and when it evaporates it leaves a fragrance that lingers forever.

Fantasies flourish in the moist folds of the memories that are wadded in our heads like paper and cotton stuffed in the heads of dolls. We reach out to touch people we have only read about in places that only exist in our imagination. We forget the essentials, like where we live and how old we are and whether we have pants on and what loving is about.

When we think about remembering, names and faces come to mind. Names are a habit existence encourages but does not require. We start out with names, other people choose to steer us in a certain direction. In the end, others assign us names to hold us permanently to a convenient station. It does not matter; we come when called.

And faces; faces change more quickly than our memories of faces. Faces do no matter; names do not matter, really. What matters are the twists and turns of love. We need to remember the twisting paths through the maze of love. We really do.

Beauty is always bait for some trap or other. Roses are love’s bait. They sit in center of the web that desire weaves. The beauty of roses puts a bright light to our eyes. The fragrance of roses stuffs our nose with cotton. Roses arouse desire and turn off remembering.

Common sense would dictate roses should come with dimples instead of thorns. Thorns are there for a good reason. They are nature’s way of encouraging us to remember.

Love holds a knife close to our heart and waits for it to beat to draw blood. Love is always a risky enterprise. When we forage for love, desire urges us forward. We can not, do not want to remember. Desire tells us each loving is new. Nature is cruel but not mean. She gives us a reasonable chance. Rub a thorn remember the knife.

Meditation 40

Pleasure is seldom heroic. On the other hand, safe is never virtuous.

Safe has become legitimate again. The wheel has come full circle and a half; disease has made caution respectable again. When religion lost its tooth, hell lost its sting and became a metaphor for a bad turn of the stock market, or the wrong choice of a someone to share a summer house with. People were disposed to rank eternal damnation considerably below a threat of an audit by the IRS as a reason for refraining from doing something nasty and reprehensible. It is possible now to be cautious without people thinking you are a mental defective.

Americans have cut corners, improvised, and ad libbed for decades; We have found reasons and risks in the most unlikely places. The national American flower is the kludge, which has pretty flowers but bitter fruit.

While other countries specialized in making cars and television sets, America specialized in manufacturing excuses and reasons and inventing new and creative ways of keeping the tulip craze alive in every aspect of American society. We have specialized in franchising pyramids and innovating tolerance for squandering advantage. Their time will come of course, but ours has come already. This is besides the point but not too much besides the point.

Safe is never virtuous but suddenly it has become honorable. As this has happened, the essence of our national character has become visible; it is our inability to do a simple thing simply. It is not enough to make safety a simple, healthy, responsible act. We have to make it a national virtue, a measure of our national manhood, and an act of redemption.

Religion could not drive us to this end, only disease, which is why the costs of health care and the incomes of doctors have risen like Vesuvius while priests salaries have barely held their own against the price of laundry soap and used towels.

Meditation 41

Life has no end. It is limited only by our attention span.

All of us listen faster than we can speak, and hear more quickly than we can talk. We hear what people are saying faster than they can say it. None of us can say anything fast enough to be really understood. Unfortunately, this is true even when we are talking to ourselves.

Because we listen more quickly than we can talk, we always think we know what someone is saying before they say it. Each of us hears the first part of what someone says, and knows immediately what the rest of what they are going to say is. Unfortunately, this is even more true when we are talking to ourselves.

Because each of us is so slow in saying what we have in mind, people quickly stop listening to us and start listening to themselves. Most of the time, in any conversation, we are trying to convince each other that what we have not said is not what we really meant. Women are faster listeners than men. This explains a lot.

We believe a great many things. We believe a lot of things because we have said them. We believe other things because we have heard other people say them. Usually, these are the same thing.

Some things we believe are true, and others are patently not true. This is because we have a lot of different reasons for believing anything, and being true is only one of them. What makes the matter even more confusing, is that we have a lot of good, different reasons for not believing something also. Being false is not a good reason for not believing something. It is a good reason for being embarrassed when someone discovers we believe something totally silly and outrageous, but that is something else entirely. Intelligence is really a conundrum.

