The idea (and title) for this piece came to me nearly a year ago, after the culmination of a long series of altercations with my neighbors. I tried to write it in various ways, but never felt as if I was capturing the full scope of the conflict. Eventually, I moved on to other projects and assumed this one would remain unwritten. This winter, however, I finally committed to reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is itself a meditation on love of neighbor, and in reading it I was inspired to revisit the aborted drafts. Two iterations on the theme I found compelling and worked on in tandem. I expected to prune one or the other, but in the end was convinced that they function best as a pair. Thus, what you have before you are sister pieces, intended to be read in order, the first informing the second and possibly vice versa.

For some time now, I’ve wanted to record audio narration of my newsletters in the hopes of reaching those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to read them but might listen to them during a commute or workout if given the option. It ended up being more of a process than I’d expected, but I have a finished product that I’m (relatively) happy with for my first-ever attempt at narration. You can listen to it below. Thanks to my brother for the title artwork and to you, for reading (or listening).

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Love Thy (Nextdoor) Neighbor: A Thought Experiment

A thought experiment: imagine that you live on the second floor of a two-story apartment building. Knock knock. It’s your landlord. He tells you that he’s about to rent out the vacant unit next to yours. “Only thing is,” he says, “I’ve got two applicants. The first is a little family. Mom’s a hospice nurse, dad stays at home with the kids.” He lowers his voice in exaggerated incredulity. “Five! Five kids. One starting kindergarten, one a bit younger, two-year-old twins, and a brand-new baby!” He whistles. “Wouldn’t wanna be in their shoes, tell you what.”

“Why are you bothering me with this?” you ask, trying to stifle your irritation. “Who’s the other applicant?”

Your landlord’s jolly face contorts in disgust. “A goddamn pedo,” he spits. He draws out each syllable, pee-dough. “But,” he continues, softening, “feller’s paid his debt and all that, so I figured I oughtn’t discriminate against him for it. Honestly, I was hoping you’d tell me you wouldn’t live next to a sex offender—wouldn’t tolerate it—and then I’d have a good excuse to send him packing. Well? What do you say?”

You’re astonished by the man’s seemingly limitless capacity for wasting your time. “Frankly,” you tell him, “it’s none of my business who you rent it to. I find it a little inappropriate, to be honest.” You glance conspicuously at your watch. “Look, I need to get back to—”

“Hypothetically,” he insists. “In theory. Who would you pick for a next-door neighbor?”

“Jesus Christ,” you blurt out in exasperation. The fastest way to get rid of him, though, might be to play along, and before you can summon the will to refuse, images of possible futures flood your imagination. First, the family: the mother rushing around in wrinkled scrubs, frazzled exterior, but there’s something about her solemn gray eyes, a rarefied aura of spiritual centeredness, as if they’ve seen something, something ineffable. There’s the father—earthbound, compared to his wife, his life deeply enmeshed with the lives of his children and preoccupied with the mundane day-to-day tasks of childrearing. He’s unpretentiously handsome, humble, a bit shy, but a great dad who, if you could fault him for anything, it would be that he is sometimes too quick to spare the rod. His children, though they love and respect him, know that he is a soft touch and sometimes take advantage of that fact.

Speaking of: the kids all look just like their mother, gray-eyed and golden-haired, except for the baby, who has dad’s auburn complexion and green eyes. You picture them growing up, imagine the sound of their laughter and quarrels, hear their shrieks echoing off the apartment building on a hot August night. Dad’s setting up a telescope on a tripod in the parking lot. One by one, they become silent as their turn comes to peer reverentially into the Milky Way. Then it’s January: at first, they’re throwing snowballs, but after one of the twins gets hit in the face, they shift gracefully into an effortless armistice, banding together to build a snowman. As they finish construction, they convene for a moment: something’s not right. The oldest comes up the stairs and knocks shyly on your door, one, two, three times. “Excuse me,” she says, nose running, her cheeks scarlet from the cold. “Do you have a carrot we can borrow?”

Then you picture him: mid-thirties, overweight, wire-frame glasses eternally slipping down the greasy bridge of his porcine nose. He wears shorts year-round; the two of you never speak, but there’s no denying that his unkempt goatee and adult acne repulse you. He gives you the creeps. Then—it’s irrational, but you can’t help it—you see him peaking out his window; he’s discreetly watching the kids as they thrust the carrot into the head of the snowman, and… You shudder, disgusted by the pedophile, but also by your own bigotry, because you, after all, created him.

Your landlord is still staring at you expectantly. “Well?” he asks.

“If you’re seriously asking me this, rent it to the family.” You start to shut the door, but he jams his foot in the way.

“You’re sure?” he asks.

“Yes,” you sigh, “I’m sure. Now get out.” And he does.

Love Thy (Upstairs) Neighbor: A Thought Experiment

A thought experiment: imagine that you live on the first floor of a two-story apartment complex. Knock knock knock. It’s your landlord. He’s come to tell you that the gravy train is over. The vacant apartment above yours will soon be occupied, no way around it, and he’s sorry, but the unit has hardwood floors, no carpet, and you’re going to hear every footfall, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

He sees your crestfallen face and takes pity on you. “Look,” he says, “I’ve gotta rent the place out—I’d go bankrupt letting it sit vacant. But,” he adds with a conspiratorial grin, “I’ve actually had two tenants apply for the place. I’ll do you a favor; since you’re the one who’ll have to live with them, I’ll let you cast the deciding vote.” He stares intently at you, expecting you to exhibit something resembling relief or even gratitude.

You’re unsure. “Okay,” you reply warily. “Tell me about the first tenant.”

He launches into the following spiel: “Salt of the earth, these folks. A young couple. The mom is a hospice nurse—a wonderful woman—and the dad stays at home with the little ones. Seems about as gentle a fellow as you’d hope to meet.”

You scowl. “Little ones? So they have kids?”

The landlord winks. “Boy howdy, they do. A five-year-old, a four-year-old, and twins, must be two or thereabouts from the looks of ‘em. Cuter than buttons. And another one fresh outta the oven.” A beatific expression comes over him, as if he is moved just by contemplating so wholesome a collective.

Involuntarily, you glance up at the low ceiling of your first-floor apartment. The sudden movement doesn’t escape your landlord. “Look,” he says, somewhat defensively. “I told ‘em that the place was too small for so many people, but they said it’s the most they could afford on her single income. And they were such nice folks. How could I turn them out in the cold? Seems mighty unchristian.”

“You’re a Christian?” you ask.

Annoyed, your landlord rolls his eyes. “It’s a figure of speech.” He shakes his head and sighs. “Didn’t realize I’d need to be so explicit, so literal with you.”

You nod—you won’t die on this hill, not today. “Tell me about the other applicant.”

It’s your landlord’s turn to scowl. “I ain’t too sure about him, to be quite honest. First things first, and just to be entirely upfront with you, he’s a sex offender. Tried to diddle some kids a few years back, got caught, and did his time. I don’t much like the look of him, but the landlord from his last place said his checks cleared and he was a model tenant. I guess he has some, uh, ‘work-from-home’ job, and when he’s not doing that, he’s playing computer games with his headphones on.” His upper lip curls. “Seems a bit antisocial by my lights. What kinda man just sits around, the whole damn day in the dark, listening to his earbuds, not making a peep?” He snorts in disgust.

Inexplicably, your landlord continues to expound upon the improbable peace and quiet you will enjoy if you choose the sex offender as your upstairs neighbor: “Spooky. Downright chilling, I’d say.” He mimes tapping the ceiling with an imaginary broom, calls up to an imaginary neighbor: “I mean, hello? Anybody up there? Still alive, you damn pervert, or are you dead?” He laughs, a little too mirthfully. “I mean, who needs that, not knowing whether your own neighbor is up there staring at a screen, or keeled over in front of it?”

Remembering his offer, he looks back at you. “Well?” he asks. “Should I let the family know they can move in as soon as they’re ready? I suppose I didn’t sell the pedo to you all that well. I reckon you don’t want to be sharing air with some pervert off the street.”

“No,” you start to say, but even as the word tumbles past your lips, your voice bounces off the ceiling of your apartment, which suddenly feels tomblike, mausoleum-like. You reconsider. “But. But, but, but…” You become pensive, philosophical. “Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance? The man did his time. Should one little mistake really follow him around for the rest of his life?”

And isn’t that right? You’re starting to convince yourself. He might be a decent fellow, a quiet fellow who made a terrible mistake. Besides: you’re not a prepubescent boy. Or was it girls he diddled? —no, no, allegedly diddled. “Look,” you say to your landlord, “for all we know, he could have been falsely accused. All he wants to do now is move on from the injustice. Shouldn’t we help him?” You see the scowl returning to your landlord’s face; he’s opening his mouth to argue. Before he can: “It might even keep him from falling back into old patterns.” Optimistic, but yes—surely having reliable shelter, a place to call home, can only aid in the man’s rehabilitation, can only ward against recidivism?

Your landlord looks at you skeptically. “I thought you said he was falsely convicted. What do you mean, old patterns?”

“Right, right,” you mutter. “Falsely convicted, most likely. A misunderstanding, maybe. But even if it wasn’t, he still needs a safe haven, away from temptation, to keep him from reoffending—”

The landlord frowns, then interrupts you as if he has just remembered some crucial extenuating circumstance. “Excuse me. I, er, misspoke. For the sake of argument, assume epistemic certainty. We know he’s guilty.”

“How do you know?” you protest. “What do you mean, epistemic certainty?”

“Pick your ethics: for our purposes, he’s a bad, bad man, unrepentant, perhaps incorrigible—but unobtrusive. He’s a ‘good’ upstairs neighbor.” His fingers wink air quotes as he contextualizes for you the tenant’s moral value. “And the family—very good people, ethically speaking, by whatever metric one measures such intangibles. We’ll just say that the world is objectively better off for their being in it. But through no fault of their own, they make your life a living hell, necessarily, just over the course of their day-to-day existence, by virtue of their spatial relationship to you. They’re ‘bad’ upstairs neighbors, as it were.”

Your head begins to swim. “Why are you talking like—”

“No!” he exclaims. “Just answer the damn question! Would you rather live beneath quiet John Wayne Gacy, or loud Mother Theresa?”

“What? Aren’t they both dead?”

“Larry Nassar, bound and gagged, or Dolly Parton learning to juggle?”

“Why would Dolly Parton want to live—”

“Adolf Eichmann’s corpse or living Oskar Schindler?” he recites frantically. “Paraplegic Pol Pot or Carl Sagan opening a bowling alley? Jeffrey Epstein, hanging from the rafters, or Greta Thunberg’s farm-animal sanctuary?”

“Greta Thunberg? She doesn’t have a—”

“Adam Lanza wearing slippers, or Harriet Tubman, but she drops a crate of ball bearings every hour on the hour? Emperor Palpatine force-levitating in the apartment above yours,” he practically screams, “or the extant Ewoks, celebrating their victory at the end of the original trilogy for all time?”

“Stop it,” you cry. “Enough! This is ridiculous.”

Suddenly drained of spirit, your landlord sputters a final, gasping hypothetical. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he pants, “and their donkey, or I keep it vacant?”

A surge of indignant reproach washes over you. “Keep it vacant,” you tell him, and shut the door.

Love Thy Neighbor: A Genealogy Of Quarrels

“I must make an admission,” Ivan began. “I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors. In my opinion, it’s precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

When our (former) downstairs neighbor, Darlene, moved in, I decided to introduce myself to her straight away. I had been on good terms with the previous (much younger) tenant—had helped her with little things, moving furniture, catching and releasing spiders—and I intended to be on good terms with Darlene, too. I saw that she was old and relied on a walker; accompanying her on the day she moved in was a middle-aged man, unloading her U-Haul truck, helping her get around. I watched them for a while from my window. After they had both gone inside, I went downstairs and knocked on the door. The man answered.

“Hi,” I said in greeting, sticking out my hand. “I’m Benji. I live upstairs with my wife, Hannah. I just wanted to introduce myself.”

Before the man could say anything, the old woman came tottering down the hall. “You’re my upstairs neighbor?” she blurted out. “But you’re so skinny.” I stared dumbly back at the stout widow. “I thought you must weigh five hundred pounds!”

Before I could ask her what she meant, the ceiling above us began to emit an oddly familiar clacking-and-scraping sound. It took me a moment to recognize it as our terrier’s nails as the little dog traipsed aimlessly around our apartment upstairs, because I had never heard them amplified thusly, as if the ceiling were vinyl and his stub claws the malfunctioning stylus of a record player. Then came the stampede: my petite wife’s footfall in the upper unit carried spectacularly through the smaller, unfortunate apartment. Hannah did sound much larger than she in fact was. Thud. Thud. Thud thud thud. The ceiling was so low that her feet seemed to slam not above me so much as atop me, on me, and I could feel the apartments’ communal framing shake. I could not escape the sensation that I was being buried alive, as if each of Hannah’s steps were the blow of a hammer upon the nails of my own coffin.

“Is that your wife?” Darlene asked, glancing up at the thundering ceiling, which was further away from her head than mine by almost two feet. Then, in mock comprehension, she answered her own question. “So she’s the one who weighs five hundred pounds.”

My face reddened; I fought the instinct to flee.

Instead, I forced an awkward chuckle and shook hands with the man, who introduced himself as Joe, Darlene’s adult son. He was helping his mother get settled into her new space. “Mom,” he said, “stop it.”

“It’s so loud,” she insisted.

Faced with the same circumstance today, I would tell the sundowning crone to get used to it, that such was the unjust and undignified nature of apartment living, and to consider herself lucky that she had managed to avoid upstairs neighbors for the bulk of her golden years. But back then I was soft. My heart had not yet been hardened against the plight of the elderly; I saw her and thought of my grandmothers, lonely widows themselves. I pictured my father’s mother, how—even in her last days, when she was sick and in pain and perpetually confused—her face lit up when she saw me, beautified by love. I imagined her living beneath a man my age, in similar circumstances. How would I hope he treated her? Easy: I apologized for the noise and told her we’d try to keep it down.

Then, in a mistake of unparalleled naivete, in my sentimentality I offered my phone number to Darlene and to her son. “Call me,” I told them, “if you ever need anything.”

Joe never did, but Darlene needed one thing often: an ear to register her complaints, which usually centered around the noise generated by Hannah or myself as we went innocuously about our lives, vacuuming, sweeping, closing the front door too loudly or too often. Even our walking became a point of contention, and I slipped into a dual role, wherein I was both the source of the elder’s misery and her succor, her only outlet. My phone would ring; heart sinking, I’d answer. “Hi, Darlene.”

“Do you have a herd of teenagers up there?” would come the voice of the senescing widow on the other line. I’d apologize—sincerely, much of the time, at least at first. I understood that it sucked. Not because we were especially noisy—we weren’t—but because she was an old woman in her twilight years who had lived most of her life in a nice house, with her nice husband, an Argentinian painter (and, to hear her tell it, saint) who she’d married before she was old enough to vote. Now, he was dead; instead of a house, a rented condo, a downstairs coffin. Instead of her paintbrush-wielding lover, a television frozen on Fox News that—no matter the volume—could not drown out the quaking ceiling, the stomp-scratch-clicking, the noise.

I felt for her, and so I indulged her. Her calls followed a predictable rhythm; after my apology, Darlene would complain a bit more and then wax sentimental, reminiscing over her deceased husband. Finally, she would turn the conversation to one or the other of her two favorite, still-living men: Jesus Christ, or Mike Pence. I’d listen long enough to be polite and then excuse myself, but only after promising that Hannah and I would redouble our efforts to limit the commotion. When our renewed vigilance inevitably proved insufficient, Darlene wouldn’t call again right away; instead, she’d sometimes open her front door and scream impotently up the stairs at Hannah or, in her more severe escalations, attack the ceiling with the butt of a broom. Despite her unremitting rudeness, we were kind to her. She had a sweet tooth, so we left her baked goods; Hannah, after sweeping our deck, would go around the apartment complex and clean the ingrate’s patio, too, though as far as we knew, Darlene never went outside.

Although I did not feel so at the time, I was still a young man. I know this because, in my many months of laborious and futile peacemaking, never did I compromise the tenuous détente by exploiting my inherently superior position over our powerless neighbor; Hannah and I walked on eggshells, on our tiptoes, in our own home for nearly two years. Idiot youth that I was, I still thought to turn the other cheek; I still believed in the possibility of goodness, that we meek might inherit the earth, might love our neighbor as ourselves. I was not an exemplar of perfect love; my thoughts, I am ashamed to say, would sometimes turn to the wickedness I could visit upon the old woman, the revenge I might exact.

“Imagine what she’d think,” I’d say to Hannah after getting off the phone with Darlene, “if we just stopped making an effort. We wouldn’t have to do anything, just… no effort.” Yes, I’d think, maybe we’ll show her how bad things can get… But we never did; we remained steadfast in our neighborliness. Not once after listening to the crippled old harpy lament her lot (and our role in it specifically) did I rejoin: that’s tough titty. I never told her to lose my number, to fuck off and die.

And so it came as a welcome surprise when, despite my never suggesting it, Darlene, in a display of hitherto unimaginable good manners, did fuck off. (I do not know whether she eventually also died.) It happened suddenly. She suffered a fall, and—though for someone of her advanced age and impoverished constitution, there are no unserious falls—this fall was not too serious, as falls go. I suppose it was just serious enough: a Goldilocks fall. It resulted in no broken hip, was no death sentence, but it put the fear of God in her son, who because of it decided to relocate his mother to some ostensibly safer environs.

On moving day, the widow called me for the last time. She was sentimental, feeling uncharacteristically fond of me, despite everything. Darlene could not bring herself to forgive Hannah, who she considered to be inconsiderate and a nuisance, and spoke neither well nor ill of her, but as for myself… well, I had been raised right, she told me, and my parents ought to be proud. Darlene voiced her hope that I would eventually come to Christ (I demurred—a soft ‘maybe’), stated her opinions on Joe Biden (unfavorable) and the ascendant novel coronavirus (fictional), then said her final goodbye.

Hannah and I had much reason to celebrate and little time in which to celebrate it. Before the month was out—before we’d even grown accustomed to walking like adults, heel-toe heel-toe—we had a new neighbor. Angie: another spinster, but not nearly so old, in her mid-fifties, perhaps, a spring chicken next to Darlene. She still drove and (thank God!) left her apartment almost every day for work or leisure.

I had learned my lesson, or so I thought. I exchanged numbers with Angie but was not overly friendly. She was the first to text: to thank me for shoveling snow from her walk and digging out her car. No problem, I texted back. For two years, this was about the long and short of it. I shoveled and was pleasant; Angie minded her own business.

At some point during Hannah’s pregnancy, Angie noticed and congratulated us. She expressed sympathy and concern to see Hannah climbing, day in and out, the stairs to our apartment; it was the most we’d ever spoken. When the time came, we went to the hospital and were gone for a few days. We returned with Angie’s third upstairs neighbor. She texted me: I left a little something for you on the porch. A onesie for Graham. It read “New To The Crew.” A bit big, but he’d grow into it. I sent her a picture of our newborn son, swaddled in his bassinet, and a quick text of gratitude. Thanks. So kind of you.

It is impossible to identify now the exact nature of my mistake: did I wrongly take myself to be exchanging neighborly pleasantries with a sane woman? Or was I in fact, and did my error lie in imagining that the sound mind cannot, if sufficiently perturbed, become unsound? Were there signs I missed that could have forewarned me of what was to come?

Perhaps. Angie’s flare of neighborly warmth was short-lived, and fair enough. When communications returned to the status quo of long-term radio silence, I thought little of it. Hannah and I, being sensitive upstairs neighbors, continued to live according to the strict asceticism Darlene had taught us: as monks, contorting our feet like ballerinas, stepping always in pointed, pained silence. During those hours in which Angie was away we went about our chores hurriedly, vacuuming and mopping before she returned and foregoing our labors altogether on those days she remained at home.

There was one problem: the newest initiate to our order, so silent during those probationary first weeks, proved soon to be an incorrigible noisemaker. The colicky novice screamed during the day, to be sure; but his most piercing and incalcitrant keening he reserved for those final hours before the first hint of dawn, when it is no longer night, and thus too late for an eleventh-hour turn of fortune, but not yet morning, and thus too early to surrender to one’s inevitable fate.

Hannah was the first to suspect that all was not well. “There’s no way she doesn’t hear us,” she told me. “She probably hears me crying, too—she probably hates me and thinks I’m a terrible mother.”

“No, no,” I offered distractedly. “Voices don’t carry through the floor in the same way. It really is the vibrations that are the worst—footsteps, dropping things. Even Darlene never complained about music or talking.” I said this to comfort Hannah, but I believed it, too. That’s physics, right? Besides, there was one room in our apartment where sound carried with uncanny fidelity: the bathroom, for whatever unfortunate reason, and so I assumed that what we could hear in there was the exception that proved the rule. But, just to make sure, I checked with Angie when I next saw her. “Hannah’s worried that Graham’s screaming is bothering you,” I ventured. “There isn’t much we can do about it, obviously, but I’m really sorry if it is.”

This exchange took place in person, so I wasn’t misinterpreting the subtlety of text. Was she just being polite? “Oh, don’t worry about it—I can barely hear it,” she told me, smiling. Was it the cumulative fatigue of fatherhood pulling wool over my eyes, that allowed me to feel grateful for our good neighbor, relief at her low-maintenance understanding? Did I deceive myself? Should I have detected behind her placid eyes the seeds of resentment that must have been burrowing, even then, into the warm soil of the woman’s soul, that fallow but fertile vineyard that would soon erupt into row upon row of wrathful, sour grapes?

We could not concern ourselves overly with Angie’s wellbeing; our lives revolved around trying to feed our son, who, for the first nine months of his life, struggled mightily with the all-important oral technique requisite for the survival of all young mammals: that is to say, sucking. Our world shrank to accommodate only the barest of ameliorative routines, into ever-tightening spirals of despair. I slept little; Graham slept even less; Hannah slept least of all. Every week we saw a nursing consultant or pediatrician, for all the good it did. In her medical opinion, Graham’s doctor had just one pithy response to any and all of our woes: his weight is fine, keep doing what you’re doing. Which is to say, unintentionally or no, fuck you, you’ll get no quarter here.

During those months, we were entirely alone—the meal train had long ago left the station, leaving us stranded in our misery. The handful of friends who had not forgotten about us could not understand our predicament; we were like shades in a bardo, neither living nor dead. In the bitterness of our solitude, I sometimes imagined that only Angie—more than our best friends, our parents, our own flesh and blood—could possibly understand what we were going through. Because she heard us. She must. And she forgives us, I thought. And so, when Angie texted me one afternoon to announce that she had accidentally backed into Hannah’s car and was prepared to give us her insurance information, it did not occur to me that the communication was perhaps brisk, brusque, a tad chilly. Indeed, before even checking the damage (which was minimal) I was celebrating the opportunity to forgive Angie in turn, to unyoke her from the only burden of stress over which we had power.

“Hannah!” I cried joyfully. “Hannah! Angie has hit your car; I told her not to worry, to never mention it again, nor even to think of it!”

“What?” Tears of catharsis pooled in her eyes; as they brimmed over and spilled down her cheek, she released one sob, wracking and hollow, as if expelling some poison from deep within her soul. Grace, grace, she agreed; it felt wonderful to have, if only for a moment, grace to bestow upon our poor, long-suffering neighbor, who was after all a sinner like we.

I must not overstate the spiritual significance of the fender-bender. The damage to the Subaru was virtually nonexistent, more scuff than scrape, and inflicted upon a car of at best middling value; furthermore, I myself had backed into Hannah’s car only a few months prior, hitting it in nearly the same spot. Nevertheless, I am sincere when I say that we were relieved by the incident, because—on top of our immediate troubles—we felt terrible for Angie, the only person in the world who (we believed) knew us, but did not hate us.

And perhaps there was something to it—to our forgiving Angie her little trespass—because it seemed that around that time, things started to get better, a little easier. The sequence of developmental stages that had driven us to despair gradually gave way to new phases: Graham crawling; Graham eating solid food, rice crackers and pureed fruit; Graham, once or twice, sleeping through the night.

It was November, so the weather could not mirror our psychological state, which was something like Noah’s and his family’s when they saw the dove, the olive branch, the rainbow. Like them, we stepped wobble-legged into the light, kissed waterlogged earth. We both felt the tentative glimmer of hope and were almost embarrassed by it, a spark so fragile and vulnerable within us that we dared not even speak its name lest we smother it in tinder. We were a season out of sync: the world had moved on from hope and harvest and had settled in for autumn’s bleak finale.

Spring within, winter without; Graham’s first snowstorm. Thanksgiving; much to be thankful for, surely. We had already forgiven Angie; now we forgot about her. Until came the afternoon when we remembered. Hannah was in a hurry to get to work; I was feeding Graham and preparing him for his midday nap. I heard Hannah take the dog out, bring him back inside, and leave. Then, my phone rang. It was Hannah, calling from her car as she drove to her office.

She was upset. I could tell from her shaking voice that adrenaline and cortisol still coursed through her veins. Here is what happened: she took our dog, Raleigh, out. Never a fan of the cold, he quickly lifted his leg against a snowdrift directly in front of ours and Angie’s windows. He had toileted in this locale not exclusively, but consistently, for many years (strictly number one). Of our pet worries about the ways in which we might unintentionally offend our neighbors, Raleigh’s urinating there, in the bushes, did not number. Even Darlene at her most pedantic had never taken issue with Raleigh’s answer to nature’s call.

Angie did—perhaps she had been bottling it up for months, years. She opened her door and pointed at him. Trembling with cold hate, she asked Hannah: “Are you letting your dog pee in my garden?”

My sweet, conflict-avoidant, neighbor-loving wife was struck dumb: how to respond to an accusation so vitriolic and, at the same time, ludicrous? “Oh… I guess, uh, I mean, he pees here sometimes—”

Angie cut her off. “Well, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.” She spat the last word and slammed her door before Hannah could say anything else. By the time Hannah finished recounting the confrontation, she was at work. I was quaking with fury. I started to protest, insisting that I’d go talk to Angie as soon as Graham finished his bottle and was down for his nap.

“Don’t,” Hannah said. “Please don’t. Just, when you take Raleigh out, take him out past the parking lot.” She took a deep breath. “I’m late. I gotta go.”

As I rocked my son to sleep my thoughts circled like vultures over carrion love of neighbor, which had rotted in a second, corrupted until it was an unrecognizable mound of putrid black hate. I am not a man usually given to anger; it is one of the few vices that plagues me only rarely, only in extraordinary circumstances. I am envious, covetous; I am proud. I am uncharitable in my thoughts and a cynic. I am gluttonous and slothful. But wrath remains to me a relative stranger, and—although at that moment I felt him knocking on my door—I did not answer.

Instead, I went straight about the work of preparing my defense. As my son passed into unconsciousness, I recited to myself the litany of kindnesses that I had done for Angie, the many ways in which I attempted, falteringly but steadfastly, to be a good neighbor. The list was not so long as I expected: for two winters I shoveled her walk, and we forgave her when she hit our car. There had been a recent phase, too, where Angie convinced herself that our apartment complex was under siege by a troupe of homeless burglars. When she confided in me, I humored her (“I’ll keep an eye out.”) but she probably considered this a kindness done unto me—a warning—rather than vice versa.

But there was so much more, so much that she could never know! The kindnesses done via negation, the evils from which we, at great expense to ourselves, spared her! How could she know of our monastic austerity, the years of creeping about on bloodied toenails, like thieves, like imposters in our own home? She heard only our failures and hated us for them. She could not love me for the times when I had plucked a can of cat food from my son’s hand just as he went to throw it; she begrudged us (I was sure of it now) the ruckus of Graham’s playing on the rug, not knowing that we confined our developing boy to that small, inadequate cell so that he might not disturb her through the linoleum!

My heart burned like Cain’s as I contemplated all that we had sacrificed, only to be rejected so callously. Her garden? I wanted to spit: a fucking garden. Miserable cunt. Our asceticism, our denial of self! We had not allowed ourselves—not once—that simplest of pleasures: to feel at ease in one’s own skin, to feel at home in the universe. Constant vigilance—her garden?

Fucking spare me. Yes, there was a rosebush amidst the creeping ivy and overgrown hedges. But it was tended, to the extent that it was, by the same lethargic landscaper who was charged with maintaining the entire complex. The man spent the bulk of his billable hours lugging around a diesel-chugging leaf blower, billowing exhaust as he, termite-like, piled trash and plant detritus into arbitrary little mounds, which he abandoned to the wind until he returned the next week to begin the cycle anew.

I could feel my fury losing its proper object, latching as it was upon the nameless landscaper. I inverted its focus: her garden? Hers? Woe, woe unto you, o idiot tenant, o undeeded pretender—because the so-called garden was as much mine as it was hers! We all paid for the landscaping—did her rent include that extra ten square feet of neglected soil? Where was her property line? Was the sidewalk hers too? What of the parking lot, the mouse-infested storage units with their doors rotting off hinges, or the row of alders that buffeted them? Alders beneath which, I might add, accumulated an ever-expanding minefield of dog shit, because it never occurred to any of the other dog owners in this god-forsaken ghetto to clean up after themselves! Has she complained to any of them?

My spiteful reverie was interrupted by a cry on the baby monitor. Graham was awake, so I went to my son and read him a story as he finished rousing. Then, I bundled him in his coat and hat, leashed our dog, and trudged outside. Raleigh ran down the stairs, almost tripping me on his leash, but when he tried to beeline to the snowdrift, I just shook my head at him. He looked at me resentfully from the end of his rope, but I pulled him onward through the slush and muck of the parking lot, Graham on my hip, and finally coaxed the confused beast into urinating out there, twenty yards from Angie’s miserable garden. Steam rose from his lifted leg as he painted the snow, and while he relieved himself I stared vacantly at Angie’s closed door. I fantasized about knocking on it, presenting her with my pitiful charges, my crying infant, my shivering canine. I pictured her blushing with shame. I’m so sorry, I’d say. As she tried to sputter some justification for her outburst, I’d kiss her—I wouldn’t kiss her, I wasn’t insane—but I’d say nothing, kill her with kindness, and she would understand that I was Alyosha in my mind (or Judas), forgiving (or condemning) her with a kiss.

I wish I could say that my hatred dulled as the weeks passed, grew cold with the deepening winter, but it did not. It could not, because—as much as I wished to abandon it all—I was unable to cease my appeasing. I longed to forgo all pretense of civility, to stomp and dance all night, in my revelry to shatter the ceiling above that head I had come to loathe so completely. I longed to torment her as I had been tormented, to persecute her as I was persecuted. But my shame would not allow it; our advantage was too complete. We had the eternal high ground but could not leverage it, out of a fundamental discomfort with the injustice of our enemy’s handicap. So unevenly matched, to skirmish was to risk her annihilation.

I was well-practiced in the art of silence, so for silent months I nurtured my resentment at our belligerent neighbor. I despised her for her presumptuous ingratitude, but I tiptoed around the insult to my wife. I feigned tranquility, but in my heart, I took to composing feverish indictments, drafting and redrafting the declaration of my just war, analyzing and litigating the casus belli until I could recite it in my sleep. In those transient pages, I worried the feud like a dog with a bone, a boy with a hole in his pocket. In hindsight, it was inevitable that a spark would find the exposed fuse of my wrath and ignite it. The final straw came when my parents stopped by—in the middle of the day, a normal time for people to be moving around—and, in the process of maneuvering past Graham’s playpen, I knocked over a stool. I cursed and set it upright.

A few seconds later, a text. From Angie.

you guys have absolutely zero respect for me, as someone you share a living space with

BANG! BANG! BANG! The stranger was again pounding on my door. But it was not a stranger at all. Anger; Fury; Wrath. My mistress, an old lover; or it was me, had been me all along, my shadow, begging to be let in all these months, ever since our precipitous Fall, ever since we had been made ashamed in Angie’s Eden. I hated her. I hated her because, in the midst of our misery, in her unforgivable negligence, Angie had allowed us to suffer for her as well, to suffer for her, and we, in good faith, had suffered. And then she had denied it, had told us that she, in truth, had been the one to suffer. I told my parents to watch Graham, and I fled out the door and flew down the stairs. Then I became the stranger, became wrath.

BANG! BANG! BANG! My fist smarted against Angie’s door, which was also Darlene’s; it was the door behind which lived all miserable spinsters, all hateful busybodies. I stood at the gate of the garden of our exile, ready to reclaim its piss-drenched rosebush, to take back the row of corrupted alders and their windfall crop of dogshit. I had stayed too long my hand over those damnable hounds, and over their masters as well, those undeserving inheritors of civilization who shit all upon it. No more! I would drive him from it as well, that vulgar landscaper! His absurd little mounds, his abominable machine; his castles of garbage like Tibetan mandalas, built with crass disinterest and squandered to the breeze… After the third knock, I waited, barely breathing, heart pounding, delirious with rage. I didn’t know what I would say; I didn’t know what I might do, because I had given myself over to wrath.

The door opened; Angie peeked out. “Why are you pounding on my door?” she asked in a hushed snarl, and though she tried to master herself, she failed and her voice began to shake. Bitterness pooled in her mouth as she spoke and it spilled out in the space between words like saliva, like drool. For a second, I was startled by how unwell she looked. Her face was covered in tiny crimson scabs with pink halos; otherwise, she was white as a ghost. Her blue eyes were possessed by a kind of equine terror, as if she might stampede at any second, like she might trample me to death before thinking better of it.

“Why?” I hissed. The hormones surging through my body demanded that I continue hitting, pounding, crushing, screamed for something to grind into sand, glass, dust. “What the fuck is this text?” Caged in the rigor of my bloodless fingers, I brought the phone up to my chest and pointed it at her like a pistol. “Like, what the fuck, Angie?”

She flinched away as if I brandished a club, a mallet I might use to strike her dead. “Well, what was that sound?” she howled. “What was that crashing?”

I could not have unhardened my heart to her in that moment if I’d wanted. Seeing her cower did nothing to summon my better angels; instead, it flooded me with a new variety of rage, a righteous rage, as if my mere physical advantage over her, as a man, was not an accident of birth or the unfortunate consequence of biology but divine right, the might of God, the mandate of heaven. It is shameful to admit, but important to confess: unconsciously, I interpreted her fear as guilt. Her cringing dispelled the most incapacitating element of my fury and I took a confident breath in. The burst of oxygen quelled the drive to fight or to flee, leaving in its place cold hatred, venomous contempt. “That sound,” I said, “was a chair falling over. Or my parents stepping on the floor. Or my son playing in the bath.”

I sensed that, like me, Angie had a litany of grievances that she had rehearsed madly to herself, over and over for months. She opened her mouth, but the recitation fled back down her throat and she instead moaned like a wounded animal. “That was a chair? What is it the rest of the time?” She said this as if I had told an obvious lie, and she was insulted by the blatant falsehood of the alibi.

My lip curled. “The rest of the time? We have a fucking one-year-old. Who the fuck knows what it is? Do you think we’re just up there making noise—” I raised my voice. It felt good, invigorating, to finally say it all aloud. “—to fuck with you?” I spat the last words at her, as if they were not adequate vessels to contain my malice.

“It’s constant,” was her response. She looped back to her original message from the text. “You guys have no respect for me. I share a space with you, and you don’t care about me at all. You have no respect for me.” Here her voice began to crack; her accusation had a hint of pleading, of panic.

“How dare you?” I continued. “We always think of you. We walk around on fucking tiptoes carrying our son—we’ve given ourselves back problems trying to respect you. It’s so uncharitable, after we’ve always gone out of our way to be good neighbors, to send this—” I waved my phone at her again. “Besides. The last time I asked you about the noise, you told me it didn’t bother you. Were you lying then? How should I have known?”

“It’s different now, it’s… changed.” She bit her lip and groaned as if trying to give birth to something too large for words.

I intended to continue my prosecution along the same line, but at that moment I remembered the garden and felt a renewed surge of indignance. “And for you to come out and yell at my wife,” I shouted, “over the fucking dog. If you can hear us, you know what it’s like for her. You see me out there with the dog three or four times a day, but come after her? A stressed-out new mom?” My returning anger animated me and leaked into my voice.

Angie froze for a moment. “I… felt bad about that,” she said. Then she began to cry. “I was sick that day… couldn’t rest with all the noise… but I felt bad for yelling at Hannah.”

I could feel my resolve waver under the onslaught of her tears. “Listen,” I told her. “We are honestly doing our best. Truly. We are constantly worried about bothering you,” I said. “But you can’t just tell me that everything is fine to my face and then lash out at my wife. Or at me. We’ve tried to be good neighbors. We deserve better than that.”

Although I had softened, it was too late; the floodgates were open. Angie continued to weep. “You don’t understand,” she insisted, “how loud it is. It’s all the time. This is my home,” she said, “and I’m sick and I can’t rest. And I can’t afford to move—I would if I could—but I’m stuck here.”

And just like that, my hatred fled me. Desperately, I reached out after it but grasped only pity. Spent of my anger, I saw us as if from above: an angry, imposing man shouting at a weeping old woman, waving a phone at her as she hid, terrified, behind her door. I was repulsed; it was shameful. I reached out and put a tentative hand on her shoulder as she sobbed.

“Angie, look. I’m sorry for getting so upset with you. Really. I know how hard it’s been. We just… we really are doing our best, and so it’s extremely demoralizing to feel like it’s all for nothing.” Then, I remembered something. “Can you wait here for a minute?” I asked.

She looked at me suspiciously through red and swollen eyes. She nodded.

I ran back up the stairs to my apartment. My parents were still playing with Graham. I went into the bedroom and opened a drawer. From it, I retrieved the birthday present I’d intended for my brother—new AirPods—and ran back to Angie’s door. “Do you have these already?” I asked.

She looked at the box and snorted as if I’d told a bad joke. “Yeah. I have headphones.”

“Noise-canceling?” I held the box out to her.

“No,” she said doubtfully.

“Take them,” I told her. “They aren’t going to solve everything—the situation is what it is, at the end of the day—but they work very well.”

Part of me expected her to refuse, but she didn’t. She took them. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

“You’re welcome. It really is important to us that we live in some semblance of harmony with you,” I told her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the noise, and I’m sorry for losing my temper. It was wrong of me, and I promise that it won’t happen again. But please, please, don’t send me another text like that. Tell me when it’s too loud and then, if it doesn’t improve immediately, assume that I did everything I could, because I will.”

“Thanks,” she said again. “And it’s okay. I understand.”

I thought she might apologize too, but after a beat of awkward silence, I excused myself and went back to my family.

“Where’d you go?” my mom asked.

“Downstairs. I had to talk to our neighbor about something.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, we’ve still got a long drive ahead of us, so we better get on our way.” She knelt down and gave Graham a kiss on the cheek. “Bye, buddy. I love you. Be good.”

My parents made as if to go to the door. Because they’d only planned on staying for a minute, both still wore their shoes. My heart skipped a beat as my mom’s New Balances collided with the linoleum. I imagined I could hear the silverware rattling in its drawer as Dad’s boots sent shockwaves rippling through the apartment.

“Guys,” I said, my voice coming out in a strained whisper, “try to step lightly, okay?”

“Okay,” my mom whispered back. Though they pantomimed stealth as they crept out, the door still slammed behind them and I flinched as it reverberated throughout the house. I went to heat up Graham’s naptime bottle and heard my dad’s motorcycle roar to life in the parking lot. It faded as he rode away until I could not distinguish it from the rest of the constant freeway commotion.

In the bedroom, I set up the blackout curtain and turned on our white noise machine before feeding Graham his bottle. Just as he had drifted off to sleep, over the nondescript, low-pitched drone that blanketed the room, a sound like a chainsaw tore through the dim space. It sounded as if it were coming from directly outside the bedroom window.

I bit my lip and held my breath, hoping against hope that the sudden, proximate blaring of an internal combustion engine would not rouse my son. I lay down softly on the bed next to his crib, every muscle tensed, my heart racing as if I were a mouse cowering in the lazy, looping shadow of some bird of prey.

Outside, the motor oscillated wildly, idling in gluttonous thunder and then screaming when the landscaper flooded it with gasoline, a banshee, a demon. Throughout the darkness, the scent of diesel prevailed, and I awaited the inevitable sting of the falcon’s talons, prepared for death. In my mind Angie’s pockmarked face appeared, her eyes like a spooked horse; her whinnying despair echoed in my ears. I pictured the cyclone that was, even now, billowing above her garden, a barrage of garbage and leaves conjured higher and higher, ever higher. Bark chips pummeled the window like hailstones; Graham stirred. The leaf blower crescendoed to its violent, virtuosic climax, idled for a brief coda, then sputtered dead.

Mercifully, my son still slept. In the inky blackness, I saw the landscaper turn away to go about his inscrutable work.

About a month later, I got a message from Angie.

Just wanted to let you and Hannah know that I found a new job and will be moving to Spokane at the end of the month. The moving people will be coming by, so I’d appreciate it if you could park your cars elsewhere while they load up my stuff.

Ever the obliging neighbor, I congratulated her and assured her that we would. I could not help feeling like a bit of a sucker at having given her a pair of $200 earbuds. I wondered whether she would return them before making the escape that she had, quite recently, described as a financial impossibility. Perhaps she would leave them as furnishing for her unlucky successors.

She did not. But it was a small price to pay; her leaving was the greatest gift I could have asked for. And she was gone in days, not weeks, going ahead of the movers. When the dust settled, we watched the owner of the unit interviewing potential tenants. At first, we were worried about her—that she might complain to our landlord, or to the HOA, about the trouble we inevitably rained down upon her unfortunate customers. But whenever we ran into her, she fawned over Graham and acted as if she were deaf, as if she could hear nothing at all.

We realized then that she had a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that there was no fundamental conflict between our units; instead of us being too loud, and it being her responsibility to tell prospective renters about the inherent conflict, she was eager to roll her eyes at oversensitive Angie’s complaints, at senile Darlene’s ridiculous expectations.

But she, of course, knew. Because our new neighbors were a young couple—early twenties, too young to expect the peaceful solitude that was not possible in a downstairs unit. They came bearing California license plates; they were grateful merely to find an apartment they could afford. I don’t know them well. Both work odd hours, service gigs, him at a brewery and her at a coffee shop; they love EDM, love to party, and host, in their small apartment, a rotating cast of couch-surfers and ne’er-do-wells.

It is wonderful. When I hear the bass begin to thump at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, I feel peace like a river. When the scent of marijuana wafts in with cigarette smoke through our open window—when I hear them shrieking and laughing out on the porch at midnight, doors slamming and cars starting before the bars close at half-past one—I feel utterly at ease. Because I know that when I wake up at six to begin my morning, I can stomp into the kitchen without fear; when Graham inevitably throws a toy on the floor or knocks over the vacuum, my pulse no longer quickens in panicked anticipation. They are living their lives with nary a thought for our wellbeing; and why shouldn’t they? They’re practically children. Why should they worry about the grown-ups upstairs or their fussy toddler?

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, I learned as a child, and love thy neighbor as thyself. These edicts were tattooed on my psyche, a spiritual brand that rendered me forever meek, an eternal cheek-turner, a pathological altruist. They were a part of me too ingrained to even imagine being free of them. But our new neighbors, with their unapologetic disregard, neither malicious nor beneficent—total disinterest, true neutrality—taught me a new set of axioms: everything is permitted, they preach as they rearrange furniture in the small hours to accommodate some reveler too drunk to drive home.

An unfamiliar SUV pulls into Angie’s old parking spot. Two German Shepherds bark from the backseat. A young man staggers out, and the dogs follow, running rabid through the parking lot, shitting beneath the alders. “Hey! Get back here,” he cries, but they heel to no master; nothing is forbidden.

The night is a mad symphony, debauched and obscene; the defecating hounds are howling, engines roaring to life; doors open, slam shut. A deep bassline begins to thrum beneath my feet. The man forgets about his dogs. “Yo,” he yells, knocking hard on the door, one, two, three times. “Let me in.” The door opens; the muffled bass is louder now, joined by snare and hi-hat, a glitching violin, a bleating, sampled scream. He discreetly lowers his voice until it is barely more than a shout. “Dude, I should be in jail right now.”

That is what he says, but what I hear is this: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Their ecstasy seeps through the ceiling and rises like smoke. I love him as if he were my own son; I love my neighbor.

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Happy New Year. This essay was prompted by Hannah, who told me I should write about the act of and motivation for incessant picture-taking. It’s something I’d already wanted to write about, but more from the angle of what it might be like to grow up inundated with images of oneself—to, as a toddler ending her day, watch a video of herself from that same day. Maybe it’s a big deal; maybe not. Anyway, that’s not what this piece is about. Enjoy, and my intention—my resolution—is to try and keep up something a little bit more like this rhythm for publication in 2024. In the next week or two, expect also Elephemera #3, long-delayed but surely much anticipated. As ever, I am grateful to my brother for the excellent title illustration, and to you, for reading.

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The oldest picture on my phone is a blurry shot of Hannah laughing. From the year we met, 2014, a decade ago. In it, she looks like a little girl; in a sense, she was one—twenty-three years old, a beautiful baby. A few years later: there we both are, second-serving honeymooners, a day, two days in London. I have a beard. It’s obscene, it’s disgusting, and what a waste—patches of pubes, haphazardly plastered over handsome youth. Wasted, as they say, on the young, but I forgive him, because now he is dead, poor devil, and his needs are dead man’s needs: amnesty, indemnity, grace. To be held gently in memory, recalled not as he was, not even as he saw himself, but as he wished to be seen. Only for a moment. Don’t dally: nothing to be done for him now.

Every third picture is of a dog or a cat, half of whom are also now dead, and pictures of my parents, who are not yet. And permutations, too, of the now-dead and not-yet: one of mom with my dog when he was still a puppy, before he became a diabetic baby-biter; there’s my dad with Pepper, Hannah’s sweet girl, on his lap. 2018, two years before she got sick—a little over a week with her, ten days of navigating pandemic veterinary care, and then, like that, poof, she was gone.

Lighter fare—dozens of shots of meals (also gone for good, but who cares?) that I’d made back when we were vegan and, for some reason, thought warranted immortality. Here are the plant-based pizzas I cooked on my wedding day; a Beyond Burger from when they first came out, still new, with homemade brioche and tempeh bacon; later, my from-scratch ramen phase. The food shots are especially compromised, for some reason, by the terrible lighting in our apartment: grotesquely bright, inquisitorial where it is light and dark to the point of hazard where it is not. Unappetizing.

May, 2020. Surreal shots of Hannah watering her pandemic garden in the backyard of her mom’s house, slender in a white confetti skirt and rust-red tank top. How embarrassing: there’s me, trying to lose weight, and every seven days, a picture or three of my doughy reflection in the bathroom mirror, stubborn flesh receding in fits and starts. Utility pics: menus, phone numbers, insurance cards. There’s a series of screenshots from when I was playing Subnautica on my Playstation 4—recipes, virtual blueprints for virtual tools, to better survive the virtual depths.

Onward, onward, here we go—July 2021, pandemic summer the second. Hannah again, different backyard, blue sundress. Visiting friends, playing with their new puppy, Buddy, a yellow lab. There are five of Hannah, but none capture her eyes. She’s sitting on the ground, beatific gaze trained on the floppy bundle in her lap, so the camera catches only lids. Is it just in hindsight that she looks… radiant? Full breasts, milky complexion—even a sort of halo, a corona emanating, I suppose, from the second soul igniting within her. All wrong: the photo is a faithless likeness, because it depicts her as looking pregnant, but I'm sure that—when I took it—she did not. That’s pictures for you. They represent imperfectly, the lying operators, always adding or subtracting. Be grateful when you can spot the deceit, when you don’t get sucked in by the illusion.