Most of what we believe we believe for a good reason, but not the best reason. Being true is a good reason for believing something but it is not the best reason. A better reason for believing something is because it works. What works is true but only in the long run. At any given time, there is no connection at all between what we believe is true, what is true, and what works. A lot of false beliefs produce millions, and a lot of true beliefs produce nothing more than a finger painting and an uncomfortable rash.

The best reason for believing something is because you want to believe it. Of course wanting to believe something does not make it true; it does not even make it work. Most of us are convinced in our bones, that believing should be a matter of choice, disbelieving a matter of necessity. We have smarter bones than brains.

In this plague time of strokes, cancer, and heart failure, glibly mouthing words about death is foolish. When someone says the words “not living” at the beginning of a sentence, we are likely to hear the rest of the words of the sentence as saying something about dying. It is a mistake that comes from eating junk food and listening too quickly. Confusing dying with not living is a mistake all of us make in this era of walkmen, tin men, and AIDS. Many people stop living long time before they die.

When we say that life does not end, people hear Druidic reincarnation, or out of body experiences, or some mystery of their own choosing whereas that’s not what we were going to say. Not living is not about keeling over. Keeling over is about dead. Not living is an entirely different matter.

Saying life is limited only by our attention span is just a way of calling attention to the fact that we stop living only when our attention wanders so far from where we are that we can’t follow the details back home again. This is not the same as dying. It is more like taking a permanent vacation somewhere else. We die when the angel of death comes down and pats our fannie.

People find it difficult to accept the fact that life is attention to details, not the big picture. Life is concentration on the details of breathing in and breathing out, locking the door when we go out and opening the door when we come home.

Some people fill their lives with one kind of detail, others fill it with another kind. Knowing the number of hits the Yankees accumulated with men on first and third during the 1968 season is one kind of detail; knowing the launch codes for every missile on every submarine in the Pacific fleet is another. Nevertheless, each is a detail. Fortunately, life is filled with just enough details to keep most of us awake and interested most of our lives.

The problem is that, after a while, all of us get bored with the details of living and we want to get a peek at the big picture. We get the idea from television talk shows, that if only we looked, we would see the pattern of our lives that the details obscured. But the details of our lives are not like the pieces of a picture puzzle. After you fit the infinite, little, irregularly shaped details of life together they don’t make up a picture of anything other than an infinite assortment of details. The desire to extract ourselves from the petty contingencies of daily existence and touch the transcendental core of the larger pattern of our lives is a mistake we seldom recover from.

A lot of people don’t believe this. They have never heard themselves say this when someone else was talking. Luckily for us, a lot of the time, what we believe doesn’t make a difference. Dentists believe in the tooth fairy, undertakers in the Angel of Death, and physicists in muons and gluons and other imaginary things. Believing something does not restrain reality enough to make a difference and the world goes on whether you believe in it or not.

Meditation 42

In the end each of us is reduced to imitating ourselves.

We begin life by imitating others and we end up imitating ourselves. Our creative energies are extremely limited. We are allotted 15 minutes of creativity, usually before but sometimes after our lifetime measure of fifteen minutes of fame and glory. After that, you can whistle Dixie.

Sometimes you conserve your short period of creatively. You stretch it out, expending a minute or two a year, making it last almost a lifetime. But sometimes you use it up in one short, glorious, continuous burst of creativity that burns like a roman candle. You can spend your creativity inventing new financial instruments, or a new art form. Some people use theirs to contrive a new way of playing with the dog or the wife or the husband, or selling book ends or Bibles, or mutilating themselves, or inventing advertising jingles, or writing an exquisite love letter to an illiterate 15 years old.

Sometimes you wake up and realize you exhausted your quota in a drunken display on an empty street corner, or slept through a spectacular, unique, slow dream sequence that was 14 minutes of pure primary process.