The next photo is from the day after—the test itself, a deep pink line parallel to its telltale pale shadow. Then it’s Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. At first, she looks less conspicuously pregnant than she did with Buddy, with the halo. Soon, though, sporting a small but detectable bump, if you’re looking for it. I swipe, and her belly grows like a customer who, seeking satisfaction, is meek and timid at first, and then—still polite—raises their voice just a tad: “Excuse me! Could I please get some help over here?” The customer-belly gets progressively more assertive, more annoyed, and finally—swollen and taut as a drumskin—becomes irate, shouting for attention, demanding resolution.

And there he is: little Graham! The down of his scalp is slicked with birth’s wetness, and his cheeks jaundiced yellow, but his appendages are pink, little curling Michelin arms instinctively seeking Hannah’s bared breast, his toothless mouth her nipple. Then, before he’s even been swaddled, he’s squinting beneath a heat lamp while nurses get his stats: weight length etcetera. Hannah, unfettered exhaustion, utter peace. Leaky-eyed me, holding my son, kissing his forehead.

This relatively brief series of photos demarcates a change in my photography habits, a bifurcation. Most obviously, there is a significant uptick in quantity—I go from taking, perhaps, a dozen pictures a month to hundreds of them, edging toward a thousand in some particularly trigger-happy weeks. But the subject changes, too. No more dog, no more cat, no more food. Gone are love handles in the mirror and sucked-in-gut. A birth certificate instead of a menu. (More insurance paperwork; some things never change.)

There are not many pictures of Hannah by herself after this. Rather, it’s Hannah and Graham, Graham and Hannah. This is good: by looking more or less like herself throughout, Hannah validates the timestamps on the photos, anchors them to time and place. Graham is unreliable. He changes by the swipe, from photo to photo, a newborn and a toddler on the same day. It gives the impression of a timelapse video, a glacier collapsing in stop-motion, of months condensed into minutes.

I am struck by the unexpected isomorphism between my camera-roll schism and the phenomenological experience of time passing before and after becoming a father. The time dilation of the pandemic years notwithstanding, before my son was born, time moved—well, always too quickly, so not as I thought it ought—but the flow of time functioned predictably, linearly. Time conformed to my intuitions about it; in other words, hours felt like hours, weeks as weeks, and so on.

In the fullness of time, the professor who taught me Kant and Nietzsche was given to saying, and I liked the phrase. It conjured images of blushing apples as they ripened, a full moon, breasts heavy with milk. An idiom of exclusively positive connotation, as I understood it. In the fullness of time, life’s brute and irresoluble mysteries—death, for starters, evil, suffering, even the deets on God—would dissolve into exquisite punchlines, cathartic and comprehending, neutered of sting. Yes: knotty, snarled, fraying history will, in the fullness of time, unravel, dissipating like a dream upon waking.

Perhaps there is no trait that better enhances the human organism’s fitness than this: the limitless capacity for beneficent self-deception, that dumb and inextinguishable hope that springeth eternal; future-facing optimism, the certainty that the waxing moon will reveal her orb and with it call the tides home. The unerring faith that the branch-bound apple will inevitably surrender its sweetness. Kingdom theory: Kingdom Come, the Kingdom on Earth, a horizon imminent and culminating.

An empirically unjustifiable hypothesis, very well, but necessary nevertheless. How else to go on? What other balm in a world of interminable oscillation? What other flame in the wilderness between poles? How else can we interpret our existence as anything other than unconsolidated meaninglessness, a Kafquaesque sentence? Faith, unsubstantiated, baseless: how else to render tolerable our internment, evade the torments of our wardens, those semantically barren twins, Tautology and Contradiction?

But swipe, look, swipe: the fullness of time is its bursting. I have been a glutton at time’s table, gorging myself for thirty-six years, swallowing whole, spitting fishbones, watermelon seeds. It’s too much, and it comes up, hot acid forcing open my contracting esophagus with the sheer volume of undigested, bilious time. Look, swipe, look: time-puke all over, read dregs like tea leaves. What do you see? A petri dish of abortive infinities, mating and reproducing in finite volume, Malthusian, unsustainable? Or lightlines, recursive and spiraling, that fall out of space, to dust returned? Or water, moments leaking inexorably through clutching, cupped hands, spilled, squandered?

Too many moments in the day. In a vessel so inadequate as mine, they cannot be contained.

The original iPhone was released in 2007. It had a five-megapixel camera; the top-tier model had a paltry sixteen gigabytes of storage. I didn’t jump on the bandwagon until the iPhone 4 was released in 2010. My mom bought it for me; we drove to Portland in the snow to get it. A decade and change later, I am on, I think, my fourth iPhone, an 11 that I picked out in late 2019 or early 2020. It has three lenses: a standard and superwide lens on the back and a fixed-focus lens on the front for selfies and video calls. As of this writing, the newest model, the iPhone 15, has a forty-eight-megapixel main lens, with additional ultra-wide and telephoto lenses clocking in at twelve megapixels each.

It will not escape the savvy reader that our phones can now take pictures with resolutions almost an order of magnitude greater than the original iPhone’s toy camera. And present-day storage capacities are virtually incommensurable with the ur-iPhone; it would take four just to store the apps on my 11 (which they could not even run). With cloud storage, there is no upper ceiling to the data that can be retained; one is limited only by what one can afford.1 And so we can store more pictures, and each is laden with tens of millions more bits of information than those taken a mere ten years ago. Whether you call this progress will depend: do you suppose yourself the one righteous man, ark-builder, sea-of-information swimmer? Rising with the tide? Or are you one of the proximal unworthy, useless fingernails splinter-scrabbling against hull, in up to the ankles, waist, neck? Or everyone else: caught unawares, drowning in the flood?

Before you answer, there’s something you should know. A five-megapixel camera isn’t five megapixels. Not really. Or at least it won’t create an image with five million pixels. This is because, in order to translate photons into a visual, pixel-based representation, the camera requires a baseline, a foundation. The computer needs to ‘know’ about the world outside the frame, something about its color and its light. To obtain this knowledge, the apparatus employs its outermost photoreceptors, the border-dwellers and boundary straddlers. Those liminal pixels between, if you will, the object and the symbol themselves become the information that the act of translation requires. In so doing, however, they are lost. Simulacrum and sacrifice; they are the no-shade-sitting grandparent tree-planters, the pyramid erectors who dropped dead hauling foundation stones, the last mortal generation. Just outside the frame of every picture: the world lost forever. Necessarily. And the higher the resolution, the steeper the toll.

So. I am a drowner, but was not always. In the fall of 2011, I enrolled in Public Speaking at Portland Community College. It was a prerequisite for my transfer degree. The inaugural attempt was a failure—I didn’t pass—but I remember the first and only speech I delivered. The assignment was (something like) ‘teach the class about a hobby’. Texas Hold ‘Em, rock climbing, whatever. At the time, I was enamored with a then-little-known photography-app-cum-social-media-platform, newly emerged, called Instagram.

I wrote a speech. I delivered it, projecting my phone onto a pulldown screen and demonstrating the app’s (at the time) illiterate communion; I said, maybe, “We might not know the Chinese word for dog, but we recognize the image of a dog wherever we see one, from wherever it hails.” Picture worth a thousand, or something. An old lie, practically as old as the original—you will not surely die—but I believed it. Look: even back then, I wasn’t some kind of silicon utopian or LTE apostle; I was no gospel-spreader. Maybe you don’t remember, but that technology could save us then was not a theoretical conceit; it was the necessary consequence of Kingdom theory, a prediction like General Relativity’s black holes. Salvation was necessary, followed logically, cock-a-doodle-doo, little chicken dinos crowing the sun up, hatched out of natural selection.

I don’t have the speech now—a casualty of time’s fullness—but probably, it’s for the best. I suspect it would have aged poorly. Instagram is, of course, now a cesspool, an actual sewage pit. It’s addictive, and there’s a fairly well-established correlation between time spent on the platform and depression, amongst teenage girls especially. But even if kids weren’t seppukuing themselves over it, at best, Instagram is a waste of time, an effective vehicle in which to escape the present moment, a platform populated by idiots parroting bad ideas, mercifully abridged into shitty slideshows.2 These days, I log in once or twice a year by accident.

Since I no longer share my photos—at least not publicly or on any social media platform—what am I doing when I take picture after picture? That is the question that inspired this essay—sorry about the scenic route. In its writing, I have uncovered an answer. At the surface level, and most charitably to myself, it’s simple: I want to remember it all. My immobile son, swaddled and sleeping; tentative crawling, first taste of lemon; overconfident toddling, words and then sentences spilling out over his milk teeth. From that angle, my camera is a prosthesis, a security blanket failsafe against the certainty of fallible, faithless memory.

But it is more than that, worse than that. I recognize in myself the desire—the impulse, at least—to withdraw from my perfect son, to recoil from anything as precious and as pure. Not the bitter jealousy—the hatred of the good—that drove covetous Cain to slay his brother, no. More like Adam’s last brain-hanging evening in Eden, the forbidden fruit a rock in his gut, naked, hiding from God. When Graham falls asleep in my arms, or when he sings without so much as the flicker of self-consciousness, I am exposed. Or he’ll be crying, in the grip of real grief, and through his sobbing, snotty, hysteria, repeating, “It’s all gone” or “No the end” and I don’t know what he’s talking about. Because he can’t know, can he? The way time recedes, how it recoils from my grasping. No—he’s too young, must be, but the uncanniness prostrates me, naked and ashamed. And so I hide.

My love for Graham is not like any of the other great loves of my life. When I fell in love with his mother, for instance, I felt waves of euphoria almost indistinguishable from an MDMA peak, as stupifying as morphine. This could sometimes be interrupted and, without notice, replaced by despair—that I had committed some irreparable wrong, that she would know me and be repelled. That she would fall in love with someone else.3 But the emotions were distinct, mutually exclusive. I could feel only one at a time. With Hannah, I encountered an unfamiliar soul, newness—novel love, which is magnetic and enchanting.

This is not what loving my son is like at all. Encountering Graham was the sudden shock of the unexpected familiar, the possession by an ancient and terrible love, primordial, original. How to explain? A syllogism woken into, from before hydrogen froze out of plasma, etched in an elementary particle. The first line: all fathers are murderers. I will not debase you by reciting its undeniable second premise, its dreadful conclusion. But it is sound; though I have not yet killed, perhaps never will, love of son is the world-destroyer. For it I would throw the first stone, kill, hunt consciousness to extinction, extinguish the universe, would only that it preserve him for another day, another hour. And because it is infinite, that which is finite can never tip the scales against it; such is its bleak asymmetry.

It is a horrible thing, this geas. Because no son wishes so depraved an inheritance. Yet it is his, nevertheless, and mine, because I believe it binds all fathers to its will, and so we whither from its poison, become lead to contain its unimaginable wrath. It is a love neither euphoric nor despairing; here, it is honey’s sweetness on the lips, truly, but excruciating in the mouth, as caramel when it cement-clings to cavities, sugar-shock on rotten molars.

It is too much. So, as my cup runneth over, moments with nowhere to go, I pretend to catch them there, collect and save, to distill from them the waxing moon, and imagine that it will be there for me one day, soon, perhaps, or far in the future, but with perfect, unwaning fidelity, identical, the thing itself. And when the Kingdom comes, I will dwell in it with my son and savor the sweetness of a fruit that never turns. Because I know it: that in the fullness of time, all shall be saved.

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Merry Christmas, readers new and old.

I have about a dozen drafts in various stages of completion, each with its own introduction in which I try to explain myself, to justify or at least contextualize my extended radio silence. Each version varies in minutia, but the gist is this: I have become an impossibly exacting critic of my work, and nothing I’ve written has met my own standards. This piece, among other things, is an attempt to short-circuit my inner critic. I gave myself 24 hours to write, proofread, and publish it. It is inspired by my son’s reaction to experiencing the Christmas season, which for me has been a source of profound joy and emotional catharsis. It’s something that I want to communicate to you in full, but know that I’ve fallen short. Without further ado, a partial transmission.

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At some unremarkable point in my adulthood, I became a cynic. I did not notice it as it occurred; it was one of those transitions that occur too gradually to perceive until it is too late to reverse course. Long before my transformation, I sometimes acted cynically. I could squint my eyes and see the world as a cynic might, discovering a world populated exclusively by self-serving, deceitful agents, whose motives were usually malevolent and always motivated by self-interest. I suppose that one day, I peered through that lens to find myself unable to unsee that dismal landscape.

The worldview produced by cynicism is not without merit and can prove quite seductive. It is especially compelling for two reasons. The first is its explanatory power. Like astrology, cynicism has an ontological scope applicable across a vast and diverse array of contexts; like Freudian psychoanalysis, cynicism is a universal explanation. The second is its efficacy as a defense mechanism. By assuming the worst about other people—that they act exclusively in bad faith, and that their stated motives are laden with deceit—it becomes nigh impossible to be wounded by them. Betrayal requires a measure of vulnerability that the cynic lacks, and by preemptively anticipating it, cynicism deprives the eventual doublecrossing of its sting.

This comes at a cost. Like all grand theories, the sheer breadth of cynicism’s explanatory scope comes at the expense of predictive depth; explanations that can be modified ad hoc to explain everything can predict nothing, and cannot anticipate real novelty. As a defense mechanism, cynicism is likewise imperfect. Because of course, at bottom, people are only sometimes malevolent, only sometimes deceitful. All people act out of self-interest on some occasions and have (at least) the potential to inflict real cruelty upon their fellows. But all people also have (at least) the capacity for genuine altruism; all people believe at least a portion of what they say. A hermeneutics of real cynicism cannot interpret human behavior and relationships with the requisite nuance to represent human beings in all their moral complexity, and—crucially—their moral inscrutability. Cynicism renders human motives nothing if not scrutable; in so doing, it is self-limiting, losing access to the staggeringly diverse palette of reasons, beliefs, and values from which agents compose and recompose themselves in infinite variation. For its adherents, it is a Rosetta stone, a universal translator, but—oddly—its output is a single string, repeated ad infinitum: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

As a defense mechanism, cynicism is similarly flawed. It can be likened to a kind of spiritual DNR or hospice. By its own estimation, there exists no real treatment that might reverse the world’s bleak and hopeless course; in the absence of an antidote, the most humane course of action is to dope one’s self with the palliative of hopelessness, which dulls the worst of the pains on offer. And—if the cynic’s diagnosis is correct, and the human condition is as terminal as he says it is—so much for the better. But what if it is not?

Growing up as a Christian, I remember how, around Christmastime, I would be inundated with reminders about the real reason for the season. I understood this ‘reason’ as being Christ’s birth, the miraculous and necessary precursor to his mortal death on the cross and his eventual repudiation of death itself—not merely his own, but Jesus’s victory over the grave as such. There were multiple ways to misinterpret the holiday—the worst being to give in to the commercialization of it, to fall prey to greed and envy over material things—but it was also a disservice to celebrate for the mere love of one’s brother, to imagine Christmas a secular light in a season of dark.

For a cynic, there is perhaps no story more hopeless in its naivete than that of the Nativity. The Greatest Cuckolding Ever Told. This is because the hermeneutics of cynicism lacks the resources with which to interpret a miracle as anything other than a hoax, a scam. This is also why I could not make sense of it—of the many Christmases that I have, as an adult and a cynic—either dreaded from the beginning or, as often, anticipated with measured optimism only to find myself bitterly disappointed in the car, driving home, because I had squandered the holiday fighting with my brother during another of our precious biannual visits. Or not even fighting, or not even my brother. Fundamentally, I had wanted something that I could not articulate and could thus not receive, even had it been on offer. My wife Hannah has grown accustomed to my post-holiday bad moods, my anxiety, and what has been, in truth, a shameful spirit of ingratitude, which I have justified by positioning myself as uninterested in the accumulation of more things. (Except when I want more things.)

Last Easter, I tried to write about the Resurrection. My working thesis was this: the story of Easter has a truth in it that is relevant to our lives on Earth, even if it didn’t literally happen. I couldn’t finish it; no matter how I tried, I could not convince myself. What is the value of a metaphorical resurrection in the face of real death?

I put it away, forgot about it, and the remainder of the year flew by; before I knew it, it was December. This will be Graham’s second Christmas, but the first during which he understands that it is Christmas; the first Christmas that he can pick out snowmen, reindeer, Santa, and Christmas trees. He is mature enough to know what a present is, but too young to care what is inside it. Two days ago, coming home from a walk, he noticed a Christmas decoration that Hannah had put up at our front door: a felted Christmas gnome. “Christmas tree,” he called it.

“Christmas gnome,” I corrected him.

“Christmas gnome,” he said, grabbing it by its hat. He insisted on bringing it inside. Shortly after, he discovered its partner and has carried the two gnomes with him ever since. He loves them. He really loves them—not for reasons—but just because. They’re cheap and ugly, made in China, and probably dangerous, but my son loves them.

If there is one phenomenon truly anathema to cynicism, it is miracles; by definition, miracles are events believed so improbable or impossible that, when they occur, they defy the very order of things and upend all notions of possibility. To witness a miracle is to realize that one has had the measure of the world all wrong, and to be humbled and disoriented by it.

Was the blinding radiance of my son’s unalloyed joy over two Christmas gnomes a miracle? I am a cynic, but… I believe it was. Because the logic of the cosmos in that moment rearranged itself according to the contours of his smile. The specificity and intensity of his love created something of infinite value out of kitsch; so abundant was his joy that it spilled out of him and into me, and suddenly I fell hopelessly in love with the gnomes. It was a miracle: for a brief moment, our combined love moved something in me, and—with perfect clarity—I understood the whole universe to be a kind of ecstatic tautology, in which all language and all its objects refer endlessly back to the same ineffable core, and I was looking at it, smitten.

The lens that had become synonymous with my vision shattered, not a refutation of cynicism so much as its nullification. Through his eyes, I saw the world as it is: an endless parade of miracles, novelty at every turn, an endless exchange of love given and received. What is the meaning of the Ressurection if it is only a metaphor? What is the significance of the Nativity if Jesus was only a man, the genetic son of a carpenter? These are not meaningful questions, not even questions at all—just ill-formed strings, senseless and incoherent.

“Fear not,” said the angel to the shepherds outside Bethlehem, “for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day a Savior.” Or the prophet Isaiah, who foretold that He would be called the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

Or the three magi who, upon arriving in Jerusalem, asked, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.”

For the wise men, a star; for the shepherds, a heavenly host. For myself, two Christmas gnomes loved so ferociously that they—well, not came to life, not exactly—but became messengers of God’s love. The angels told the shepherds to spread the news across the countryside; I must do likewise. I write this to tell you what I’ve seen and heard: a Savior has been born and will redeem our fallen world; unto our shattered cosmos, a Son has been given.

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Thanks for reading. Thanks to my brother for whipping up an illustration with only a few hours’ notice. Reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. My goal for the new year is not to go six months without publishing, but you know how resolutions are. Anyway, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and good fortune in the year to come.

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Because of that unfortunate feature of the past—namely, its immutability—it will always be the case, from now until the end of time, that I ruined Hannah’s first Mother’s Day. In retrospect, the deck was stacked against its being a success, a day memorable for all the right reasons: like the fact that our one-month-old son was healthy, and that his birth had been uncomplicated; or that Hannah and I were, no matter how it felt, in it together, and were, compared to so many parents, well-prepared, our teamwork so practiced that, to an outside observer, it would have seemed effortless, even though during those initial months after Graham’s birth, it was anything but.

Instead, by the time Mother’s Day rolled around, we’d been sparring regularly for a couple of weeks; to our credit, our situation—particularly Graham’s colicky reluctance to nurse and his aversion to the bottle—was a stressor that could have torn a weaker couple apart, and our fights usually ended with first blood, in stalemate if not truce. And neither of us had allowed our respective resentments to ossify so totally that we could not try to put them aside for Mother’s Day.

I had planned ahead—too far ahead, in fact. Almost as soon as Graham was born, I had purchased for Hannah a fashionable nursing cover branded “the Cocoon”, which could be worn as a shawl or a cape or a poncho when it was not engaged in its primary function. It was in a color that looks remarkably good on Hannah—a chic amber—and I’d even considered buying her another in a different shade. It was a little expensive though, and frugality won the day, which ended up being just as well. As things turned out, Graham would not be nursing—not in private, not in public—and we would rarely leave the house. Modesty and stylishness were luxuries of which we had no need.

This was not my fault, obviously, but neither was it a good gift. It may have even salted the still-smarting wound of birth. I bought Hannah flowers, and—I’m somewhat embarrassed to mention it now—a map of the night sky on the eve of Graham’s birth, printed alongside a quote by Carl Sagan: “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” Today, I see it and worry that it’s tacky, like a wrist tattoo of a (still-living) child’s name and date of birth. Maybe it is, but it’s earnestly tacky, and earnestness imparts its own aesthetic, the value of which transcends—is incommensurable with—the fickle spectrum of mere taste.

It didn’t help me, though, on Mother’s Day. I’d been so enthusiastic about the poster I’d made that, rather than holding onto it, I’d given it to Hannah as soon as it arrived, figuring that I’d always have the Cocoon. Hampered by overeagerness and saddled with a $100 poncho, I resorted to my surest standby: writing a sincere letter, in which I took all the blame for the weeks of interminable jousting, admitting that I was, at bottom, a self-centered man-child. I expressed my gratitude that Hannah was patient enough to permit me to mature into my new role at my own pace, no matter how glacial it seemed relative to Hannah’s own rapid metamorphosis, from my best friend and lover into the miracle-working mother of our son.

The problem wasn’t that any of it was, strictly speaking, untrue. But it was too hasty, too presumptuous to assume that all our misunderstanding could be negated by mere apology, no matter how tender the sentiment or lovely the prose. In my rush to reconcile, I allowed my thinking some measure of enchantment; I came to believe that the purity of my longing for armistice could, through sheer force of will, bring it about.

For a propitious second, it appeared to have worked. With tears in her eyes and as gracious as ever, Hannah put the card down and draped the Cocoon over her shoulders. Predictably, she was moved by my sentiments and, after finishing the breakfast I’d made, we decided to put Graham in his stroller and bask in the temperate springtime noon, to let the auspicious May sun finish thawing us to each other. In the moment, it seemed inconceivable that that might not soothe our frazzled nervous systems, that the fresh spring air might not be the only purgative our relationship required.

We walked side by side, breathing deeply and staring at the tiny person we had created. In my memory of it now, there was a surreal thickness to the afternoon, dreamy and heavy, like something from a fairy tale or a movie set. I know now that the thickness in the air was the unresolved tension between us, and it felt like a dream because, in dreams, the words we hear uttered are sometimes attached to meanings unrelated to the consensus semantics of waking life. Such was the state of our communication at the time. I said something (or maybe it was Hannah) and her (or my) reaction was not just inappropriate and uncharitable, but from my (her) perspective, incoherent. Thus the clock struck midnight and the spell broke; Graham’s magical stroller was once again nothing more than a rancid pumpkin and, in a matter of minutes, we were fighting in earnest.

At the time it was the worst fight we’d ever had, though over the coming months we’d go on to repeat it, virtually word-for-word, rehearsing the script at least once per week but sometimes twice or three times. Today I believe I’ve diagnosed our problem: we two, who had always, always, put the other’s needs ahead of our own and prioritized the health of our relationship over individual resentments or petty jealousies, were of course no longer a couple but were a trio, and a new dynamic had emerged out of a rather unambiguous hierarchy: no longer in service to the other, we each sought first and foremost the wellbeing (real and imagined) of our son. When our visions of this end aligned, we were collaborators or at least labored in parallel; when they did not, we became rivals and saboteurs.

I suppose that is the gemma of human misunderstanding and conflict throughout the ages: we all want the good but disagree on what it is. When we are lucky enough to share a coherent vision, we disagree on the best means with which to effect it, to bring it about. Under the cooing, crying, diaper-shitting paradigm of our new master, we abdicated our allegiance to the partnership in order to better bring about the good—nay, the best—for our son as we saw it. Because communication had for us until now been so effortless and disagreement so rare, we were unpracticed in the art of war. Amateur fighters, we pulled punches too late; we held on long after the other, lips turning blue, tried to signal the tap tap tap of submission.

We were both traumatized by our Mother’s Day spat, and—although I like to think we grew out of that scorched earth—this year I approached the anniversary with some (understandable) trepidation. Knowing the well of grand gestures to be tainted, since I was the poisoner, I decided not to draw from it, to give those waters more time to circulate, reinvigorate. I got Hannah a mani-pedi and, on a blank card from the grocery store, wished her a happy Mother’s Day. I kept my sentiments broad and noncommittal. Oh—and I decided not to buy flowers. Spring had come early, and the lilacs were in bloom, and I knew that a hand-cut bouquet would mean more than any sterile-stemmed roses from the grocery store.

I’ve never been much of a plant person. Before meeting Hannah, I knew almost nothing about individual flowers, I could identify, by sight, perhaps two species: roses and opium poppies. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see their appeal—I’d even go so far as to say that I’ve long wished that I was a plant person, tranquil and serene, gentle and patient, a born nurturer possessing, where gratification is concerned, the inherent capacity to (or even preference for) delay, delay, delay. I can see it in my mind’s eye, see myself kneeling in the soil, sun on my brow as I pull weeds, unhurried and utterly at peace. Instead, ever since I was a little boy, I’ve hated getting dirt on my hands, hated the sensation of soil on skin, and this has made it difficult to keep a garden.

One of the first things I discerned about Hannah was that she is a plant person, and—at her best—all those things that I cannot say about myself. I met Hannah when… well I was, you see, working with… I was friends with her older brother—I know—and, at the time, neither of us had a driver’s license—I know, it’s not a flattering picture. Anyway, Hannah offered to drive us home from work one evening. She pulled up in a silver Subaru, an old one, and when her brother hopped in back on the passenger side, I thought it would be presumptuous to sit up front next to this young woman I’d never met, so I got in behind her, like she was our chauffer or (less improbably) arresting officer.

From the backseat of the hatchback, her face was mostly obscured, but I could see a bundle of dried lavender knotted with twine resting on the dash, and I caught a glimpse of her mercurial eyes in the rearview. On first glance, they looked blue, almost emerald, like the color of the Pacific off Oahu, but when I looked again they were a blue so gray as to be almost monochrome, still oceanic but cooler, the Pacific of the Oregon coast. In both instances so wide-set and stunning were they that, had she been a few inches taller, she’d almost certainly have ended up on a runway somewhere, and I’d not have met her. My good fortune, then, that she was 5’6” and a massage therapist instead of a fashion model.1

My friend’s father was dying of cancer, and Hannah had just moved home to be nearer to family. She wore her blonde hair in loose dreadlocks, which I was intimidated by; sitting behind her, I couldn’t make out whether it was her dreads or the car that smelled like patchouli and tea tree. Patchouli. Before meeting Hannah, I didn’t know what patchouli was. I recognized its scent, vaguely, but only enough to be embarrassed for the person wearing it. I knew that people less kind than myself tended to (if you’ll indulge me) make a stink about it, as if patchouli were an odor somehow on an offensive par with B.O. or even dog shit, despite its actually being the nice-but-distinct-smelling distillate of a fragrant species of mint.

To be sure, at that point in my life I was the olfactory equivalent of illiterate; I could smell, of course, but I couldn’t identify a scent to save my life except for the very simplest and most common fragrances: Tide on a sweater; the artificial coconut on a lover’s scalp; vanilla, coffee, and tobacco; marijuana smoke. It’s ridiculous now, but I was at first embarrassed for Hannah, anxious for her: didn’t she know that she smelled like a hippie? By the time we arrived at my apartment, she no longer smelled like a hippie to me so much as a goddess. I was drunk and didn’t know it, intoxicated by her perfume.

Hannah came in to see my apartment, and from there the game was up in humiliatingly short order: we offered up flimsy excuses to see each other again (“taking our dogs for a walk”) and each time we did, Hannah arrived wearing some new, provocative scent: the sweet sharpness of Texas cedarwood and lavender’s floral spice; an exotic palette of rich amber resin and Egyptian musk. Mere days after meeting her, on a hike with our dogs in tow (and myself, sadly, still in a year-long monogamous relationship with another woman) I realized that I was smitten, infatuated—probably in love. She went away for a weekend and I ended things with my then-girlfriend. When Hannah returned, I confessed my feelings for her, and the single greatest blessing of my life has been her reciprocation.

Hannah introduced me to her alchemical world; she made perfume from plants and bristled at the scent of artificial fragrance. It’s hackneyed to say that she taught me to stop and smell the roses, but what about the lavender, the jasmine, the pine and cedar and fir? One day Hannah physically stopped me to smell honeyed poplar on the breeze, a scent that I misidentified as huckleberry, because it so swiftly transported me back to a childhood afternoon on Mt. Adams, catching tadpoles from a creek with my younger brother while our parents—can you guess?—picked huckleberries.

The gift of connection is a broadening of perspective, the opportunity to expand perception beyond the inherent limits of our brute individual subjectivity; with fresh eyes we see what has always been, but until now was hidden. The spectrum that once terminated in violet expands beyond its former boundaries and there is a new color to the world, a novel kind of light. At least, this is how it went for me with Hannah. I walked the same circuit around the same town that I’d always walked while Hannah pointed out all that I’d been missing: every block, a yard overtaken by French lavender, weedlike, noxious. Those shameless little flowers with mirthful orange faces? Calendula. I found everything about her so charming that sometimes I pretended to know even less than I did: “Look at those,” Hannah said as we walked, pointing to some purple-petaled flowers so picturesque that I half expected them to start bleeding watercolor. Papaver somniferum, I thought, but played dumb. She leaned in to whisper, and her breath tickled my ear and raised goosebumps on my arms. “Opium poppies.”

And then there were the bushes: unassuming and incognito for most of the year that, for a few weeks in late April and early May, erupted in sensuous purple blossoms drenched in a perfume so heavy that their branches bent beneath their own redolence. Through some transitive property, because I loved Hannah and she loved the lilacs, I loved them too. I started to wear a pocket knife, kept scissors in my car, and whenever I passed a particularly hearty specimen, I’d take a cutting home for her, put it in a mason jar with water, and her delight would be my own.

This year, spring arrived early. Graham and I took advantage by going for walks nearly every afternoon in April. At first without really meaning to, I began making a mental map of every lilac bush in the square mile around our apartment. There are a dozen at least between 6th and 18th on Cascade alone; a private drive off Columbia has four bushes buffeting the bluff. Before long, I found myself ranking them according to how easily I could harvest their blooms unnoticed. Graham and I would stop to smell the lilac. I’d inhale deeply; Graham would nearly hyperventilate in his eagerness to mimic the act. Each day, I almost picked a stem to take home. I’m not sure why I didn’t.

That’s not true. I wanted—I needed to save the gesture for Mother’s Day, reason abandoning me as I began to suspect that—plucked on the proper day from the perfect vine—something like transubstantiation would occur and, in the vase, the lilac would become an atoning talisman, would nullify last year’s failure, erase it, undo it. Somehow, I convinced myself there was such a thing as a gift so precious it would be squandered in the giving.

Mother’s Day is celebrated on the second Sunday of May; this year, it arrived on the 14th. It was a sweltering ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit and came on the tail of an unseasonably hot week. The heat had been so extreme, in fact, that I had become anxious about taking Graham outside and curtailed our daily walks. So on Sunday, when I went to pick Hannah her bouquet I was surprised to find the first lilac covered in dry brown petals, brittle, scentless, and quite dead. Surely a one-off. I continued. The next bush had suffered similarly against the sneaker heatwave, and so had the one after that, and the one after that.

It wasn’t until I was almost home that I spotted a perpetually-shaded lilac bush, choking in hawthorn and sandwiched amidst a grove of red alder. It had been mostly picked clean (probably by apartment dwellers such as myself), but in its desperate fight for sunlight it had grown taller than its kin, spindly and ungainly, and I could see a single bloom above me, a sickly pale purple. I was out of options. In one hand I clasped my scissors; with the other, I reached heavenward and bent the branch almost to breaking. Then, in one fell motion, I severed the last necrosing fruit of the season, pruned the blossom from the bush. Knowing already that it was hopeless, I had to smell it for myself. I pressed its petals to my nose: nothing. This bloom was no less spent than the rest that I’d encountered. It was just not yet bleached by the unwelcome May sun.

Sick with shame and self-reproach, I went home and put the specimen in a mason jar with a little water, where it stayed dead. If Hannah was disappointed in me, she didn’t show it. The cutting finished wilting and we discarded it without ceremony. I felt foolish, but more than that, I was confused. I had known the lilac season to be, like all seasons, finite. I had not thought that I could bask forever in some immortal spring, smelling flowers with my son for eternity. But hadn’t I? Why else would it come as a shock, a betrayal to find the season over?

As I get older, I suspect more and more that the Buddhists have the right of it, or at least are nearer the mark than the other great religious traditions. I wish it were not so. I would rather it be Christianity, the religion of my youth, with its virgin birth and empty tomb, its salvation solus Christus, sola gratia, its Good News. Or even the sweeping karmic logic of Hinduism: the cosmic illusion of maya out of which Atman dissolves into its source, the first and final mover, the perfect unity of Brahman.

Buddhism’s claims are far humbler and, frankly, less appealing; the Noble Truths appear almost cynical against the miracle of Easter. But they are also, fundamentally, empirical claims, hypotheses that can be tested against reality’s hard edges. The First Noble Truth, dukkha, is the hypothesis that pain is and that it is inevitable. The trauma of birth; the agony of sickness; the horror of decrepitude; the anguish of loss; the terror of death. Some set of these horsemen will be visited upon all beings, sayeth the Buddha. The verisimilitude of his claim is beyond reproach: obvious, self-evident, Cartesian.

Dukkha’s twin is anicca or impermanence; anicca denotes the ultimate transience of all things in this world of passing away. Together, they are jointly sufficient descriptions of what it is to be.2

Tanha, the Second Noble Truth, is the hypothesis that suffering emerges from our attachments—namely, our attachments to those things that are transient, which is to say everything. We want to have what we do not have, of course, but that is the least of it: we want to have what cannot be had, want to keep that which cannot be kept, and so on. Like water carried in cupped hands, the material of being slips inexorably through our grasp, and—as it does—we suffer.

Yes. I, in my hubris, thought to impart a moral upon you: the two weeks in spring during which the lilacs bloom are not something that you get. The heady perfume that once a year suffuses gray April with its mesmerizing scent is not something to be had. Anicca: there’s nothing to get, nothing to have, nothing to keep. A moment, and then it’s gone. The metaphor is on the nose, certainly, but earnestly so, because what else are our shockingly brief lives, if not that? A sequence of ephemeral springs, blooming unbidden and departing unexcused?

Hannah came into my life with baggage from a previous relationship: a little gray cat named Deva. I had a cat too, as well as a dog, and we three boys made room in our lives, first for Hannah (I didn’t give my pets much of a choice) and then for Deva. Deva had her quirks—she was a cat, after all—but was the least demanding member of our household by an order of magnitude. She was affectionate, but not needy, friendly, but always exuding an effortless feline dignity. Her biggest peccadillo was a compulsive obsession with running water. She would scratch at the bathroom sink until someone turned the faucet on for her; sometimes she would drink from it, but just as often she would stare at it and then exasperatedly at us, as if she were a schoolteacher waiting for her dimwitted pupils to see where they had erred in some chalkboard sum, patiently allowing us to catch and correct our elementary mistake.

While I was in school and spending days in front of my computer, Hannah bought me a used desk and a new office chair. Deva immediately commandeered the latter as her napping throne. All writers have rituals—cigarettes, stretches, coffee. Because my chair was perpetually covered in a thick layer of asphalt-colored cat hair, my prewriting ritual became, out of necessity, vacuuming. Or not: often, the mere presence of Deva on the chair was enough to break my fragile resolve: who, after all, wants to bother a sleeping cat?

You’re too tired; you have nothing interesting to say; no one is going to read you. It’s silly, but to this litany of excuses for doing anything other than writing I added, straight-faced, there’s a cat on your chair or, even more pathetically, there’s cat hair on your chair. These were not particularly sound arguments, since it is not the case that I require that desk or that chair to write. But so long as I could convince myself to accept the faulty premises, I could without fail arrive at the desired conclusion.

That’s what I’ve been up to. I continued to think about lilacs—passages in the shower, possible titles at work—but, as the weeks turned into one month, then two, it started to dissolve, like a dream upon waking. I decided to give up on it. There are only two cures for writer’s block, which is a strictly acute condition: the first is to write something, even something shitty. The second remedy is to not write something. The former removes the block; the latter excises the writer. My course was the second treatment. There are always, always demands on my limited free time, and I’m never without a healthy backlog of chores that have gone too long neglected, that threaten to multiply if not attended to.

Three weeks ago, one of those tasks was taking Deva, who had been losing weight at an alarming pace, to the vet’s office. This is never a particularly pleasant errand—in the best-case scenario, you leave a bill lighter with a pissed-off cat. It was not the best-case scenario. Deva was not well, the vet told us after a brief examination. Without further tests, she couldn’t tell us more than that. It’s a hard situation. Veterinary diagnoses are often vague and always expensive, but there’s that sliver of hope that $300 bloodwork or $200 x-rays might reveal some easily-treatable malaise, an infection curable with antibiotics, arthritis that responds to steroids.

An hour or two later (I’d gone home to feed Graham lunch) Hannah called me, crying. Deva had cancer. The doctor, whose bedside manner left much to be desired, assured Hannah that it would be acceptable to euthanize Deva then and there.

“What should I do?” Hannah asked between sobs.

“Come home,” I told her, “and we’ll figure it out. We aren’t going to make any decisions today.”

The word euthanasia comes from the Greek and its literal translation is something like “good death”, though the sense of the word is closer to “a happy death” or “a gentle death.” I do not believe that the veterinarian who offered to euthanize Deva that day could have delivered a death good or gentle; charitably, I suspect that she was overworked and that this led to her being callous, careless. There is much to be said about the practice of euthanasia in the abstract, but this is not the place for it. You have already given me more of your attention than I deserve, and is that not the only resource of real value? Money is valuable only insofar as it is a proxy for time, but time’s worth is contingent, asymmetrically valuable. It cannot be saved, but it can be wasted. What is left? Attention?

Hannah and I found an independent vet who specialized in hospice care for dogs and cats. The cost was not insubstantial, but—because he performed no tests and provided only palliative care—the expense was reasonable, something we were able to afford. We bought a couple of weeks, which we did not waste. We attended to Deva. When she stopped eating and finally could not even be roused to sip running water, we arranged for her to be euthanized at home.

Any death gives the lie to all life; scheduling one is a harrowing, impossible responsibility, and the only thing worse is to lose even that modicum of control. On the eve of what I thought would be our penultimate day with Deva, I said goodnight to Hannah and Graham and thought of seasons ending, thought of lilac in weedlike abundance, dying in stop motion: blooming, parched, wilted, gone.

That night in the small hours, I awoke to Hannah shouting for me. Deva was experiencing some sort of medical emergency. I will spare you the grim details. Suffice it to say that the peaceful trajectory of her linear decline toward death had been upended. She was suffering. Hannah tried to contact the hospice vet, but because it was the middle of the night, he would not see her messages until morning. We did what little we could: gave her medicine for the pain and sat on the bathroom floor next to her as she lay dying.

Is death a problem in need of a solution? As the life of our sweet, gentle little companion came to its violent, intolerable conclusion, there was no question. It was not. What had come too swiftly was then not swift enough; what had seemed an intruder, a thief, was revealed, finally, as a Samaritan, a friend.

Now my chair is empty, and I write. And I think I understand until, unbidden, in my mind’s eye I see Deva at the faucet, but she’s the Buddha beneath the Bo tree, and she’s the Buddha wracked with pain, dying of dysentery, both at the same time, in superposition. She stares hopelessly at me, patient pity for her idiot student, the dunce who cannot refrain from making a fundamental mistake of category: it’s not the kind of thing you solve, she’s saying. It is a gift given in earnest, and the worst fight you’ve ever had, and springtime’s sudden end on the second Sunday in May. There isn’t anything to get.

It’s berry-picking, a half-forgotten afternoon catching tadpoles. They’re not the kind of things that you can keep. The trickle of tap water in the sink. Nothing to have. Do you understand? Take a deep breath; it’s like the scent of poplar on the breeze. It’s there, and then it’s not. It’s here, and now it’s gone. Exhale. It’s okay. There’s not anything to do about it.

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As always, you can reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. Thanks for reading, and special thanks to Hannah for… well, everything I wrote about here, and much, much more. Thanks also to Deva for teaching Diego how to be a cat. I miss you.

This is a piece I’ve been tinkering with for a few months now. I kept thinking I would improve it, but I moved on to other ideas. Originally, it was going to be an introduction to a longer piece about a particular thought experiment to do with my (now former) downstairs neighbor. I think that I’ll try to finish that one next and publish it in the next couple of weeks. For the time being, I hope you enjoy. it’s a bit lighter in tone than what I’ve been up to lately.

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I. The Prodigal Scholar

When I decided to go back to school in 2018 to earn a degree, I had no idea that I would end up majoring in philosophy. Despite having always had something of a philosophical bent, the latent (or at least dormant) intellectual curiosity that I discovered, at the ripe old age of 30, was of the scientific variety.1 So it was with visions of physics and cosmology—not metaphysics and epistemology—dancing through my head that I returned to Portland Community College after a decade-long hiatus.

After a few rounds of preliminary paperwork, I found myself seated across a desk from a kindly old academic guidance counselor.

“Well,” he said, glancing down at a printout of my rather uninspiring ten-year-old transcript. “Welcome back.” He looked back to me, his expression guarded and skeptical, like I was a mother who, after surrendering her malnourished and scab-covered child to the fire station on his first birthday, had shown up a decade later at the home of his adoptive parents, unannounced, expecting full custody. “I suppose we should talk a little about what you’re hoping to accomplish here, this time, what your interests are, potential majors. What brings you back?”

The wizened old fellow must have been at least 40. Good god, I thought to myself, in an instance of that phenomenon in which we project our most deep-seated and unconscious insecurities about ourselves, wholesale, upon whoever is in front of us. How depressing, to get to his age, and be stuck in a job like this. Always the bridesmaid, eh friend? A framed diploma on the wall announced my interlocutor’s bona fides—Master of Social Work—and I made a mental note to avoid the discipline at all costs.

When I didn’t immediately respond, he looked again at the transcript. “I’m just asking because it looks like you’re actually pretty close to finishing your associate degree,” he told me, “but you’ll probably need to retake a few of the courses you failed, depending on what your goal is.” Then, taking an almost apologetic tone, he added: “And, of course, it’s important to make sure that whatever happened last time—that caused you to lose steam and drop out—doesn’t happen this time around.”

My hubris evaporated; I felt suddenly uncertain in the presence of my lettered better. It was true, reader: this was not my first community college rodeo. I had taken a year’s worth of classes straight out of high school and another couple of semesters in my early 20s. Taken together, both attempts revealed a pattern that even a complete stranger could decipher with ease: strong start, mediocre middle, catastrophic finish. I was the runner who sprinted once around the track and then, my energy spent, walked a second lap before abandoning the race altogether without ceremony. Obviously, the advisor could not know the details, the contingencies that circumstanced my modus operandi, but I felt ashamed to realize that the man had my number.

“I-I’m—” I stuttered, “—i-interested in, maybe, physics?” I hadn’t meant to turn it into a question, but my register had risen a half-octave by the end of the confession. It did not inspire confidence in my guide.

Masking a grimace, he glumly studied my transcript and opened his mouth to say something before ultimately changing his mind. “Okay. Well, if you want to be a physicist, then the first step will be retaking Math 70 and Public Speaking. After that, you should really only be taking math and science classes until you transfer to a four-year.”

I demonstrated the extent of my mathematical literacy with the observation that this was only two classes, and shouldn’t I sign up for a few more? The counselor stopped me: “Look,” he said, taking pity. “You failed all the classes you attempted in 2011. That doesn’t mean you’re not smart, or that you won’t do well this time around. I just find that people in your situation do better if they start off slow. If fall term goes well, you’re more than welcome to enroll full-time in the winter. Sound good?”

It sounded fine. Honestly, I’m grateful to him—at that point, I was deflated enough that if he had given me any pushback whatsoever, I would have left and never returned. Instead, over the next year I finished my transfer degree (and, in the process, disabused myself of the notion that I might possess the requisite arithmetical acumen for physics) and enrolled at Portland State.

So it was that in January 2020, I found myself once again sitting in the office of an academic advisor. Like his junior college counterpart, he had a diploma hanging from the wall—also social work, but a Ph.D. His name was Tony; the first thing that I noticed about him was that I seemed to have caught him on a very good day. Reading over my transcript, he noticed and then effusively praised my dramatic turnaround. When I asked him about doing a double major, he scoffed. “Someone with your ability,” he said, grinning wildly and pointing to the transcript, which I had done much to improve since my return to the academy, “should be focusing on finishing your B.S. as quickly and cheaply as possible. You should really be thinking about graduate programs.”

I was flattered and (at the time) entirely ignorant vis-à-vis the structure and machinations of higher education. I didn’t actually know what grad school was, although I heard people talking about it occasionally. But Tony’s confidence in my “ability” and enthusiasm about my prospects made him easy to trust. After all, didn’t I, in my heart of hearts, believe myself to be extraordinary, talented, and yes, exceedingly able? If Tony and I converge so wholly on this most important matter, I thought, surely Tony knows best.

And so it came to pass. I told him my whole story, how I had been a bright and precocious child whose diamond was lost in the rough of a ruinous opioid addiction; how I had loved every class I’d taken in the past year: psychology, philosophy, physics, astronomy—even math—and so was having trouble choosing a major. Fuck if I didn’t tell him that Carl Sagan had, posthumously, changed my life, that the first four chapters of Pale Blue Dot—where Sagan writes about the Copernican revolution, the Roman Inquisition, the great demotion, and our species’ precarious tenure on the planet—had instilled in me a burning passion for the big picture, which was tediously earnest of me to tell this complete stranger, but also true.

Ever the consummate professional, Tony listened in rapt attention. He knew, he told me when I finally shut up, the perfect major for me: Liberal Studies, Portland State’s very own build-a-bear degree. Under the auspices of the unstructured, choose-your-own-adventure Liberal Studies Department, I could take any classes that interested me, from any of the university’s colleges (with a few exceptions—no math, but no loss), and all of them would count toward my degree. It sounded perfect. I was in.

The twist, gentle reader—and there’s always a twist—I’ve alluded to already. Do you recall how I seemed to find Tony in high spirits? Tony’s exuberance that day, as it turns out, was not solely due to his salubrious encounter with me, a guileless scholar virtually overflowing with academic potential. Rather, Tony had just given his notice; what I took to be an unattenuated passion for advising undergraduates was actually the incipient mania of a man for whom an entire year’s worth of bureaucratic obligations had just been wiped clean.

The form letter that arrived in my inbox a week later from Tony stated as much: Tony announced that he was leaving Portland State in order to devote more time to family and personal projects; Tony was grateful for his time with the university; Tony would not be joining us for winter term, slated to begin in less than a week.

He left instructions as to how his former charges should be divvied out to new advisors: psych majors go here, English majors there, and so on. I poured over the list looking for the Liberal Studies department, but there was nothing there. A thorough search of Portland State’s labyrinthine website revealed nothing. It was not as if the Liberal Studies department had been shuttered, its members absorbed into the university’s larger, better-funded departments; it was as if it had never existed at all. My heart sank. The Hogwarts Express had left the station, I realized, with me reeling and concussed in its luckless dust, a knot forming on my forehead where I had encountered no illusory wall at Platform 9 & 3/4, no magic, just the humiliating solidity of corporeal brick.

II. Gedankenexperiment

With few exceptions, life’s great vicissitudes are legatees of the butterfly effect. Car accidents are a prime example: if only I’d left sooner (or later); if only the dog hadn’t (or had) pissed on the floor. A minute’s delay would have changed everything, and vice versa, ad infinitum. Or, less morbidly, the chance encounters—say, at a coffee shop—that turn into great, life-defining love affairs.