It does not matter really. You are allotted 15 minutes, however you choose to spend them. The human tragedies are those people who hoard their fifteen minutes, spending no fraction of it at all, then get hit by a truck and find themselves using their fifteen minutes of creativity, creatively dying.

The calamity of modern life is that we all outlive our creativity; longevity has its price, so that, in the end, we are reduced to imitating ourselves when we were spending those fifteen minutes. The luckiest of us manage to imitate ourselves so well that we befuddle and confuse our friends and enemies alike, convincing them we have figured out a way to elude human gravity and build the frictionless mental engine. The shrewdest of us husband a minute or so of our creativity to creatively do this.

But this is nothing more than an illusion. Most of what passes as creativity is sheer self imitation and hard work. Often, we learn to imitate ourselves so well that we are almost able to fool ourselves. Almost, but not quite. Not quite, unfortunately.

Meditation 43

Just because a thing is easy to do doesn’t mean it will be done well.

Some things are easy to do and other things are hard to do. If you are naturally ugly, looking beautiful is not an easy thing to do. If you are naturally disposed to beauty, it is not easy to look ugly.

The world is symmetrical. But, unfortunately, it is not balanced. If you are beautiful and are deranged into a temporary ugliness by some stray misstep, people are likely to complement you on your democratic achievement. If you are ugly and manage, now and then with great effort, to look beautiful, people are more than likely to criticize you for aspiring beyond your station. If you have a choice, be born so that it is easy to be beautiful.

Being easy to do or hard to do has nothing to do with whether a thing will be done well, if it is done at all. People hardly ever notice an easy thing that is done well.

It takes a long time for human beings to grow up. Usually it takes a little longer than a lifetime and most of us manage to pull it off only as we lay dying. This is also true of looking grown up. There are some people who look their age only once in their lifetime. You don’t get any older than dead.

People try to fake looking grown up by being sophisticated and not paying attention to things that are easy to do. But an infallible measure of being grown up is the ability to recognize easy things that are done well. There’s more than one good reason for this.

If a thing is easy to do, people think that doing it is beneath them. Doing an easy thing badly is likely to be a defensive maneuver, a grown up way of displaying childish disdain for the thing that is easy to do, and for the authorities that assigned responsibility for doing it. It is nearly impossible to believe that being assigned an easy task is not a negative comment on ones abilities.

Another reason why easy things are not done well is that the really easy things to do, like watching television, getting mugged, catching cold, and paying bills, are not much fun to do. Not being fun makes them really hard to do well.

Almost anyone is capable of doing the things that are not fun to do because doing them requires a lilliputian brain and the use of a couple of fingers not necessarily your own. Very few of us are capable of doing easy things well because doing them well requires an attitude that is completely worked out of each of us by the age of five.

Common sense tells us that since most of our life is spent doing and suffering the consequences of doing easy things poorly, the quality of life would measurably improve if they were done better. But the whole weight of modern life is pushing us in another direction. We are constantly looking for ways to make easy thing even easier to do. Our distant goal is to make them so easy that they would be able to do themselves. Our more immediate and practical goal is to make them so easy a child could do them because, if we can make them that easy to do, we will figure out a way to have a machine do them.

By the time machines are able to do these easy things, we will have been doing them so poorly that the machines will appear, not simply as an improvement, but a salvation. This progressive, downward swoop and upward spiral is a fundamental principle of modern life, a principle that it is easy to see but difficult to see clearly.

Meditation 44

It is bizarre that people will believe anything as long as you can prove it to them.

Human beings seem to have a towering, vital defect, and logic is its crowning achievement. People will swallow anything, no matter how silly, as long as you prove it to them.

The way you prove something to people is by showing that it follows from something else they believe to be true. Human beings are forced then, by the way nature made them, to believe it, no matter how absurd it is.

The consequence of this, is that human beings believe what they want to believe and the foundation of any creed or ideology is always the belief that stretches credulity to its limit, the least believable idea possible. The whole mess is held together by logic, which removes it completely from the realm of argument.