The causal fulcrums upon which life is leveraged are almost never recognizable to us at the time except, perhaps, as an inchoate sense of unease or excitement, dread or anticipation. Even in hindsight, we will only very occasionally be able to identify a strict causal progression, step one leading to step two, and so on. Thus it is of at least a passing interest (well, to me) that I can identify the exact decision that led to my (ultimately) opting out of Liberal Studies and declaring instead as a philosophy major.

In my second term at Portland State—COVID-19 having only just turned the entire student body into distance-learning refugees—I wrote about the role of thought experiments in Galileo’s scientific discoveries for PHL 470: Philosophy of Science. You’re probably familiar with the term “thought experiment.” In recent years, thought experiments have bled out from a gutshot academia onto the culture at large. Television series like Black Mirror take inspiration from various philosophical thought experiments, sometimes to great effect. The Good Place is less subtle, wearing its philosophical influences proudly on its sleeves; sometimes its characters are literally just reciting thought experiments to one another, reading real-life philosophers in a college classroom, except in heaven. Video games like SOMA go that step further by introducing the variable of player agency into simulated thought experiments, which really brings the thought experiment to life.

There was a problem, though, with my essay on Galileo, I realized after reading over the first draft. It was all correct; the information was organized well enough. There were no typos, no major grammatical issues. Its issue was the same one plaguing the preceding paragraph in this very newsletter: thought experiment, thought experiment, thought experiment. The phrase “thought experiment” was overused, repeated ad nauseam until it broke the cadence of my writing. It sounded clunky and sophomoric. But what to do about it? Vaguely recalling something I’d once read, I knew that the term “thought experiment” had been coined by Einstein and that it had a special name in German. So I googled it; the German phrase was gedankenexperiment, “gedanken” meaning “mind” or “thought” and “experiment” meaning, well…2

I was torn. Over the next two years, I would acquire a taste for writing in the fussy argot of academic philosophy, but doing so is akin to training one’s palette to enjoy black coffee, bourbon, or tobacco. It required that one take that first, disgusting sip, to inhale that repulsive preliminary puff. Starting out, it’s normal to feel a little green around the gills, a little sick to the stomach. I waded into the rewrite:

Surveying Galileo’s prodigious body of work in physics and astronomy, it is all the more remarkable to learn that his attitude towards experimental confirmation—that hallmark of science—was inconsistent, even flippant. Galileo discounted experimental results that conflicted with his theories, writing off discrepancies as “unnatural accidents” or due to “secondary causes” (qtd. in Losee 51-52). Elsewhere, he claimed experimental results that—in hindsight—betray their gedanken pedigree.

I gagged, a little. But as I reread the paragraph once, twice, three times, the German word no longer stuck in my craw, each time going down more smoothly than the time before. On the fourth read, I realized, it started to sound almost good.

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Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of White Elephant. As always, you can reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com, where I accept positive criticism and softball questions.

I’ve wanted to write about my relationship with food and, in particular, veganism, for some time. After being vegan for most of my adult life—and certain that it would remain a lifelong conviction—I was as surprised as anyone when I decided to abandon the lifestyle after Graham was born. This piece barely scratches the surface of what was an extremely difficult decision (some might say it doesn’t even broach the topic at all), but I feel as if it is a good enough start. Thanks for subscribing and thanks for reading.

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Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out—the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

We have evolved to recognize the grotesquery of feces and its expulsion; shit is, of course, not good or safe to eat, and therefore those of our ancestors who were adequately repelled by it possessed an advantage over their brethren whose attitude toward feces was more lackadaisical. On the other hand, nutritive, high-caloric foodstuffs we find irresistibly attractive (sometimes to our own detriment). We are social eaters; we take pictures of our plates and post them to social media; we talk openly and enthusiastically about the hottest culinary trends, diets, restaurants, and so on.

Not so for eating’s unlucky, ugly cousin: scatological snapshots are decidedly unwelcome in most online spaces, and most of us are just as happy for it, grateful for the solidity of the poo taboo. Poop is—and even writing about it, is, to an extent—disgusting. The case I hope to make here, however, is that eating is similarly repulsive, perhaps even more so. “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” children are taught from an early age. Well, why not? For the same reason that we close the bathroom door before using the toilet: because it’s gross. The brute necessity of life’s incessant salivating, chomping, grinding, and swallowing is fundamentally disgusting; we’d rather not be reminded of it.

But—mouths open or closed—there is no escaping it: life eats life. Maddening; paradoxical; obscene: we are sentient, thinking beings, self-aware, but the very perpetuation of our sentience depends inexorably upon the consumption of other beings, many of them sentient in their own right. Just to stay alive, we must saw at flesh with dull teeth, gnaw at gristle and bone. And we must think about it, vaguely aware of the bestiality of our predicament. As if this were not sorry enough a state of affairs life goes on to shit death. This vulgar equilibrium is the only compelling argument for the existence of God—but not, it goes without saying, a benevolent one.

So it went: as the size of our brains increased over ponderous millennia, one generation to the next, we utilized our increased cognition to obtain better food more safely, more reliably, and in greater quantity. Until one day, a painfully, cringingly self-aware ancestor took a bite and thought about what, exactly, he was doing, and he gagged a little before he could stifle the thought.

Anyway. It’s turning out that my son, Graham, is a bit of a picky eater. Not a huge surprise—from the get-go, Graham’s relationship with food has been… complicated. As early as his first month planetside, Hannah recognized that there was something off about the way he nursed. He wasn’t, like some babies, completely incapable of the (surprisingly difficult) feat; nor was he utterly disinterested. He successfully identified Hannah’s nipples as a locale of great importance within his expanding world—even that they were meant to be interacted with orally. Nevertheless, his nursing sessions were reliably short and usually ended in cries of hungry frustration instead of the milk-drunk stupor of a well-fed infant.

We visited our first lactation consultant, Jen, a saint of a woman, a (medical) nurse who worked under the aegis of the local hospital and whose entire practice specialized in the (surprisingly complex) mechanics of breastfeeding. She confirmed what Hannah already suspected: Graham was having trouble ‘latching’ onto momma’s nipples. As a result, he was only drinking Hannah’s letdown, the watery surge of runny ‘foremilk’ that precedes the fattier, harder-to-get ‘hindmilk’. As the name suggests, the letdown practically (and sometimes literally) leaks from the nipple, so it required no real effort or determination on Graham’s part—just catching it in his mouth, basically. But because he couldn’t suck, couldn’t create the requisite vacuum with his mouth, he missed out on all the good stuff, giving up as the trickle subsided.

For most of our evolutionary history, being bad at nursing—sucking at sucking—was a death sentence. During infanthood, mammals rely exclusively on their mother’s milk for all their nutritional needs; the mammalian biological imperative to nurse the young predates the emergence of humans and primates by millions of years and is, therefore, quite powerful, to understate the case by an order of magnitude.1

Luckily for him, Graham was born in the year 2022, in the United States, to parents whose poverty was situational, rather than generational, and so his unskilled sucking was merely a hindrance and a (major) inconvenience; in no way did it spell his doom. (Although the anxiety we felt, as his parents, admitted of no difference, experientially speaking, to that catastrophic panic felt by our ancestors whose young could or would not eat. It was rough.)

Through an absurd and wholly unscientific system of trial and error, we—eventually—devised a routine that seemed to work for him, some of the time. We kowtowed to his exacting preferences: bottles served hot, five degrees Fahrenheit above body temperature, from gimmicky contraptions designed to prevent the gassy discomfort of indigestion. Some days he would attack his bottles with gusto; more often, he would merely attack them.

When we introduced him to solid foods at about six months, he seemed at first to take to it like a pro, but—before long—he woke up to the essential odiousness of ingestion and protested accordingly. All the same, it’s less stressful now than it was at first—at this point, he’s able to communicate his pleasure and displeasure to us with a degree of specificity unavailable to him during those early days. If he decides not to eat for a meal, or even a day, we’re able to set aside our anxiety and trust that his disinterest in food is temporary and that tomorrow, he’ll be hungry.

That’s not quite right; he’s extraordinarily interested in food—perhaps too interested in it to bother eating it. Sitting in his high chair, he’ll exercise his grip by crushing peanut-buttered toast into a pulpy mass; he appears to be developing a folk theory of ballistics, utilizing his rubber spoon to propel cottage cheese or applesauce in majestic, parabolic arcs across the living room. By the conclusion of most of his mealtimes, the concentrations and locales of his various foodstuffs have altered significantly—shapes changed and geographic coordinates dispersed—but very, very little of it is inside of him.

I’m worried he gets this from me.

Let me explain: my relationship with food is fraught and complex. One of my earliest food-related memories involves a protracted battle with my mother over my refusal to eat a sandwich. (I don’t remember what sort of sandwich; it could have been anything.) I might have been four years old, maybe five. The crux of the issue was that I had, for whatever reason, assigned a moral weight to the continued existence of the sandwich my mother had prepared.

My thoughts were not sophisticated enough to argue that the snack was sentient; in my later years as a vegan and vegetarian, I might have brought up the sandwich’s carbon footprint—the greenhouse gases emitted in its production, from seed to plate, the untallied cost of the rainforests slashed and burned to grow it, the fossil fuels combusted to transport it to the grocery store and so on. During my last few years of adhering to a vegan diet, perhaps I’d have resorted to claims about sandwiches being “ends unto themselves”, a Kantian tenet referring to the quality of having one’s own desires and goals that are goods for their possessor. At that age, though, I could not articulate my misgivings; I merely recognized that, if I were to consume the sandwich, it would be at the expense of the sandwich—that such an action would be, in fact, irrevocably detrimental to it.

I don’t remember the extent of my resistance—ten minutes? An hour? It has become one of those cancerous memories I cannot entirely trust, faithless and compromised over decades, now, of frequent access and reproduction. All that remains with vivid certainty is the bitter sting of defeat, for of course the battle was lost; how could I compete with my implacable mother’s razor-sharp sophistry?

Since memory fails, here is how I imagine it went: my dear mother, perhaps frazzled, even growing a bit short-tempered, appealed first to my love for her. “I worked hard to make this for you. It will hurt my feelings if you don’t eat it.” Being, in general, a sensitive and sympathetic child, I was moved by this entreaty—how could I not have been? But—and what my mother failed in that moment and throughout the altercation to understand—it was that very sensitivity that bred my rebellion, that prevented me from eating the sandwich.

The term theory of mind describes the ability to recognize and acknowledge the internal lives of others, despite the fact that we have access only to our own. Noticing that we have an inner world populated with thoughts, feelings, and qualitative experiences, we infer that this must be the same for everyone. Our capacity for empathy, I think, depends on an adequately-developed theory of mind; to simulate the emotions and predict the reactions of people who are not ourselves, we must first be able to recognize possessors of emotions, to distinguish between those entities that have inner lives—and those that do not.

Although this becomes more-or-less second nature to us relatively early on, there are of course misfires as the skill develops—false positives being, at least for myself, the most frequent mistake. And indeed, this was the error at the heart of the whole tragic misunderstanding: I had identified the sandwich as a thinking and feeling being, a person, the sort for whom I was regularly encouraged to empathize with, whose feelings I was told I ought to consider.

And I had been taught well. My parents received regular compliments on my behavior—delighted squeals of so polite! and adoring he’s so considerate! My habit of developing and imagining elaborate inner lives for each of my stuffed animals was similarly encouraged, and why not? Graham’s not doing this yet, but I can anticipate how heartbreakingly precious it will be when he does.

So when my mother appealed to my consideration for her feelings, a fatal conflict was introduced: suddenly, I had to decide between hurting her, and killing the sandwich. It was not even that I had to harden my heart; as the conflict dragged on, I would have loved to merely side with her, the inevitable victor, to acquiesce to her increasingly-impatient demands and return from the cold wilderness of her anger into the soothing comfort of her favor. I just could not muster the requisite brutality to do the thing she wanted of me; I lacked the constitution and the stomach for it.

Perhaps there are vast sections of the memory unavailable to me, hours of begging and pleading, ineffectual platitudes about starving children in Africa or elsewhere. There must have been. There must have been some extenuating circumstance, some looming consequence that I could not see and thus cannot now recall. Given the sheer barbarism of what came next, nothing else makes sense. My mother’s exact wording is lost from memory, but I remember with devastating clarity the spirit of the rhetorical thrust that finally pierced my moral resistance, that broke the siege and ended my strike:

You have to eat it or you’ll die.2

Because I cannot bring to mind the extenuating circumstances that presaged her (somewhat nuclear) retort, I will render no verdict as to the appropriateness of its mobilization. There is a sense in which my mother’s strategy was to bring, as it were, a gun to a knife fight, but I do not suppose that she intended to threaten my life. Charitably, I reckon that it was a last resort, marshaled only after exhausting all civilized recourse. Perhaps I had offered up similar instances of lunchtime resistance for days or even weeks prior. I was very young; I do not remember.

This brings us to the cornerstone of the memory, the qualitative, narrative sequence that I remember in the first person. I’m crying, probably tired from the extended struggle, and—although I don’t remember being hungry—given the circumstances, it makes sense to assume that I could have been virtually famished. I gripped with both hands the sandwich, the soft white bread of its limbs giving beneath my tiny fingers. Through my tears, I apologized to the sandwich. Here, I can provide an exact quote, the fidelity of which there can be no real question:

I’m sorry, little Sandwich, but I have to eat you.

It’s important to draw attention to the extent to which I had anthropomorphized the sandwich; in that moment, there was no emotional difference between the brutality of what came next and, say, the desperate meals of the Donner party. I steeled myself, hardened my heart against the snack to which I had become so inexplicably attached, raised it to my open mouth, and bit down suddenly and viciously, as if I were trying to kill the thing with the first blow. Immediately my tears returned, but here the memory dissolves almost entirely; perhaps I finished consuming my former friend; perhaps a single bite was all my mother required of me, a merely symbolic act of acquiescence, a communion that absolved her prodigal son.

I am skeptical of the word “trauma.” Not because I am a cynic; I am, but it does not prevent me from recognizing that people develop defense mechanisms—psychological and physiological—in response to specific events in their lives. Like the sapling that grows unnaturally around a stone becomes a crooked, gnarled tree, the pathologies of childhood are writ large upon our adult neuroses, as maladaptive patterns of behavior or beliefs. I am skeptical of trauma because of its explanatory power: like religion, astrology, or psychoanalysis, it can extend to explain everything within the domain of human behavior, with entire personalities reduced to the ‘traumas’ that generated them. Applicability extended thusly, it of course explains nothing.

Nevertheless, I wonder now if the brutality of my sandwich lunch that day traumatized me. I can’t help but try to explain vast swathes of my adult life in relation to it, as if everything I’ve done—everything I am—can somehow be traced back to that fateful meal. It sounds crazy, but sometimes I worry that the trauma is generational. I’m afraid that my despicable act, so many years ago, burrowed its way into my germline and that the wages of my ancient sin are now being visited upon my son.

And I have fever dreams—sleep-deprived, waking nightmares—during which Graham refuses any sustenance whatsoever, not because of some physiological contingency or developmental delay, but out of a burdensome capacity for love, swollen like a tumor. Because he knows—not consciously, but on some tacit level—that to love something means to desire its continued existence, and thus we cannot eat what we also love. In the dream, I want to cajole him, lie to him, to tell him it’s okay, but he doesn’t understand because he’s just a baby boy. Desperate, I feel the terrible truth come surging up from my stomach like vomit, like a meal half-digested and rejected: you have to eat it or you’ll di…

And then I wake up.

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Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of White Elephant. As always, you can reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. Thanks to my brother for the truly chilling sandwich illustration, as well as the section-divider elephant candles. He also provided me with some feedback for this essay, which was fun and helpful.

I thought long and hard about whether to continue with the monthly digest. Giving up after a single attempt isn’t even giving up; it’s merely acknowledging a failed experiment and soberly putting it behind you. Last month’s Elephemera #1 seemed to me to border the unnecessary. Certainly, February did not find me so prolific as to warrant a reader’s guide to the month-in-review. But, I wrote and published it anyway, and it felt—if nothing else—helpful to me, a useful exercise for orienting myself within the project, to reflect on and potentially revise my process. The digest format is also convenient for sharing on social media; a list of brief summaries gives new readers a better picture of the topics I write about than does my (somewhat uninformative) about page.

The creative fecundity that embued my February, unfortunately, waned somewhat during the month of March. I found myself with fewer hours of leisure at my disposal and spent a smaller percentage of those writing. Nevertheless, I did complete and publish one piece, so without any further ado…

This month’s post:

March 17 - Cosmic Microwave Background

This is a personal essay about my grandmother’s recent death and my son’s first birthday. I describe my emotions surrounding the two events via metaphors from physics, cosmology, and statistical mechanics; there is nothing too difficult for the layperson to understand (I am one myself, after all), but neither will everyone appreciate the metaphors with the subconscious ease they may be accustomed to.

I attempted to adhere to the (apocryphal) dictum of Albert Einstein as I wrote about subjects many readers will find unfamiliar: “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.”1 I suspect that I failed on both sides of the equation, that I overcomplicated the simplifiable and simplified the irreducible beyond recognition—but, then again, I’m no physicist.

Even if you’ve already read this essay, please check it out again, just to see the new artwork. The original was published with a placeholder photograph of Neskowin’s Ghost Forest. Today, I replaced it with a bespoke illustration designed by the talented Joseph Mahaffey.

B-Sides and Rarities

I have surprisingly few completed pieces of (nonacademic) writing that I’m proud of, considering the sheer number of unfinished drafts and half-baked projects taking up space on my hard drive.

Nevertheless, I have a few, and—since it’s been weeks since I published anything—I’ve decided to publish one essay that I wrote a couple of years ago that seems evergreen enough that I don’t cringe to read it today, as well as a poem.

I didn’t want to spam subscribers or to come off as if I was recycling old material, so these won’t appear in your inbox. You can access them below:

August 2020 - The Couch

An essay about a dysfunctional relationship with a piece of furniture, focusing, primarily, on that relationship’s terminal stage.

November 2020 - Natural Selection

The last poem I wrote.

State of the Substack

When I launched the Substack, I set a goal to publish thrice monthly. When I managed to exceed that output and actually achieve double that goal during White Elephant’s inaugural month, I was quite pleased with myself and hoped to continue apace.

Consequently, I was discouraged by the meager fruits of my March labors. I had thought that I wouldn’t write an “Elephemera #2” at all, feeling it a bit redundant. It seems gratuitous—almost narcissistic—to produce commentary on one’s own writing at a 1:1 ratio.

Then again, I’m a bit of a narcissist, and—more importantly—I couldn’t shake the anxiety that, if I gave up on the monthly digest so early on in the life of the project, I might be giving up on the newsletter altogether. So I’m publishing a March digest, because I know that not publishing it will make it all the more difficult to hit the “publish” button next time. My aim for April is to publish at least three new pieces (not counting this one, of course).

As ever, thank you for subscribing and reading. A huge thank you to those of you who—despite my pitiful March output—purchased new subscriptions or upgraded your free subscriptions over the past month. It is humbling and hugely encouraging.

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Thanks again. You can reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. Image Credit: Joseph Mahaffey.

If God is One and God is Three
Could there exist a god in Me?
Not atoms nor void solely be—
But essence holy? Wholly free?
Divine decree? Darwin’s degree?
A nadir, or an apogee?
Farther, my God, from thee, from thee.

Oh God, Oh, My
Are we the More, from Less refined?
A helix spore, a gnarled vine
Tangled, tore, and serpentine
Eternal, infinite—Divine?
A timelike light, a lightlike time
Platonic form or blink of eye?

Good God, God Damn
If there is nothing More than Man
Then for what purpose bled the Lamb?
Why’d Abraham forsake the ram?
Nothing plotted, nothing planned
No reason, rhyme, no “greater than.”
A wasteland where a river ran,

goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.

and yet:
the aggregate of all our shame, all our pain
rings like church bells, falls like rain
an aspect, a facet, imperfect light reflects
in death we return to the dust whence we came

by Benji Mahaffey

I don’t have extensive archives of my writing that I’m terribly proud of, but this piece is an exception. It is a true story, which I recorded during the summer of 2020. I’ve decided to share it here, but not as a newsletter—just a quiet addition to the collection. It’s similar in tone and voice to some of what I’ve written recently, and I still like it, years after the fact. On the other hand, I shopped a draft of it out a year or two ago; the only feedback I remember was from a (relatively) accomplished poet. Nothing at all on the first page; on the last, just “WTF?” scribbled in the margins of the last paragraph. So, caveat lector, or whatever.

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Squinting against the midday August sun, I watched as the two young men hoisted themselves into the back of their black pickup and began to unravel the knot of canvas straps binding my old nemesis to the truck’s bed. In victory, I felt a pang of shame and averted my eyes from that gaudy green- and white-striped flannel, now laid bare, her upholstery finally failing after years of losing battles to cats’ claws.

I didn’t choose the couch—it was well into its tenure when I moved into my apartment almost seven years ago. The last tenants had abandoned it unceremoniously, and it was perhaps this fact, more than anything else, that persuaded my wife Hannah and me that the couch was an immovable object, that it was a necessary fixture in our lives, like death or taxes. By our count, it was wider than the doorway of our second-story apartment by at least two inches and impossibly heavy. For the first year—if we did not exactly revel in the paradox—we were at least not utterly mirthless in the face of this koan-turned-flesh. But as our fortunes turned—as the problems of life mounted conspicuously with only the couch remaining constant—we became convinced that it was the sentient totem of some ancient, malevolent evil, and we the proximal victims of its indiscriminate geas.

We both hated the couch, it’s true, but never in equal measure. Repentant—but always, eventually, recalcitrant—I could not quite quit my long-suffering, nostalgic fondness for it, the roughness of its fabric, the garishness of its vulgar stripes. Even its incomprehensible shape—somehow room-spanning and yet not quite long enough to lie down on—for me held a rose-tinted, parochially charming appeal. Hannah, on the other hand, harbored no such sentimentality. For her, the couch was the ultimate bottleneck, an irredeemable blight on an already troubled apartment. Energies of every kind—financial, physical, emotional—were captured in the well of its gravity, unable to muster sufficient velocity for escape. The couch was blasphemous, a sin against feng shui, and its very presence grew increasingly intolerable to her, constituting a sort of depraved spiritual water torture.

Et tu, Benji? I heard the sofa cry out to me as the movers muscled its backside humiliatingly into the air, diesel smoke billowing around their Ford as if to blot out the sun. It was a sweltering day, hot and cloudless—probably the worst day of the year to haul a couch to the dump, and yet, here we were. Whatever humor the movers might have ordinarily brought to their work evaporated in that heat, and—like the vacating tenants before them—the sweat-drenched, sunburned men were unmoved by the weight of the couch’s faded, magnificent history.

Their movements: uncalculated, animal reflex. Their violence: impassive, spiteless. They knew not what they did. Once they had hoisted the couch’s girth into an unnatural, vertical position, they callously tipped it out and over the bed of the truck. One side thudded into the dry pavement of the transfer station, sending up a scandalized cloud of hard-luck dust. Memories accrued over a decade—quarrels and truces, dead skin cells and cat hair—shed in an intransigent instant, squandered by that old brute, gravity. A silver quarter and a permanent marker toppled out from the couch’s depths, a race of long-extinct cave dwellers banished from their garden. Too little, too late. Lost, now, for too long to be found.

I’m sorry, I whispered under my breath. You’ve been in our way, now, for so many years. You’re not right for our apartment—you do know that, don’t you? It’s never been a good fit. You somehow block the air conditioner and the refrigerator door at the same time, even though they’re on opposite sides of the room.

Is that so? I could hear her wounded reply, dripping deep into my subconscious with the venomous fury of a woman scorned. I don’t recall any complaints from that night when you and Hannah made up after your first fight. I seemed fine enough, then.

I cringed. I had hoped the couch had forgotten about that time. It was undignified, uncouth of her to bring it up—a below-the-belt, desperate tactic, employable only by those old friends who are witnesses to one’s basest self, and who leverage that knowledge in moments that transcend mere cruelty. I mean—yes, you were good for that. You were a good couch. Please, don’t think me ungrateful.

It occurred to me that I was having a conversation with a couch, which—on a hundred-degree day—might be a sign of heatstroke-induced delirium, but I couldn’t help myself and added: I promise I won’t forget about you.