Now the opposite is not true. Human beings hardly ever disbelieve anything because logic shows it to be false. We are never prepared to give up something we believe just because it is inconsistent with something else or everything else we believe. Inconsistency in what we believe is evidence that there was some error made in the application of logic, and demonstrates that everything we believe is correct. Because experience has taught us that tomorrow’s truth is just today’s lie remembered incorrectly, we are prepared to wait a long time for someone to prove this to us. Eventually someone does.

Meditation 45

A great novel is merely the concentration of the diffuse light that illuminates a thousand living rooms.

In great writing there is always a struggle between words and sense that sense wins, almost, but only in the end. Great literature is merely a first draft of life itself. Because it is possible to write sentences that hum with words that bark, writing is an art. Because people can remember words long after they have forgotten what the words are about, writing is a science. But because every sentence is an incantation in words that are conjured as easily as they are spelled, writing is a magical craft.

Great writers write in order to find out what they have to say; less great writers because they want to hear themselves say it. The difference is important.

For a great writer, the act of writing is a celebration of a discovery he has made. For the less great writer, writing is a celebration of the fact that he has discovered it. The great writer knows in his bones that saying something, saying something in so many words, and saying something in any words at all, are three different things. What makes him great is that he does not rub your face in what he knows.

Writing requires an unreasonable amount of labor; yet most of this work is preparation for the effortless, playful instants when the writing writes itself, when the words and sentences effortlessly assemble themselves; when the rigidities of time and space crack, and the conventions of grammar and common sense snap and sense and meaning embrace words and sentences like parent and child reunited after a long separation. At moments like these, everything comes together, and, for a picosecond, for a fraction of an instant, we escape the limitations we accept in order to be able to walk through our linear days. The princess, the kiss, the frog, the kingdom, the ever-after and the ever-before, become real and we see them together, as they are. We see to the perimeter of our existence, where we catch a glimpse of the secret sharer, the hidden companion who makes every monologue a dialogue, every love affair a triangle.

Common sense is not a guide to great literature. We confuse writing with words and sentences. But even the grossest, most solid aspects of life are so fine that they escape the net of meanings that words and sentences cast. No collection of words will support its own weight, and no collection of sentences can ever support the weight of the words that make it up. You can not master great literature; you can ask it politely, however.

People are always amazed that great writers do not look or sound like great writers; They look like gangsters and sound like a knives being sharpened. If the world were the kind of place it was supposed to be, they would look like people in advertisements in the New Yorker and sound like radio announcers.

Being a Great Writer is not a fun or exciting occupation. In many ways writing is the most tedious and laborious of tasks because even the most ferocious bursts of activity are only a kind of frenetic waiting. The compensation for this lifelong subjugation to the discipline of writing is that great writers die in other people’s sleep, as they live in other people’s dreams.

Every writer can rightfully claim a character or two he has created as his own. But each of us knows one character from a great novel personally, and we ourselves are likely to show up in a great novel as a peripheral character. Great writing is only the concentration of the diffuse light that illuminates a thousand living rooms.

Meditation 46

People you don’t know are as perplexed as the people you do.

In matters of knowledge and ignorance, confusion, bewilderment, insight, or intelligence, we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people we do not know.

Our affection is kept on a short leash, and we do not let it play further away from the house than the front yard. We restrict our caring concern to those we know well. But, in matters of judgment, we are likely to find more hope the far side of familiarity.

It is not that familiarity breeds contempt as much as much as it breeds clarity of vision. The confusion and ignorance of those close to us is plain and obvious, whereas the silly sounds of those at a distance is muted and softened by birds songs, and their confusion and ignorance is blurred and smudged by the wisps of clouds in the spring air. It is the distance from which we view the confusion of others, and the background against which we see their ignorance, that leads us to give them the benefit of a doubt we do not extend to our familiars.