My apology fell flat, synchronizing awkwardly as it did with the movers as they forced the other side of the couch off the tailgate. The second thud was weaker than the first, a mercy killing in the wake of a fatal but sloppy blow.

Impulsively, I snapped a picture of the couch in its death throes and sent it to Hannah. She would be pleased to know that I’d finished the job, and wasn’t all this for her, after all? The immediacy of the photo, so close now in my palm, made me regret the boorish act instantaneously. There were those soiled green and white stripes, disgraced remnants of a once-mighty empire. There was that hole where stuffing spilled through shredded fabric, a gut-shot soldier abandoned behind enemy lines.

The men finished and didn’t dignify the couch with their touch again, even to reposition it amongst the refuse heap. They drove the thirty or so yards to where I waited in the sun without looking back. The movers had worn their coronavirus masks in the house, but had removed them now in the safety of their vehicle. Neither was older than twenty-five.

“How much do I owe you, gentlemen?” I asked, hoping to sound casual, composed, trying to disguise furtive glances at my unburied adversary, so unjustly sentenced after its years of distinguished service. Like a shell-shocked Sherlock I stared, stunned, into the already-vacant eyes of my dying Moriarty. Panic mounted as I realized how unsure I was of the person I might become, now, in the absence of my historical foil. I forced my gaze away, and I could feel the history of our mutual war disintegrating, threads irrevocably severed.

The driver fiddled with his phone for a minute, calculating a fair wage. Neither thought to kill the pickup’s diesel engine, and I started to feel sick in the heat and the exhaust. Finally: “It’s a hundred forty-five,” he said, “and I need you to sign here and here.” He had marked a document with x’s, and I signed without reading, would have pledged my very soul to be done with the bloody transaction. I had a check prepared and leaned against the truck to finalize it. The sun-soaked steel of the hood scalded my fingers; I grimaced and continued. One hundred forty-five dollars and no cents, I printed, and scribbled a signature before my resolve could falter.

I handed over the check and a cash tip, their thirty pieces of silver, like some sort of bureaucratic Judas—or was I Judas-In-Reverse? The latter thought gave me a measure of comfort. Overcome with profound regret after betraying his Savior, Judas Iscariot hung himself (or disemboweled himself—accounts differ in grisly detail). But before all of that, he’d been a disciple, favored, beloved. And who, if not Judas, had made mankind’s ultimate deliverance possible? Was it not his fated infidelity that snatched victory from grave and neutered death of its inimical sting?

Perhaps my betrayal was like—in kind, at least, if not degree? Perhaps now, no longer eclipsed by the couch, that space of all possibility whose chaotic weave had seemed so hopelessly knotted would unspool, breach all boundary, become infinite.

Perhaps, in the light of this act and its brute finality, some forgotten, incoherent tongue would be rendered comprehensible at last, as time’s inflexible, deterministic clockwork unwound itself to reveal, as the grand finale, an ultimately benevolent universe! Or—if benevolence is too strong a condition—then behind that crooked veil a benign cosmos, a toothless grin, smiling the hapless goodwill of senility.

Here in the shadeless noon, I was the betrayer, but I felt certain that from this point, time would flow in all directions. Linear causality would cease, replaced by the recursive, sweeping loops of a gentler, more humane history. All those intractable tragedies that had seemed so necessary, exposed now as mere contingencies, provincial, inconsequential, and eternally mutable. A spark like hope as I realized that in this fresh past, I might have been a believer, might have found salvation. With sweat stinging my eyes, I bowed my head in salty prayer: Forgive me, entropic Sublime! Redeem me, senescent Creator, so that I may go forth and spread the Good News, preaching the gospel of change.

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Comments? Questions? Concerns? Leave them in the comments, or send ‘em my way at benjimahaffey@substack.com. As ever, thanks for reading.

It’s been a busy month; I’m sorry for my delinquency. I decided to publish this today, in celebration of Graham’s first birthday, rather than to continue editing or proofreading it. I hope I caught most of the worst mistakes, but I’m sure some remain. Anyway, enjoy.

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It’s the last day of my weekend. I slept in, a luxury much depreciated but nevertheless infrequently afforded since my son, Graham, was born. Still, a quarter past seven feels a lot nicer than my usual 4:50 AM alarm. As a result, though, I’m behind, running out of time, so I’m multitasking—brushing my teeth on the toilet—when I see that my mom’s calling. I almost answer it, but think better. I’ll call her back once I’m dressed and there’s no toothpaste in my mouth.

The call ends; I get up and spit into the sink. While I rinse off my toothbrush my phone vibrates once against the countertop. I pick it up, ready to listen to my mom’s voicemail. There isn’t one. Instead, a short text:

Just wanted to let you know that Grandma died last night.

During those initial moments after my brain processes the message, I’m unsure how I feel. My face reddens and I take the rush of hot blood to be guilt, maybe shame, remorse seeking its proper object. She never met Graham, I realize. It would have taken, what? Half a day, a day at most.

In a few days, Graham will have his first birthday. He will have been around the sun exactly once, a circuit that most of us will complete around seventy times before we die, give or take. Although the last year of her life overlapped with Graham’s first, my grandmother never met Graham; she wouldn’t have comprehended his relation to her if she had. Ida was on her eighty-seventh lap across the solar system when she died, but the last seven or eight were rote at best, joyless and confusing, her memory and cognition abandoning her long before her body began to fail. There’s a real sense in which—even if I had organized a physical rendevous—they wouldn’t have truly met one another. Toward the end, she was a vacant husk. An introduction that ought to have been fraught with numinous significance would have been disorienting and upsetting for all parties. It was for the best.

Maybe, on some level, she’d have understood, I tell myself. Even if she didn’t, what if it would have made her happy? It would have been one day.

The earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours; it has an orbital period of 365 days. Like the swinging of a pendulum or the ricochet of a billiard ball, orbital mechanics—though not exactly simple—are derived according to just a few fundamental physical laws. Furthermore, in classical mechanics, these laws are time-reversal invariant, meaning that the equations that describe the system’s evolution forward in time also describe it in reverse. The future is the mirror image of the past, and vice versa. At this level, everything is still reversible, undoable.

Directionality—in time as in space—is determined by an observer, defined in relation to a particular frame of reference. This was Galileo’s relativistic insight, inspired by a swaying chandelier, centuries ago in the cathedral. Perhaps it is cold comfort, but entropy and its concomitants—aging, senescence, death—emerge relativistically, macroscopically, from the fabric of being. They are contingent and perspective-bound.

One day.

I call my mom back; I mention none of this.

For a handful of childhood summers, my father’s extended family attempted to forge a tradition: an annual reunion at the coast, in Neskowin, one of the many essentially fungible wet and foggy beach towns that stud the Oregon Pacific like a bracelet. Every year, a new catastrophe struck, each worse than the last—a fire, a broken ankle, a stroke—until the tradition smothered quietly in its cradle. During its brief instantiation, however, we witnessed the unearthing of Neskowin’s Ghost Forest, an ancient grove of Sitka spruce that appeared, seemingly overnight, after a particularly tempestuous winter.

The mist-shrouded coastal clime was rendered downright mysterious by the sudden appearance of these millennia-dead trees. Jutting out of the sand and mist, they seemed the ancient, petrified fingers of some long-buried giant, black and stark against the endless expanse of gray ocean. One morning, my father and I explored them together. I wonder now if he was, unbeknownst to me, freshly incensed by a late-night argument with his atheistic father that I had not been privy to. I know they were prone to bitter disputes over matters metaphysical and theological, and the odd specificity of our conversation that day makes more sense in this light. Or, perhaps not. Maybe it was just the exhumed forest’s somber majesty, spurring questions of existential import.

One way or another, the subject turned to God, to Christianity and its constant assault from secular science. We discussed the culture’s obsession with Darwin’s theory of natural selection: “You know, Darwin himself said that evolution was wrong before he died,” Dad told me. “He was saved on his deathbed.” I didn’t doubt it for a second. My exposure to evolution was limited to the criticisms of its least charitable opponents; at ten years old, I already saw the theory for the ludicrously ad hoc explanation it was, an embarrassing attempt to deny Creation its Creator. Dad brought up Christian scientists and explained the methodological rigor with which they—by tallying the concentric circles circumscribing the innards of very old trees—demonstrated the veracity of Biblical history. He even tried to explain a few of the theoretical flaws of carbon dating—something about volcanoes—but this went over my head.

The conversation turned to that least-satisfying cosmological posit of all, the so-called Big Bang, the secularists’ theoretical catalyst for all creation. The patent absurdity of it was plain to see. “What came before the Big Bang, though?” I asked, hoping to impress with my incipient apologetics. “What caused that?”

We gazed out across the mist-shrouded half-forest, the silhouettes of its dead trunks contrasting sharply against a backdrop of barely-differentiated gray. These little islands of novelty—pockets of order within the incoherent ombre of sand, sea, and sky—seemed answer enough. I shivered in the brisk coastal air, as if together we had discovered irrefutable evidence of creation, a timepiece bearing the watchmaker’s inscription.

“Exactly,” my father replied.

That night, after I had gone to sleep, a blood clot lodged itself in my grandfather’s brain. It was bound to happen. The tenuous equilibrium of any ordered system—orbital, terrestrial, circulatory—has but a small set of similarly-ordered states into which it can evolve; there will always be, by many orders of magnitude, more states of disorder into which its parts can arrange. So if not this malfunction, some or another was, given enough time, inevitable. This is entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, the order of time. The reason why past and future are not symmetrical, emerging de facto out of de jure reversal-invariant physical law.

This I reflect on only with the benefit of a lifetime’s hindsight. Back then, I could not articulate my vague unease. I suppose it had the shape of my rhetorical question from the day prior: what caused that?

“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” is a mnemonic that never really caught on. Who knows why? Perhaps it’s because the acronym “ROYGBIV” is uniquely memorable all on its own. Roy-gee-biv. Or, maybe we don’t need a mnemonic to recall the color spectrum of visible light. We see it—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—every day. We’re more than intimately familiar with it; consciousness consists of it. Sure—with eyes shut—auditory experience can take center stage, but color still spills in through closed lids.

Homo sapiens have perceived a technicolor world for hundreds of thousands of years; for just as long, we sensed that there was more to it as well, lurking unseen just beyond the threshold of perception. Religion institutionalized our nascent suspicion, proposing other dimensions, heavens and hells, but this demarcation is a comparatively recent distinction. For most of our tenure as a species, the primal weltanschauung understood the relationship between the spiritual and material realms as one of simple identity.

Only a few centuries ago—a span too brief to register on a cosmic scale—did humankind discover that we had been right all along, that the visible light we see is merely the minute, observable portion of a spectrum that extends into asymmetrical infinity. Our perception captures only a fraction of the universe’s light, a sliver selected for by evolution because seeing it provided our ape forbears with some reproductive advantage. The shortest wavelength that our eyes discern, we see as the color violet; the longest, red. But we’ve developed methods to detect the infinitesimal gamma ray, and—on the other end—radio waves arbitrarily long, spanning the breadth of the universe.

The mantle of Galilean relativity was taken up by Albert Einstein at the beginning of the 20th century. Einstein expanded the applicability of the theory, first with Special Relativity—which added caveats for velocities approaching the speed of light—and later with General Relativity, which incorporated gravitational effects. A postulate of Einstein’s is that the speed of electromagnetic radiation—the speed of light—is constant in a vacuum, for all observers, regardless of their frame of reference.

Although the speed of light is a universal constant, its wavelength—due to the Doppler effect—can be perceived differently by different observers. In the same way that a car passing on the freeway increases in pitch as it approaches and descends into a low rumble as it departs, the wavelength of approaching light shifts blue, while receding light—moving, relative to us, away—shifts toward the red end of the spectrum in a phenomenon known as redshift.

My father was right; religion is under a sort of attack by science. Science and its methods have, systematically and for centuries, broken the tenuous logic of religious faith, peeling mystery off the cosmos in clumsy, fleshlike strips. One such blow came in 1929, with the discovery of the Hubble expansion.

While examining the electromagnetic spectra of distant galaxies, Edwin Hubble observed something astonishing: anywhere he pointed his telescope, anywhere he looked and in every direction, the spectra of these far-off worlds shifted always red, never blue. In every case, their light appeared to be receding, farther and farther away from us; the more distant the galaxy, the more pronounced the phenomenon. In the aftermath of the Big Bang, space itself was expanding too quickly for even light to keep up.

The coup de grâce came in the 1960s, delivered by the radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who inadvertently discovered the cosmic microwave background—literally the afterglow of the Big Bang. They stumbled upon it by accident, thinking it at first to be a malfunction of their radio telescope. As anticipated, it detected the radiation of the distant stars it pointed to—but, oddly, it registered too a low-level radioactive hum no matter where they directed it. Rather than mere icy vacuum, all of space was suffused with a cool-but-detectable warmth, radiation about three degrees above absolute zero.

A brief explanation: for 370,000 years after the big bang, the universe was too hot and energetic for stable atoms to form; thus, despite being full of photons—full of light—the universe was an opaque plasma of elementary particles and energy. Imagine it like a salad dressing: oil, slowly blended into vinegar. What Penzias and Wilson discovered with their radio telescope was the moment the emulsification broke: as space expanded, the temperature of the universe dropped and a phase transition occurred during which the universe became transparent. Matter condensed out of hot plasma; hydrogen atoms formed and released photons. Traveling for fourteen billion years, the photons had cooled off significantly by the time they reached Penzias and Wilson, but were still easily detectable with the proper tools.

The homogeneous glow of the microwave background betrays the remarkable uniformity of the early universe, a state in which any configuration looked, more or less, like any other. But—after the phase transition and the emergence of stable matter—gravity became the dominant universal force. As the cosmos evolved, atoms fused into stars, then galaxies. Suddenly, there were infinitely more possible disordered states in which to evolve than uniform, equilibrium states. Thus loosed the arrow of time from its crooked bow.

In a few trillion years, the expanding universe will have outpaced us entirely. In every galaxy across the universe, the speed of light will be outstripped by exponentially expanding vacuum, infinite distance, and the night sky will grow dark. The microwave background radiation will dissipate, and there will be no telltale evidence of the Big Bang, nothing at all to suggest that there is more to the world than what we can see. Any sentient life will be left with nothing more than the vague premonition of our early ancestors.

Suddenly, I realize how I feel—about the death of my grandmother, about the single day that I could not spare for her, about Graham turning one. I feel unsure of what to do: should I cringe away from the entropic aftermath of miraculous, impossible creation? Or bask in its cold light, omnipresent and all-illuminating, before it is gone forever? I feel that understanding—the meaning of love, God, consciousness—has come to me too late. My remorse finds its object: that the infinite mystery only just dawned on me and already passes through me like a sieve, light racing, receding, violet shifting blue, growing redder and redder. Any minute now it will disappear, first from the spectrum of my comprehension, then vanishing altogether.

I bathe Graham nightly; the first thing he does is pull the rubber stopper from the drain. He is too eager. He is endlessly fascinated by the spiraling bathwater, by the way his rubber ducks and plastic orbs inexorably circle the drain. When the bath is empty, he is nonplussed; he knows I will refill it, and the game will go on. The rigid order of time is observer-dependent, and from his perspective, there is still only the present in its infinitely interchangeable potential configurations. At this level, everything is still reversible, undoable.

Delay, delay, a little longer. Give me a little more time! A minute more, an hour—one day! A single day to count them for myself: the rings, the recursive history of the universe, nested and repeating, circumscribing petrified hearts of spruce! All I want: to arrest the heavens in orbit and send the planets spinning back to the beginning. It is all I wish to accomplish: to gather the prodigal galaxies, star by errant star, and wrap them in my embrace, hold them close forever. Is it too much to ask? To stop time? Freeze light in a vacuum, halt the universe in its tracks?

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As always, thanks for reading. You can reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Thanks to my brother, Joseph Mahaffey, for the illustration of the Ghost Forest.

This is the first of what I intend to be a regular digest/post-mortem of White Elephant’s month-in-review. I’ll use it to address you directly, solicit feedback, reflect on what the process was like for me, and include links and short summaries to the month’s writings in case you missed something.

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First order of business: a sincere and big “thank you” to everyone who has subscribed so far.

I’m not going to say that the initial response to White Elephant has surpassed my wildest dreams. It would be untrue: White Elephant has not, in its first month, caught the attention of Hamish McKenzie, the creator of Substack, and in the process netted me a six-figure cash advance. Nor are Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, so far as I know, engaged in a frenzied bidding war for the rights to my as-yet-unwritten guide to fatherhood. Surprisingly, I haven’t even received sponsorship offers from Amazon or Simple Human.

Luckily, neither has it been as bad as I predicted during my most self-indulgent dim nights of the soul. Nothing I’ve written has, as of yet, cost me friendships or employment; my long-suffering partner, Hannah, is still a subscriber and still my wife. My decision to appropriate the likeness of Rich Uncle Pennybags for the artwork accompanying “The $400 Question” has resulted in no cease-and-desist orders from its copyright owner, the notoriously litigious Hasbro.

As is almost always the case, the reality of it has been somewhere right in the middle. There’s still plenty of time for the other shoe to drop—on either side—but the already-low probability of the best- or worst-case scenarios obtaining seems more fanciful or more neurotic, respectively, by the day.

In the meantime, you’ve given me an audience and a reason to write. This project is filling a void that for the past year—though I’ve been vaguely aware that something was missing—I hadn’t identified as creative in nature, nor was I cognizant of its sheer scale. Thank you.

This Month’s Posts

A few of the better-organized newsletters I follow do something like this every month (or, for the more prolific, every week). I’m not sure if it will prove necessary or even useful, but for the time being I’m going to act under the assumption that it will provide some organizational value at a later date.

January 31 - Coming and Becoming

Technically from last month. Reflections on the very beginning of Hannah’s pregnancy and tongue-in-cheek conceptual analyses of “wanting” kids and “trying” to have kids.

February 7 - The Ordering of Things, Vol. 1

Musings on the merits and perils of listmaking. My thoughts on becoming a father and getting COVID, written from the conceit of a best-of-2022 list.

February 13 - The Ordering of Things, Vol. 2: The Creek Drank the Cradle

A paean to one of my favorite albums of all time; reflections on how my musical tastes developed, and how this particular album played a fortuitous role in Graham’s first few months of life.

February 14 - The $400 Question

My thoughts on paying for online content generally; a justification of the $400 price tag for the “Benefactor” annual subscription.

February 24 - The Ordering of Things, Vol. 3: Simple Human

My experience with nesting during the last trimester. Making our home more livable by reducing friction in high-traffic places. Some Alexa hijinks, and thoughts on the excellent bedtime story Goodnight Moon.

February 28 - 1992

An essay about my first experience with death, and the (what I take to be) paradoxical consolation inherent in the belief in heaven.

Special thank you (and apology) to paid subscribers.

When I was doing the preliminary setup for White Elephant, I didn’t intend to offer a paid subscription. Substack recommends building a free audience first and—after it’s of sufficient size—“going paid.” The idea is to get people hooked on your content before the upsell.

Frankly, I don’t have the confidence in my ability to create something that’s “worth” paying for; I’m a professional waiter/prep cook and an amateur writer. But at the last minute, I decided to offer the paid subscription because, what the hell? It’s not as if I couldn’t use the money, and it would strictly exist for people who wanted to support me in a more tangible way. I didn’t expect anyone to purchase what they could have for free.

But some of you did buy subscriptions. In addition to feeling intensely grateful, I was mortified to realize that I had forgotten something: Substack sends different welcome letters to paid and free subscribers. The letter that’s gone out to paid subscribers—which I wrote back in January before launching White Elephant—is a rough draft of “The $400 Question.” I know that it’s not a big deal, but I regret it nevertheless. I intended for the welcome letter to be a special “thank you” for donating to a project that you could already access, in its entirety, for free. Instead, you got recycled content. Sorry.

Special thank you (and apology) to Hannah.

Over the past month or two, I’ve spent quite a few hours in front of the computer, writing about my experience with parenting. My son, Graham, is eleven months old; at this stage, he needs actual parenting, 24/7. He needs a guardian either physically present with him or watching him on the baby monitor. While I’m writing, that guardian is my wife, Hannah.

Don’t get me wrong: we love spending time with Graham. Most of the time, it feels like a privilege rather than a burden. But the fact of the matter is, we don’t have enough free time between the two of us for us both to write and maintain a newsletter. Hannah has (very graciously) given me the opportunity to pursue my hobby; she’s even allowed me to pretend that—maybe someday—it will turn into more than a hobby.

Thank you, Hannah. All of the great joys in my life I owe to you, as well as many of the small ones.

Discussion

If you have the time and feel so inclined, I’d love to get any general feedback you’re willing to provide, as well as answers to a couple of more specific questions:

• If you’ve read a few of the pieces I published over the last month, did you have a favorite and/or a least favorite? What worked for you and what didn’t? For example, here’s a piece of real feedback I received on “Coming and Becoming”:

  when I looked back at the papaya realizing what the metaphor of the image was I felt sick to my stomach.

• I get some analytics from Substack about each post. One thing I’ve noticed is that people rarely click on hyperlinks. Although I’ve tried to be judicious about what I link to, it’s looking like I could have erred even further toward frugality vis-à-vis hyperlinks. Mostly, I link to something if I think it adds context—that it is useful or entertaining, but outside the scope of the writing. Below, I’m including a poll regarding how you feel about hyperlinks.

  • A. Doesn’t matter. If I want to click on them, I will; if I don’t, I won’t.

  • B. They are distracting/break up the flow of the writing.

  • C. I like the additional context.

  • D. If they’re valuable, add them at the end, like an appendix.

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Thanks again. You can reach me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. Image Credit: Joseph Mahaffey, White Elephant logo draft.

This essay was written more or less in its entirety last November, before I started White Elephant, which is part of the reason why it’s a little different, stylistically and thematically, than what I’ve written and published so far specifically for the Substack. I’ve been told that it’s quite dark, and although that wasn’t my mood while writing it, I have to agree that it has turned out that way. So, trigger warning, I guess.

Additionally, apologies to those of you who have already read it, and thank you if you’re one of the folks who offered me feedback on the rough draft, especially Alex Kelly. Thanks also to my brother, Joe, for creating the accompanying artwork for this piece.

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I’m six years old, lying on my parent’s bed in my childhood home in Portland, Oregon. I’m transfixed by a feature of their bedroom that I take for granted: the way that, when a car passes on the street outside, its headlights cast shadows along the upper wall that look animated—a spontaneous cartoon. This phenomenon occurs only after the sun has set, infrequently enough that it remains novel, but not so rare as for me to lose interest. I’m neither happy nor unhappy. My thoughts are unobtrusive; they do not announce themselves as thoughts. I just am.

My mom and dad are there, talking about Uncle Russ, my father’s younger brother, who has cancer. The cancer had started in his leg, which the doctors wanted to amputate. My mom is crying; I ask her what’s wrong. “Oh, baby,” she says. 

She sits down next to me on the bed and a new sequence of light and darkness slithers across the wall and up the ceiling until it disappears almost all at once. Each of the shadow cartoons is a little different—some barely crawl past, others distort like a VHS tape on fast-forward, depending on whether a car is going below the speed limit or above it—but their general structure is always isomorphic with the hard angles of the window’s wrought-iron frame and the blinds that only partially obscure the glass beneath. This hard-boundedness of the shadow puppets is further limited by the position of the street itself. Light can only be projected from the east or west—people coming, people going—and, though it can occasionally differ depending on the luminosity of the headlight projecting it, these differences are too subtle for me to distinguish.

“Are they going to cut off his leg?” I ask. This, so far as I understand, is the unimaginable bargain that Uncle Russ had, up until now, rejected.

My mom isn’t crying anymore. “No, sweetie. It’s too late for that now, so it wouldn’t help. Uncle Russ is very sick. His cancer spread into his lungs. The doctors don’t know when, but he’s probably going to die very soon. Daddy’s going to go be with him now.”

Another car passes, this time from the other direction. The light on the ceiling starts out bright and pointed before expanding, crisscrossing; gridded honeycombs of light and dark that flicker like a film projected from a reel until the room is washed in soft yellow warmth, splintered by shadows bigger than I am. Someone going. Then the light disappears, and I hear the car fade into the night. I imagine my uncle’s cancer like this: spreading and diminishing, here until it is not.

Once it is dark, I think of something to say. “Will Uncle Russ go to heaven when he dies?”

I can’t see her face, but there’s no hesitation in her reply. “Yes, baby. When Uncle Russ dies, he’ll be with Jesus in heaven.”

When I was much older, I would recognize this for what it was: not strength, not quite, but stoicism or its cousin, coupled with the impulse to conceal from me death’s unspeakable mystery. Mom was acquainted with loss. Her little brother died when she was just a little girl, and then her father, too, unexpectedly—a heart attack—before she graduated high school. I don’t remember what happened next. Maybe I started to cry; maybe I asked to play Nintendo. Perhaps Russ died that very night. Perhaps he lived on for a few days or even weeks.

In my memory, though, this was the moment when my uncle died. I hadn’t known him; I don’t remember ever meeting him, although I’ve seen photos of him holding me when I was a baby. He and his family lived far away, so we didn’t see them often, and then we didn’t see them at all. It was too late: he was dead, forever. No—“forever” is a comfort—my mother would love me forever, and so would Jesus. So would my dad. Death is a never, and we would never see Uncle Russ again.

My father was devastated. He was just two years older than Russ. He shared that bond that only exists between brothers born in rapid succession—a childhood canon of mutual experience, shared emotions and memories, the exquisite, almost ecstatic joys of brotherhood and its bitter feuds that, like Portland snow, might conceal the entire world for a single evening but melt at dawn, revealing a landscape fundamentally unchanged, its bedrock permanent and enduring, its alterations exposed for the contingent illusions they had been all along.

Back then, my father (and, by proxy, the rest of our family) was a Christian. This meant that his grief was frustrated by its very consolation. The Gospels promised us that death had been neutered of its inimical sting and that victory, so implausible, had been snatched from the grave itself. This, to say the least, is no small succor, if we believe—and I think that my father, on some level, really did believe—that one day we will see with new eyes our beloved dead, and that they will have been made whole by God, their cancers excised, their limbs rebuilt; that upon death—after the cessation of the body and the dissolution of self—we will be relieved to discover that consciousness, rather than terminating, actually expands, redeemed and completed in an infinitely richer and more perfect reality. 

For the unbeliever, death is apocalypse, catastrophe, loss absolute. Faith takes death’s leaden totality and transmutes it. Nullification, undoing, and annihilation become infinite creation, infinite bliss. Furthermore, this alchemy is wrought with a single reagent: the perfect blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, spilled at Calvary. For the faithful, the triumph of Easter strips grief of its rationale, renders real mourning incoherent. The believing dead are merely asleep, promised the apostle Paul. Sorrow ye not as those without hope; the dead in Christ will rise. Is this the price of consolation, or consolation itself? I don’t know. It depends on what grief is. It seems to me that grief is a necessary concomitant of love, or perhaps even that grief just is love, deprived of its object, and mourning its proportional expression. To the extent that our grief achieves for us some measure of catharsis, Paul’s epistle requires that we delay our gratification indefinitely.

I don't know if this occurred to my father—nor do I know whether he felt deprived, his grief frustrated or stymied. In the end—or at least until the end—it probably doesn’t matter. In just two years—before he could even acclimate to his grief over Russ—his older brother, Larry, died. His dad, my grandfather, lived just long enough to watch his boys die before succumbing to cancer himself. Dad slipped into a deep depression, the kind of bottomless well from which you’re never entirely extricated, though neither can you make it your home. Instead, it comes to reside in you. You internalize the dank, mineral scent of loss; you recall a sliver of receding light, but can’t remember where it came from. 

I have heard it said that death makes a mockery of life. It is ever-present, and casts a pall of absurdity over not just everything that the living love and value, but of value and love themselves. Death is the negation of all possible meaning; it transcends propositional logic entirely, as brute as the spatiality of matter’s three-dimensional extension, primitive as time’s unidirectional flow. Death comes before, the necessary condition upon which the possibility of belief, knowledge, and consciousness depend.

To my parents’ credit—whether intentionally or unconsciously—they made every effort to give me a long childhood, to preserve my innocence, unburdened by morbidity and mortality. And, at the conceptual level, they succeeded; death remained for me an exceedingly abstract infinity, and—when those instances of it with which I was acquainted crossed my mind—it was to wonder, vaguely and indulgently, what Russ and Grandpa were getting up to in a vague, indulgent heaven.

A childlike faith in heaven is incompatible with the notion of death, and so from exposure to true death, I was spared. Dad didn’t tell me until much later how he had begged his atheist father, on his deathbed, to accept Christ’s gift of eternal life and thus secure for himself a place at God’s side whereupon they would one day be reunited. I would be a man before I learned that the proximal cause of Russ’s death had not been his cancer. Rather, it was a morphine overdose, the palliative administered by his older brother, who held his hand as his breathing slowed and then stopped.

Despite their best efforts—efforts which I do not begrudge them—my parents could not rid the garden of all its serpents. Because death is the ultimate collapse of order within an unraveling system, and because we exist in a universe populated exclusively by these entities—discrete processes all, with boundaries at first porous, then permeable, until they disintegrate altogether—death is omnipresent. So even before Uncle Russ died—my first death proper—I had been troubled by death, by which I mean only that particular feature of existence that forbids all permanence and mandates eventual dissolution.

Returning to kindergarten after Christmas break, our teacher welcomed us back to school. “The year is no longer 1992,” she explained to the class, emphasizing the word two.

“The New Year means that now, it’s 1993.” Inexplicably, I was thrilled with this knowledge, and that evening, I couldn’t wait to share it with my mother—did she know that it was 1993? She affirmed that, yes, it was now 1993. During the high of the revelation I blurted out: “How long until it will be 1992 again?”

It took a moment for her to register, and then she said—with almost callous flippancy—that it would never be 1992 again. A beat: then I wept, threw a tantrum, howled until I choked on snot and tears. This was my first acquaintance with death, although back then, I lacked any conceptual framework or context with which to give my inchoate grief expression or form. Nevertheless, the weight of the thing never changes: the gravity of a collapsing star, the realization of finitude, of transience; of the fact that an egg beaten cannot be unscrambled; that time moves forward, never backward; that we remember the past but only anticipate the future. The sudden, inarticulable consciousness of the entropic structure of a cosmos in which order decreases unceasingly, and the way in which moments spill like water from grasping, clutching hands until, inevitably, it is all gone, squandered and unrecoverable.

So it was: 1992 had died, and in my naivete, I had celebrated it. As a boy of five, I did not have the constitution to grieve indefinitely, and like a good mourner I eventually allowed myself to be consoled by my freshly-chastened mother. But this is the thing about grief and grieving, which is known to all who grieve: although mourning ends, because it must, grief does not. Grief changes, of course—it would be a cruel paradox for grief to be the one immutable feature of our predicament—but, as those who have lost siblings, parents, lovers, friends, or children will tell you, grief is ceaseless. Like ink spilled on a notebook, the pages of life must be turned, but the stain of grief is permanent, becoming a palimpsest impoverished by a loss that cannot be effaced.

As it extends temporally, grief is at best diluted. The relentless flight of time’s pitiless arrow entails that, when someone dies, we will only ever grow farther away from them. No matter how close we were to them in life, if we go on living, there will only ever be more moments in which they are absent, never fewer. The fraction of my life contained within that year—1992—has been diminished by the procession of months and years that followed, but it cannot be made smaller. Grief is acute, then chronic. First it is concentrated, excruciatingly bright, the only thing in the world, but grief grows dimmer as it expands: a cancer, originating on an extremity, hot and painful on an arm or leg. Soon enough, however, it permeates the body, malignant clusters of ruined cells in the liver, brain, lungs, proliferating exponentially, too quick to cut out.

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As always, thanks for reading. If you have comments or questions, send them to me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. Image credit: original artwork by the exceedingly talented Joseph Mahaffey.

This newsletter is a part of The Ordering of Things, a series of essays about my favorite things from 2022. Each is standalone and can be enjoyed without reading the others, but if you’d like you can read the first one here and the second one here. Thank you to everyone who has read and subscribed during the inaugural month of the newsletter.

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“In the great green room,” I read aloud to my son, his eleven-month-old head so close to my mouth that his whispy baby hairs tickled my lips, “there was a telephone. And a red balloon. And a picture of…” Here, I paused, waiting a beat for him to turn the page. “The cow, jumping over the moon!” For this line, I quieted my voice so that I could emphasize the words “cow” and “over” while still keeping my volume low, the cadence soothing and hypnotic.

The seventy-five-year-old children’s bedtime story Goodnight Moon is fast becoming a contender for one of Graham’s favorite things of 2023. Probably mine as well. It’s a fantastic little book, simple and beautiful—not flashy, no gimmicks, just dreamy, understated magic and elegant sweetness.1

“And there were three little bears,” I went on, “sitting on chairs—Graham, do you want to turn the page for me?—and two little kittens, and a pair of mittens.” We continued the inventory: a toyhouse. A young mouse. Comb, brush, mush. Hush, whispered. Graham was sleepy. He stopped turning the pages, squirmed in my lap and rested his arm on my wrist. “Goodnight, room,” I said. “Goodnight, moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.” The first bit of Goodnight Moon is an exercise in list-making, pointing out, and naming. The rest is a reinforcement of object permanence; we say goodnight to all of the named things with the implicit expectation that they will be there again in the morning upon waking. It was to this latter portion that we had arrived, where the book’s already quiescent meter becomes almost narcotic.

“Goodnight light,” I whispered, “and the red balloon.”

Without warning, our Echo Dot speaker emitted an abrupt and grating chime. At the same time, both the overhead light and bedside lamp turned on and changed color, illuminating the bedroom that a moment before had been dim and cozy in a dystopian red glow. The spell broke: the drastic contrast roused Graham from his somnolence. He sat up, smiled, and began to coo and wave frantically at the crimson orb overhead.

From across the bed, my wife glared accusingly at me. “It was your watch,” Hannah hissed, referring to my treasured Apple Watch. I had no retort; it had indeed been my watch, collaborating with my Alexa and my Phillips Hue smart lights. Such is the lot of we hubristic tenants who have, like gods, breathed the fire of intelligence into our formerly-insensate homes, fashioning them after our own image by giving them eyes, ears, and voice. Our smart home was working as intended.2

During Hannah’s last trimester, the reality of Graham’s imminence finally breached whatever strongholds of delusion remained in my mind. The first trimester had been mostly blushing romance:3 do you hope we have a boy or a girl? Then: what should we name him? Even throughout most of the second trimester, our due date seemed far off and fantastical. Life was relatively normal. I applied to graduate school; we celebrated the holidays with family.

In January, though, moments of panic started to descend with escalating frequency. Their typical duration increased likewise, emerging initially as brief spasms of sheer terror, evolving into day-long meltdowns wherein Hannah and I would talk each other off ledges, until finally, the fear integrated fully into our beings, a chronic and constant baseline but manageable, not debilitating. It was during the latter stage that my dread motivated me to act: in a fit of 21st-century beta-male nesting, I cleaned the apartment to its bones, finding and removing refuse dating back to before my tenure.

I fixed things that had needed repairs for years. The rotation plate in our microwave had shattered circa 2017 and was never replaced. When I decided to find one, I was ashamed at how easy it was—five years lamenting our immobile appliance, which invariably heated its contents unevenly, solved in five minutes on Amazon. It arrived less than 48 hours after I decided to solve the problem.

It was a minor but pivotal victory, setting the tone for what would become my very own march to the sea. I think that, in hindsight, because there really is so much of life that is outside of our control, I had been living under the illusion that agency itself was a fiction. If something in our home was hideous, broken, or actively dangerous, my general modus operandi was to give it a wide berth. No need to tempt fate, I had thought.

But the microwave plate changed all that. With the zeal of a man whose life sentence had been commuted, I set about making our home more liveable, less awful. I took the busted particleboard closet doors off their hinges and replaced them with fresh curtains; while in curtain-installing mode, I remounted brackets above our bedroom window and placed upon them a sleek new rod, from which I hung sleek new blackout curtains.

Growing ever more sure of myself, I risked life and limb in the realm of electrical repairs. The primary burner on our stove had been on the fritz for years; a month ago, it had stopped working entirely. C’est la vie, the old me thought, dourly acknowledging that nothing lasts forever. I made do with an air fryer and an instant pot. The new me—the dad me—took the damned thing apart and scrubbed out a decade of petrified grease before installing new electrical housing, heating elements, and chrome stove guards. How they shined! With the heat set to high… oh, if you could have seen it, seen how the elements glowed! A pot of water that before would sit cold for eternity now bubbled and boiled over if we looked away for even a moment.

In the midst of my nesting frenzy, an unlikely guiding principle emerged. One of my best friends has a tattoo on her arm, a lyric from the band Frightened Rabbit. It reads:

make tiny changes.

This became my home improvement philosophy, my wu wei, a kind of domestic Tao. I focused on finding friction and removing it. Sure, Graham wouldn’t have a nursery. We couldn’t afford a bigger place; there would be no $1700 robot bassinet. I accepted these constraints and concentrated instead on sanding off the rough edges of the mundane places in our home that we used every day. My aim wasn’t necessarily to create time-saving processes, although many seconds were saved. Rather, I wanted to convert seconds of frustration into seconds of ease, believing they would add up, accrue interest, and amount to an easier, happier life.

Philosophy thus articulated, my next project applied the same logic to aesthetics. Our apartment is mostly one space, which was for too long dominated by an overbearing, gold-and-white pendant light that hung from a gaudy, bronze-enameled chain. Being bowl-shaped, it couldn’t illuminate more than the circle immediately underneath, which it lit up like an industrial spotlight; its homey atmosphere was that of a black-op interrogation chamber. When I first moved into the apartment, I fantasized about replacing it.

“How hard is it to change out those pendant lights like the one in my apartment?” I asked my mom one afternoon over the phone.

“Well…” She thought for a moment, muttering some calculations to herself. “It’s not exactly easy.” And that was that. It was impossible, she’d told me. No different, really, than hoping that my acceptance letter to Hogwarts was still on its way, had been lost in transit, that any day now a disheveled owl would arrive, Dumbledore’s personal apology tied to her foot.

But as I had proven to myself with the microwave plate, I was capable of making the impossible not just possible, but actual. I was Sherman crusading through confederate Georgia, the earth scorched in my wake and the lights of Savannah brilliant upon the horizon. At this point, only a failure of will could save that tacky eyesore, that tyrant. Such was my mindset at the Home Depot, where with shaking hands I selected a modern, lantern-style pendant with a black ceramic chain and an Edison bulb to go with it. It cost me $50. When I got home, I turned off the electricity at the breaker box, watched some instructions on YouTube, and set about my work.

Mom was wrong. It wasn’t impossible. The installation didn’t go perfectly—there were false starts, the chain was too long, had to be cut and rehung. The old wiring in the ceiling was coated with thick globs of paint and needed to be stripped to fit into the new fixture. But before long, I was done. I flipped the breaker and the apartment was bathed in a soft, benevolent light. It was beautiful.

Like the God of Genesis, I surveyed what amounted to a week’s worth of work and saw that it was good. So why then did I feel unentitled to a Sabbath? I felt proud of myself, but also a little sick to my stomach. I had lived here for almost ten years, and I made it more livable—by an order of magnitude—in a matter of days. It cost almost nothing. There was a metaphor for my life there, looming, conspicuous in the tasteful glow of the Edison bulb.

I think that it was this unease that spurred me on. Over the days and weeks that followed, gradually, unconsciously, I forsook my philosophy of wu wei, allowing myself to be seduced by the dubious blessings of modernity, the inventions—the products—that promise to make our lives easier, simpler, better. I brushed off a first-generation Amazon Echo Dot that was collecting dust on a shelf and bought her a sister for the bedroom. Bluetooth-enabled, color-changing lights for every room; even the brand-new Edison bulb, with its soothing, candle-like incandescence was exchanged for a smarter, uglier version of itself.

“Alexa, nightlight,” I demonstrated for my pregnant bride. After a moment of lag, the apartment stuttered to life, shimmering a lethargic red. The drama was compromised by the daylight pouring in through the windows, but still.

“Well?” I asked.

“Cool,” Hannah said.

“Yes,” I said. “Very cool.”

If you are lucky, when you’re going to have a baby, other people will buy you much of what you need. One of my professors and his family bought us the stroller we wanted. My brother and his wife gave us the (very expensive) baby monitor we asked for. Some of the things that we asked for and thought we would need, we ended up not using; other things that seemed silly or precious became items we couldn’t live without.4

The only thing that we asked for and then returned was an Ubbi, a one-trick pony of a diaper pail designed with a single, uncompromising goal: to contain the smell of poop. Pneumatic rubber gaskets; a sliding lid to “minimize air disruption.” And—bonus—it doesn’t, unlike some of Ubbi’s competitors, require special bags. Any old trashcan liner will do. To expecting parents, this sounds reasonable. After all, who likes the smell of poop? Who wants to worry about keeping an inventory of diaper-pail liners, separate from their ordinary garbage bags? It’s implied that that’s how those other pail peddlers get you: lure you in with a reasonably-priced contraption and then you’re on the hook for a lifetime subscription of obscenely expensive proprietary bags.

“It doesn’t have a foot pedal thing,” I pointed out. “You need a free hand to use it.” Hannah had been lukewarm on the Ubbi; we exchanged it for a Simple Human trashcan.5

The Simple Human uses special bags. I panicked at Walmart when I saw the price of ordinary garbage bags. They were like, $12 for 100. I pulled out my phone, right there in the aisle to see how they compared, per liner, with Simple Human. Fuck, I thought. They’re almost four cents more than the generic ones—that is how they get you. It doesn’t seem like much, but a year of daily use… 365 days, four cents a pop, round up to five, carry the two… My chest felt tight; I could feel my future collapsing around me, pictured my family on the street, our few remaining possessions tied up in Simple Human bindles.

Oh. I exhaled. It would take more than a year of daily use before it amounted to even twenty bucks. I could live with that; the can is nice. It has a foot pedal and is made of stainless steel. The bags are a breeze to change out. It’s not a pain in the ass.

This is the kind of expense happily absorbed, I thought, by the upper-middle class, people for whom time is the real commodity, and then—because I had been listening to his podcast that day at work—people like Sam Harris. Once I’d made that association, I started to notice something: at the beginning of his podcast, whenever he had some piece of marginalia to announce unrelated to the podcast proper, he would say, in his once-in-a-generation, made-for-radio baritone: “Okay,” exhaling a single deep breath. “Time for a little housekeeping.” I pictured him fluidly changing out a liner. “Okay.” He was tying up the full bag with Simple Human’s ample and sturdy built-in drawstrings. “Time for a little housekeeping.” Sam Harris noticed he was almost to the end of the pack. Without a second thought, he tapped a button on his phone to order more.

The Simple Human was more than just a marvelously efficient diaper pail; it was more even than a psychic window into the personal life of Sam Harris. During those difficult first months, it became an emotional support, a grounding totem. Oddly, it was the expense that I did not spare that brought me succor. The decadence of it never wore off. On paper, custom bags for a glorified shit bucket are the very definition of excess, a luxury convenience for the wealthy that ought to be withheld from plebeians such as myself. Yet they were mine for less than I’d spend on a pizza, the kind of money I might grudgingly donate once a year to Wikipedia. Whenever I pulled out a fresh liner, I’d thumb through the pack like prayer beads, my rosary the syllogism:

If a father spends $20 a year on designer diaper pail liners, then he is doing okay.
I spend $20 a year on designer diaper pail liners.
Therefore, I am doing okay.

The Simple Human did what nothing else could: it provided ironclad, deductively-valid proof that I was a good dad. I began to feel better and better about the decision to exchange the Ubbi. I started to look forward to the daily chore—the daily ritual—of changing out the liner, which conditioned me to look forward to Graham’s daily constitutional.

“Alexa,” I heard Hannah in the bedroom. “Log a poopy diaper.” Unbidden, a pavlovian burst of saliva flooded my mouth and I sprang up to make my way to the bedroom. With one hand, Hannah wiped the last flecks of feces from my son; with the other, she deposited Graham’s most recent bowel movement into the Simple Human with staggering ease.

“Let me get that out before it stinks up the room.” I gestured toward the diaper pail.

“Oh, that’s fine—” Hannah started, but it was too late. I couldn’t hear her over Sam’s voice in my head. Okay. Time for a little housekeeping.

I nodded, smiling to myself as I expertly removed the liner from the pail. Indeed it is, Sam. Indeed it is.

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Questions? Comments? Anonymous tips to CPS? Send them to benjimahaffey@substack.com. As always, thanks for reading, and thanks to my brother, Joseph Mahaffey for the White Elephant logo. Image credit: illustration by Clement Herd from Goodnight Moon.

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While signing up, you may have noticed the $400 “Benefactor” annual subscription tier. If you saw it and balked, you’re not alone. Even though I know better, reflexively it strikes me as excessive, an arbitrary and obscene amount of money, especially for something of such dubious value as a subscription to my humble newsletter. My thinking about the value of (particularly my own) writing was influenced by my brief tenure as a contractor for Study.com, where I wrote “lessons” on an array of topics. In some I took genuine interest; in others, I boasted relative expertise; for each, I was paid seventy dollars, gross. Perhaps a more enterprising writer could have taken this gig and scratched out from it the federal minimum wage, but—for a pathological perfectionist such as myself—the wage was untenable, the writing rendered essentially hobbyistic. Between the research, reading, and writing—followed by agonizing rounds of editing for search engine optimization—I was earning about $3.17 per hour.

This makes a perverse kind of sense. The internet has democratized publishing: virtually anyone can write whatever they want, for just about any audience, at least in principle. The bulk of the written content available online is freely accessible, background costs discreetly exacted from readers in the form of surrendered privacy, moral compromise, or the subtle opportunity cost inherent in our opting out of compensatory publishing models entirely. We bristle to encounter a paywall; once-venerable institutions like The New York Times are reduced to panhandling, enticing us with steep and ruinous discounts: please subscribe, one whole year for just $10 $5 $1 per week! If you are like me, rather than being seduced by the deal, you are embarrassed, vaguely offended—who do they think they are?—as you close the window and hop back on the merry-go-round of neverending content.

There are no paid internships for creative writers; a grasp on the craft requires some combination of innate talent, arduous practice, and the financial means with which to pursue a labor of unrequited love. In college, its many merits notwithstanding, we pay others for the pleasure of being read. If we are lucky, which I was, we find readers who engage seriously with our work, who make our investment—if not exactly worthwhile—at least not wholly disastrous. If we are unlucky, we can double down with an MFA, hoping to meet our ideal reader there. We must work out our own salvation, as it were, with fear and trembling.

A general principle emerges: our two cents are not worth much more than the copper they’re stamped on. So, what’s the gag? Is the $400 annual subscription some sort of grifter modern art, a poor man’s NFT? Not at all. In addition to being a sum of money that makes a real difference in my life—about the size of a paycheck after taxes and tips—it’s an homage to a friend who demonstrated to me how I could begin valuing creative labor.

Last summer, I was talking with him about a piece I’d been wanting to write about addiction. It would, I pitched to him, take most of its cues from a senior thesis I had written the year prior about the phenomenology of drug addiction and free will, but I’d write it in my own voice, more literary, unencumbered by the original’s dependence on the occulting technical jargon of academic philosophy.

“You should write it,” he told me. “It sounds like it could be important.”

“I really can’t,” I demurred before reciting the litany of reasons why this was the case. The bulk of my time was divided between work and caring for my six-month-old son. What hours remained of the day I spent on the mundane, ameliorative upkeep of domestic subsistence: cooking dinner, doing dishes, folding laundry. Occasionally fixing some malfunctioning appliance, just in time for the next one to go on the fritz. I didn’t have time to write.

He listened patiently to my tirade without interrupting. When finally I was silent, he asked: “How much money would you need to write the piece? To justify it to yourself, the time you spent researching and writing? Could I pay you to write it?”