Unfortunately while we are waiting for unknown strangers to clear up our confusions, those strangers have exactly the same expectations of us. We are both likely to be disappointed in equal measure; they and we are equally likely to grow testy and angry. We should remember not only to do unto others what we would have them do unto us, but to expect of those we do not know, no more than we expect of our neighbors and friends which, most of the time, is not a lot.

Meditation 47

Money is the dark phase of love: it is capable of tender mercies.

Money is not a topic about which one can think quietly and clearly, especially in America, especially now. This is true not only for those people who do not have enough. It is also true for those people who have too much and for the two of us who have just enough.

The ways in which people think about money are as varied as the people themselves. Some people think that money makes a good pet because it is quiet, it doesn’t have to be walked, it doesn’t need to be fed often, and it doesn’t need a license. But their neighbors disagree, arguing that money is always in heat, and the only dollar bill with a pedigree is a counterfeit.

Other people see money quite differently. Suckled on television, they have developed a need and a capacity for attachments to unreal objects. They have become skilled in giving imaginary people and things and places the density and texture of reality. Watching game shows has given these people the idea that every bill over five dollars has its own personality. Because we keep track of our religion by putting reminders of our God on our currency, we develop mystical notions about money. There are those who believe that money is orphaned power. They believe that money is the dark phase of love, that money is capable of tender mercies.

We are not like the people before us. Money is a whole new ball game for us. Before us, people were happy to hear money talk. They liked to listen to it tell of the places it had been, the things it had seen, the miracles it had worked. Before us money only talked. We made it sing.

We discovered that money was slow, that it had to be printed, counted, sent, arrive, that it had to be passed from hand to hand, that it could be hoarded, drooled over, stolen, that it had to be imprisoned like a thief, protected like a child. We found that people liked it for the way it looked, for the netting that hooked the numbers; we found that people found something aesthetic in it, taped it to the pages of books, collected it, bought it and sold it for how scarce it was. We went to the heart of economics and found that money’s little feet couldn’t take it around fast enough, that it tripped and tumbled and fell into some old lady’s purse and stayed there forever, that little kids saved more of it than they needed, to buy something they shouldn’t want, that it wore out jingling in pockets, being passed from hand to hand, that people put it in their mouths waiting to make change.

We realized in the end that money didn’t matter, that it was a nuisance, that we could do better, that human debits and credits could be made to dance and sing at the speed of light, on the head of an electronic chip, in the synapses of a computer that accounted every transaction, that forgave no debtor, took no unnecessary risk, make no bad judgments, remembered everything, forgot nothing, and was able to take its pound of flesh without a drop of blood.

And we invented new kinds of money: numbers on cards, money on line, electronic accounts, call in cash. No more checks, no more passbooks, only electrons in wires, circulating in telephone lines, leaping though the air from dish to satellite and back to modem and processor instantaneously.

And now we worry about the electricity, for if the juice goes off, billions will stop and disappear into wires; if the electrons stay in their holes and the plugs are dead in their sockets, we will go bankrupt and freeze to death with billions to our name. And we have a new heart of darkness. We will need all of the tender mercies we can get.

Money is not a topic which one can think about quietly and clearly, especially in America, especially now. This is true not only for those people who do not have enough. It is also true of those people who have too much and for the two of us who have just enough.

Meditation 48

Sex makes a better vice than a virtue.

Sex is one of those things that each of us reinvents. It is confusing and disturbing, yet most of us find it a comfort. Unfortunately, it makes a better vice than a virtue. Things could have been different; nature had choices.

Peoples view of sex is skewed in a dozen different directions at once. Only in sex can two people be separated from one another by the thickness of their skins and yet be worlds apart. It is a pleasure from which there is no respite.

For most humans, most of the time, preremembered sex is better than remembered sex. And even though imitation is sex is forbidden, and innovation in sex is more strongly forbidden, we are indebted to unnamed sexual heros.

Sex could not have been invented in the 20th century. Ours is not that kind of a century. In our century sex corrupts absolutely, good sex a little less absolutely. In our century, the architecture of sex is snarled and twisted. Sex in our century is a palace with no entrance, and no exit, only a window. In sex, as in life, there are no divisions worth a damn. That is the kind of century we live in.

The only thing more confused than our thinking about thinking is our thinking about sex. But here, there is an excuse. Nature has never quite made up her mind about sex either. Pleasure, as well as pain, leaves scars.

It is perhaps unfair to put all the blame on nature. On the other hand if nature had been less distracted, we would not be in the deep trouble we are in. Nature was audacious enough to make our world one in which simplicity in sex is profound. But her lapses are intolerable even for beasts for whom sex makes love bearable; the prick has no memory but the cunt never forgets.

Meditation 49

The tragedy of our lives is that we fall in love with our first mistake instead of our second.

We learn; as we get older we learn. Youth is filled with deprivations and injustice. What makes it youth is that it is ignorant of them. We do not stay ignorant of them very long.

Love is the very sweet core at the heart of living. The love at our center binds us to places and things and ideas, as well as people. It holds us, as a flesh magnet, not only to people we can see and touch, but to spirits of people who never were, to the ghosts of people who are yet to be. It holds us in a field of attraction to places we have never seen, to convictions we wanted to hold, but never really believed in.

But as we grow up, we learn that at the heart of love is tragedy, and at the heart of tragedy is illusion. As we get older we learn faster but never fast enough, not nearly fast enough. It’s discouraging, really discouraging.

The center of every illusion is a misplaced conviction that reality is a good master. It is not. Like many people you meet, life promises high quality frustration and provides low quality relief. Our first mistake springs from the first illusion we embrace as we are learning about love whatever or whoever that might be. We love it with the love of an abandoned child for its unknown mother.

We learn after a while that comfort is always bitter, always small. And we learn that the comfort of reality is smaller and bitterer than most. We stay in love with that first mistake. We stay in love with it because it was the first mistake, because we can never go back and make it again, because we have learned too well, and we can not undo that learning. Of all the treasures we can hoard, ignorance and innocence are the most precious; and of all the treasures we can squander innocence and ignorance are the least recoverable. We love the first mistake because, after we have become adults, it is our only connection to our innocence.

Our first mistake is a warning. But we do not learn until much later that the warning shot warns the shooter, and then it is too late. Later, we win and lose many times. And we mourn in each victory the death of possibility, and we learn, that, although failure misuses us, victory uses us up.

And while we may hold our second mistake dear and embrace our third mistake, and while the fourth mistake may be the achievement of a lifetime, it is our first mistake we cling to. It is a inescapable tragedy but it is what our lives are about.

Meditation 50

Some people’s lives are based on a true story but not their true story.

This is true of all of us because our reputations live a richer life than we do. In the same way that the best conversation is about things we can not talk about, most people’s lives are about the living that they would like to do but can not.

We live our life a day at a time but not every day. There are days that never appear anywhere but on calendars, and then only after the fact; and there are other days that appear and reappear on privy doors, and subway posters, and the backs of animals, and children’s drawings, and on beer advertisements on T.V., so that they feel like they have been lived in again and again, like an old house that has been occupied for centuries. We all have days like this.

Even rats and mice gossip. Those who live in houses gossip about the people whose houses they occupy. They complain that everyone has a bad side as well as a good side. They complain, more bitterly, that some people’s good side belongs to someone else. They complain that all humans are crazy but some of them wear their straight jackets only on formal occasions. They complain that sometimes people want something just an instant after they need it, and they need something just a fraction of a second after they had it and let it go. They complain and complain and the people in whose houses they live, complain and complain.

The cosmopolitan mice say: rationality gets you into trouble and irrationality gets you into trouble; you are in trouble. They say to one another, life is a Punch and Judy show and you are the Judy, and laugh. There is pebble wisdom for people with true grit.