We were speaking over the phone, so he didn’t see me blush. I tried to tell him no, that I was just making excuses anyway, that the real reason I hadn’t written the piece was that I was a fundamentally lazy person who was too afraid of failure to take risks, even risks with stakes as toothless as setting pen to paper.

This time, he didn’t wait for me to finish. “Would $400 be enough?”

I felt the same visceral reaction to this dollar amount as if he’d barged into the bathroom while I was shitting: embarrassment, fear, a deep-rooted shame. In reflexive protest, I insisted that he pay me nothing, that it would be money down the drain, that it would herald the end of our friendship, and that I would produce nothing either way. I reminded him that he himself was hardly flush; a year ago he had been unemployed, nearly homeless, and suicidal.

We left it at that. An hour later, an alert on my phone announced that I had received a payment over Venmo for $400.

I was wrong. Not about the piece—I still haven’t written it—but I was wrong about it being money down the drain. $400 was not a MacArthur grant; it was not a sum of money that allowed me to take a sabbatical, rent a cabin, and write a novel. But it was enough to justify to myself an afternoon here, a late night there, hunched over my computer, struggling to transmute a maelstrom of inchoate thoughts into first one coherent sentence, then two.

I believed that someone could value me, invest in me, and for it to somehow mean nothing and lead nowhere. I was mistaken. It lead here; it meant everything.

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Questions? Comments? Send them to me at benjimahaffey@substack.com. As always, thank you for your support at whatever level you’re offering it—reading, sharing, commenting, or giving me your hard-earned money. I really appreciate it. Also, shout out to my extremely talented brother, Joseph Mahaffey, who designed the new White Elephant logo for me, free of charge.

This is a continuation of The Ordering of Things, my list of favorite things of 2022. Next in the series: Volume III: Simple Human. As always, thanks for reading.

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3.     The Creek Drank the Cradle

The first time I listened to Sam Beam’s 2002 debut as Iron & Wine, I was 15 years old, streaming whatever twenty-second samples were available on the album’s Amazon page over a dial-up internet connection. It was a lucky find: up until that point, my taste in music had been mostly whatever my friends were listening to. The fact that—historically speaking—I had very few friends can perhaps shed light on the eclectic genealogy of my collection.

I attended a private Christian school in Portland, Oregon, until my family moved to Washington state in the fifth grade. The first and only CD in my collection from that period was Jesus Freak, the alt-rock opus of Christian darlings DC Talk. I didn’t own my own CD player, but my dad (very generously) allowed me to use his Walkman and headphones more or less whenever I wanted, though he must have known he was sentencing the machine to its eventual ignoble death.

When my parents fled the city for the greener pastures of country living in 1999, it meant transplanting me into my first-ever public school classroom. There was a certain amount of inevitable culture shock. My classmates uttered words like “fuck,” “dick,” or “ass”  that—to a boy who had not been allowed to watch The Simpsons due to its ostensible inappropriateness—were utterly beyond the pale, or—in cases like “cunt” and “faggot”—were merely alien, a tongue too foreign to be perceived as obscene.

I got off to a rough start with my new peers, quickly discovering that any social clout that had been associated with Jesus Freak among my Christian associates was, in this fresh and godless wilderness, at best nullified and at worst, a fatal liability.1 Eventually, I befriended a boy whose family attended our (new) church. He introduced me to The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication and David Gray’s White Ladder. Shamelessly, I assimilated his tastes as the new foundation for my own. By the end of middle school, I had leveraged my milquetoast musical origin into something bordering on “cool,” adding punk (Pennywise) and obscure ska (The Hippos) to my collection. Then—motivated entirely by a crush on a friend’s younger sister—my appetites converged, chameleon-like, toward hers: Third Eye Blind’s eponymous debut and Blue; (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis.

I was a junior when I finally found my “thing” and shook off the last vestiges of my naïve, Christian upbringing. That “thing” was experimenting with drugs—namely, opioids. Vicodin, Percocet, Tylenol 3; Darvocet and Dilaudid. Oxy: -codone,
-morphone, -contin. My musical tastes evolved to better suit my new hobbies. Embarrassingly, I had a flair for the dramatic, gravitating toward the slow, the quiet, or the tragic. By this time, it was possible to burn CD-Rs, lossless mixtapes. My mixes featured Bright Eyes, Sigur Ros, and The Notwist. Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head.

In the pre-Spotify, world, I discovered new music by following internet rabbit holes whose labyrinthine algorithms were precursors to services like Pandora. Amazon, on an album’s store page, would allow you to stream snippets from selected tracks; they also provided two or three “listeners also bought” or “sounds like” suggestions. One evening—probably high on Vicodin, but I don’t remember for sure—I picked out a few unfamiliar albums to add to my collection. I ordered The Decemberists’ Castaways and Cutouts and Norfolk and Western’s Dusk in Cold Parlors. One of the latter’s “also bought” suggestions led me to Iron and Wine’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, and nothing would ever be the same again.

I listened to a sample and was astonished by it. I had never heard music that tickled my brain in the way that The Creek Drank the Cradle did, like the come-up from Vicodin or Percocet, where—before you even felt high—the taste of metabolizing acetaminophen in your throat and sinuses would coincide with the first wave of euphoria. I had never heard the hissing of magnetic tape before, and its presence across The Creek Drank the Cradle lent to its effortless intimacy. It felt like pressing an ear to Beam’s closed bedroom door, and I found myself holding my breath, lest I make a sound and interrupt the spell.

The recordings, intended originally as demos, were produced with just four tracks: two guitar—rhythm and slide—and two vocal tracks. Sam’s barely-whispered harmonies felt like a recovered memory from a previous life: revelatory.

I don’t know if The Creek Drank the Cradle was the first piece of art that I identified as expressing a part of me, of my authentic self, but it is the first piece of art I encountered that expressed a part of me that has persisted over the ensuing decades. Other albums from my youth I might listen to once every couple of years, but I revisit them as I would a high school yearbook, for nostalgia’s sake. The Creek Drank the Cradle
is different. Because I never stopped loving it—I never grew out of it—listening now conjures no particular year or stage of life. Like all good relationships, mine with this album is greater than the sum of its parts. Over the decades, I’ve recursively incorporated more of myself into the album, and it into me. It’s a part of me, like a tattoo, a self-reinforcing complex of memories and emotions. I’m not sure how else to describe it; it’s ineffable; I love it.

It was good fortune, then, to have as my favorite album of all time one that could be legitimately described as lullaby-like. For the first few weeks after Graham was born, we listened to no music; we watched no television. If Graham and Hannah were asleep, I would read quietly to myself, usually essays or short stories, eschewing longer texts that required a baseline cognitive engagement to which I was unprepared to commit. As we grew more acquainted with Graham, however, and his unique difficulties—in this case with sleep—at some point I turned off the white noise machine and put on The Creek Drank the Cradle. Sure enough, the entire album lent itself to rocking a crying baby in one’s arms; rhythm and cadence shift, song to song, but never abruptly, never gratingly. I can’t say for certain that he loved it, but he would fall asleep to it, usually by the end of the fifth track. This made me unreasonably happy, feeling like a much-needed win.

Becoming a parent is (I think by necessity) one of life’s bigger tiny deaths. These can be and are experienced elsewhere across a life, but never with so much force as during the parental metamorphosis. Ego death is difficult: since we are accustomed to interfacing with the world exclusively via the egoistic perspective, threats to its perpetuity and fidelity are experienced as existential. Moreover, this is not always maladaptive. The (illusory) sense of having a center of self that persists across time and space was selected for during human evolution precisely because it increased our reproductive fitness. But—and I would hardly be the first person to say so—the ego gets in its own way. We experience this throughout our development; I see it, nascent, in Graham.

For the first few months of his life, Graham’s needs and wants were relatively undifferentiated: he needed to eat, sleep, and have his diaper changed. Even these broad categories—metabolic and hygienic—could be subsumed into a single requirement: his need for Hannah, his mother, who fed him from her body and regulated his nervous system as an extension of her own. (Graham would occasionally drift in and out of consciousness while I held him, but before Hannah started to pump and I could feed Graham bottles of expressed breast milk, my biggest contribution was to change his diaper.)

As he learns now, though, to crawl and stand, to reach and grasp—to exert his will upon his environment—he is encountering the true calamity of the human condition, of which all tragedy is merely derivative: finitude. When confronted with his own impotence, his first reaction is, quite literally, to scream. This is unpleasant for us, no doubt, but certainly not to the degree it must be for Graham. Hannah and I have had decades to come to grips with our fundamental powerlessness, to broker a tenuous peace with a universe that has imposed its blatantly contemptuous constraints on our agency. The wound, however, for our son is still fresh, so I do not begrudge him his screams. Soon enough, he will develop a rudimentary theory of mind—the innate understanding, manifesting concomitant with self-awareness, that other people have private mental lives, replete with privileged thoughts and feelings that are forever behind the veil of individual consciousness—and, if he anything like his father, find that this state of affairs significantly complicates the business of being human.

Interestingly, the impediments that Graham finds most egregious are always instances of his being stymied in an activity wherein he has previously encountered no friction. Today, he tried to open a book—something he has accomplished frequently and skillfully in his short life—but fumbled it once, two, three times and then shrieked with frustration. Of course, I could see the problem: he was sitting, and the book lay just beyond his effective reach. Nevertheless, I sympathized. Since becoming a father, I have been rudely reacquainted with my own limitations, some perennial, but many belonging to a fresh crop of uniquely selfish failings.

Like the toddler pounding the floor with her feet after being told to put her toys away because it’s time for bed, I have given into the impulse of tantrum. Even to couch my behavior in terms of metaphor is disingenuous. I am that toddler, throwing the selfsame tantrum as I despair over the impossible responsibility of my new role and (shamefully) grieve the freedom that a year ago I took utterly for granted, so quotidian that it seemed almost worthless. That’s the rub, though: the currency of my preparental life was an autonomy rendered worthless within an inflationary economy of absolute freedom.

Proscription and depravation circumscribe the realm of possible value; this I realized one evening while rocking Graham from sobs to slumber, lamenting—not so much my sudden lack of autonomy—but just how staggeringly unappreciative I’d been of it when it was all I had, had been the water to my fish. Graham was especially colicky that evening; we had made it almost to the album’s excellent closing track, “Muddy Hymnals,” and still he cried.

As the tape hissed and Beam whispered, it was, suddenly, not me rocking Graham. It was the Father, the archetype, a token reading from an eternal script, fungible amongst the interchangeable millions who had come before, would come after. We delivered the same lines, sulked at the same beats.

Look: the scene calls for a glimmer of recognition: a terrible but too-vague premonition that time’s ever-flowing creek will inevitably swallow my baby in his cradle. A dim awareness that one day, I will beg God to accept my counterfeit liberty—to brand me a slave for all eternity—just to have this back for one. more. moment.

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Thoughts? Questions or concerns? Is The Creek Drank the Cradle your favorite album, too? Leave a comment or send me an email at benji.mahaffey@gmail.com.

Addressing the elephant in the room: it’s February. The best time for year-end lists is, well, at year’s end, and the best time for belated year-end lists is probably around the beginning of the new year. I guess my excuse is that—other than the fact that White Elephant is the product of a new year’s resolution and so necessarily did not exist at the end of last year—2022 was a big year for me, the most emotionally jam-packed year of my life. There was, to say the least, a lot worth reflecting on.

I wasn’t able to finish my list in one go. Check out Volume II: The Creek Drank the Cradle and Volume III: Simple Human.

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As 2022 dwindled down to its last wax, I began to notice the flurry of obligatory “best of” lists cropping up across the web: the year’s biggest news, its hottest games, its most important books. With each morning leading up to the holidays, more and more of my feeds were devoted to rank-ordered lists—top ten, top twenty, top fifty—and, by the time Christmas came and went, it seemed as if only year-end lists could be published during the final week of December. All of my regular sites were engulfed in a frenetic curation of the year in retrospect. Like the soon-to-be refugees of an encroaching wildfire, they made split-second decisions about which cultural artifacts were worth anthologizing. No genre was too niche, no category too banal. Anything that could be categorized—vegan ice creams, true crime podcasts, celebrity sex tapes—was judged according to its relative merit, enumerated, and fastidiously recorded. They saved what could be saved, and those curiosities that defied common measure were consigned to time’s nullifying flame. When finally the ball dropped and the smoke cleared, the future landscape that emerged was unmarred, cleansed of the detritus of the previous year: a blank slate.

Just kidding. Nothing was saved, and nothing was lost. The boundary between one year and the next is arbitrary, and it is rare that the events and relationships that populate our lives—the birth of a child, a new job, an illness—fit neatly on one side of it or the other. And this is true even of those seemingly-commensurable entities that better lend themselves to quantification, (say) our favorite new Netflix shows or the year’s best YA fantasy. The tidily-bifurcating phenomena of the year-in-review genre are constructions, fictions. At best, they are snapshots, imperfect captures of one particular state of a system that is unfolding deterministically according to its prior states—from 2021, 2020, 2017, and all the way back to the initial conditions of the universe at the big bang. In that sense, they are not things at all, and not “they” but it—one indivisible, Schopenhaurian thing. A picture emerges: our calendar is not a tabula rasa, but a palimpsest.

But who can live like that, and who would want to? The 19th-century psychologist William James said of the experiential world of a newborn:

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.1

By the time we are old enough to understand what James is saying, it is no longer immediately evident to us that all aspects of our experience are appearing in the same space. As we develop, we become expert discriminators: babies come to understand implicitly and irreversibly the difference between the sound of rain falling and the smell of it. During the first three months of his life, I don’t think that my son, Graham, distinguished between himself and his mother, my wife, Hannah. But now he discriminates expertly: dada is not mama, despite both of us feeding him his babas. The pupduh (puppy?) is a source of endless entertainment, but not food. This is the distillation of the Kantian project: the world is out there, but we experience it in here, not as it is but as it seems, through the kaleidoscopic distortion of our cognition. The practice of annual list-making is, I think, an isomorph of that cognition. Held up to the light, it is a fractal instance of our dominant compulsion: the need to tease signal from noise, to take the continuum of our unruly phenomenology and bring it to discrete heel.

We are not unique within the animal kingdom in carving up the world into manageable bites, nor in our preferring some bites over others. All animals have (a) preferences and many (b) a functional understanding of numerosity, but the combination of these complimentary abilities is, as far as I know, uniquely human. My dog isn’t compiling lists of the year’s best people food; the marauding squirrels that frequent our apartment complex have no “Our 10 Favorite Birdfeeders of 2022.”

We, however, seem unable to help ourselves. And so I offer up my list, my contribution to the compulsive cataloging of the most recent trip around the sun, knowing all the while that it cannot be contained within a year except arbitrarily, that it amounts to life written on top of itself, sprawling and incoherent, undifferentiated and unbounded.

1. G.E.M.

Graham Everett Mahaffey’s birth on March 17th was, without a doubt, my favorite thing to happen in 2022. Maybe it’s too soon to call it, but Graham may indeed be my favorite thing to happen ever. A week after he was born, whenever someone asked me what it felt like to be a father, I would tell them: “It feels like a weeklong acid trip.” This was true. The steady drip of oxytocin and adorable newborn dopamine, combined with Guantanamo-style sleep deprivation, provoked experiences and emotions I’d previously only encountered on psychedelics.

Holding Graham in our hospital room the night he was born and gazing into his ancient little eyes,2 I became convinced that Hannah had given birth to the Messiah, a perfect being whose mere existence redeemed our hitherto broken cosmos. For the first time in my life, I understood my purpose, my reason for being. In that ecstatic moment, I felt all of my most profound shame, deepest regrets, and insecurities—all my individual failings as a son, brother, friend, husband, and human—rendered inconsequential and vanishingly small. Perhaps it is due to my being raised in the Christian faith—if I had grown up Hindu, I might have interpreted the experience in terms of moksha or, if Buddhist, nirvana—but holding Graham I felt as if, all of a sudden, I understood the mystery and appeal of the Nativity. For unto you a savior is born.

Throughout my adult life, my greatest neuroses have centered around the eventual death of my parents. Although this, I assume, is a common theme for many people, I suspect that at times my anxiety broaches the pathological. This too seemed to melt away in the revelation of my son. Intuitively, I understood that they would live on in me in the same way that the spark of my consciousness had caught fire in Graham, a conscious being distinct from my parents and myself yet connected to us in an unbroken chain of being.

But if becoming a father was just numinous bliss—a feeling of being at home in a benevolent universe in which my purpose was noble and absolute—the psychedelic analogy would be extraneous or incomplete. For me, what rounds out the metaphor are the incredible oscillations between unbridled joy and utter existential despair that, together, constitute parenthood.

Taking Graham outside onto our deck for the first time, I felt a kind of intense shame—like I had betrayed him by consigning him, without his consent, just to being. I had snatched this little soul from the void and forced him to walk the plank into the entropic ocean of existence, populated as it is with suffering: heartbreak, pain, death. I believe that being conscious—feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting—is a profound gift, but it has felt to me at times—only occasionally, but still too often—to be an intolerable burden. Had I been unconscionably reckless in inflicting it upon our perfect, innocent baby? Tears on my cheeks, voice cracking, I whispered to him: I hope you like it.

Of course, he’s almost a year old now—Graham has been in the world now for longer than he grew inside of Hannah. So if you asked me today what it is like to be a parent, my response has matured appropriately: it’s like an eleven-month acid trip.

2. Finally Catching COVID-19

Don’t get me wrong: being sick sucked, but it didn’t suck that much. It didn’t suck as much as the fact that it was me who brought the virus home, getting Hannah and Graham sick, sucked. It wasn’t ideal that Hannah and I were both ill at the same time—the exact period in which it would have been nice to trade off on sick-baby duty. It was legitimately wrenching to hear Graham’s lungs rattle as he struggled, for the first time in his life, to breathe, unable to understand why he felt confused, uncomfortable, and afraid.

But to put it in perspective, for the first six months of Graham’s life, feeding him was a constant struggle. Our lives revolved around trying to help him eat: gimmicky bottles, nursing consultations, weighted feeds, and eventually a minor surgery, a tongue- and lip-tie “revision” called a frenotomy. For an entire month after the procedure, his wound had to be “stretched” (essentially reopened) six times a day. It was, implausibly, even worse than it sounds. It entailed a chronically sleep-deprived Hannah having to set an alarm in the middle of the night to wake our chronically sleep-deprived baby—not to feed him or change a diaper—but to physically prevent his tongue from healing.3 Offered the choice, I think all three of us would happily choose a month of SARS-CoV-2 over another day of that hellacious aftercare routine.

It also didn’t suck nearly as much as the previous two years of interminable hypervigilance had sucked: yes, we had succeeded in avoiding the virus proper, but we were not immune to the disorientation, the social isolation, and the financial hardship the pandemic had wrought. It sucked far less than the increasing disconnect from family and friends who believed the virus was a deep-state hoax, an exaggerated case of the flu, or that the mRNA vaccines were experimental gene therapies cynically toted by bad-faith actors and pushed by a credulous and rapidly-stupifying woke mob. Or the dissonance and whiplash I felt after the murder of George Floyd, when the media—who, weeks before, had denounced right-wing lockdown protests as superspreader events—insinuated that the virus, incredibly, was able to distinguish between the righteous protests against police violence and Michigan’s fascist agitators in a sort of Kafkaesque Pasach.4

Being sick was tangible; it happened within our bodies, and the reality of the virus became, finally, unassailable in the Cartesian sense.5 The blessed double line of the rapid test was a miracle, a grounding totem, stigmata. In that instant, the host of mutually-contradicting anxieties and resentments that had, for two years, been my constant companions vanished. The internal coherence of my pandemic nightmare logic dissolved, losing not only its dominance and salience but—like a dream upon waking—became unintelligible and irrecoverable.

Hannah called the following weeks our “Covid rumspringa.” We didn’t run too wild—our lives were still punctuated by a rhythm of feedings, naps, and diaper changes—but we lay down, at least, our most burdensome crosses. When we returned to the faith, it was to a more liberal denomination—its mandates gentler, its God less jealous and more forgiving. A shadow, long cast, lifted, and we excommunicated ourselves from the tedious hell of pandemic fanaticism.

Thanks for reading. The rest of the list will come later this week in a separate post, mostly because I don’t want to post something that takes more than ten minutes to read unless it’s very necessary/good, but also because the rest of the list involves relationships with things, rather than people or events. Sneak Peek: #3 is an Iron and Wine record, and #4 is a trashcan. If you’d like to get the next part sent straight to your inbox, don’t forget to subscribe below.

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I was three months from finishing a belated bachelor’s degree when one morning, my wife, Hannah, presented me with a wicker basket. Inside was a tarot card from a modified Rider-Waite deck: the Empress, third in the major arcana. Sitting on her throne, the feminine archetype gazed coyly at me, the Venus zodiac resting at her feet.

“What do you think this card means?” Hannah asked.

This was, I should specify, first thing in the morning. I hadn’t had any coffee; I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I assumed that Hannah had drawn the Empress at random, and—put on the spot—I offered an interpretation that sounded reasonable to me, maybe even insightful or clarifying. “I don’t know. Didn’t you talk with your mom yesterday? Maybe it’s something to do with that. You’ve been gently reasserting some boundaries with her?”

When Hannah didn’t respond, I took another stab. “Or, is it to do with work?” Hannah is a massage therapist and shares a space with a few other women. Because they each operate their own individual practices, however, there’s no single person in charge. Predictably, each has a particular way of doing things, and their manners occasionally diverge over such topics as hygiene, medical ethics, and Oregon state law. “Are you communicating better with your officemates?”

Hannah glanced down at the basket and then again at me. “Maybe… But what else could it mean?” Her gaze returned to the basket.

It felt as though Hannah was looking to coax a specific interpretation out of me, a right answer to the question of the card’s ultimate relevance to our lives. I found it strange: we both enjoyed tarot, but neither of us ascribed to them any divinatory powers. I thought of the cards as a kind of hermeneutical prosthesis, an aesthetically-pleasing system of symbols with which one could relate the circumstances of one’s own life to more ostensibly universal archetypes. The Empress was the hero with a thousand faces. There could be no correct interpretation; indeed, this is what gives tarot its wide appeal and low entry floor.

Discouraged and sleep-addled, I looked dumbly at Hannah. “I don’t know. What does it mean to you?”

As coy now as the Empress herself, Hannah took the card from the basket and looked at it. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe like, fertility?” I could tell from her tone that something was supposed to be dawning on me, but nothing was. I looked at the card in her hand, then again at her, expectantly. Finally, she gave the game-over hint: “Maybe like, pregnancy?” She wasn’t looking at the card anymore. I followed her eyes back to the basket, where—without the Empress commanding my attention—I could see what had been there all along: a pink-and-white pregnancy test with a telltale double line.

I would’ve liked to have gotten there faster, to have seen the card and guessed instantly: oh shit, you’re pregnant. Failing that, I’d have liked to have at least not missed the presence of the pregnancy test repeatedly and entirely. But the deck, as it were, was stacked against me. You’ve probably heard of the famous gorilla experiment: a video of six people—half wearing white, the others in black—passing two basketballs back and forth. A dozen participants were instructed to count how many times the players in white passed the ball. But there’s a twist: toward the end of the video, a person in a gorilla suit wanders onto the set. The great ape pauses, mugs for the camera, and exits stage right.

The punchline is that fully half of the participants didn’t notice the gorilla.1 The original study runs a few variations of the experiment—alternate videos, more complicated tasks—but the general finding holds: we are virtually blind to much in our environments, and we tend not to know what we’re missing.

I was so focused on interpreting the vaguely-mystical Empress—symbolically fecund, pregnant with meaning—that I was blind to the pink-and-white, urine-stained gorilla in the basket.

Trying, wanting, getting

In July of 2021, Hannah and I had been together for seven years and married four. Of course we had talked about starting a family; we both wanted to someday—probably someday soon—but we hadn’t been “trying.” Or at least, we hadn’t considered ourselves to be trying.

There’s a sense in which “are you trying?” is an intrusive, boundary-violating question. Asked by otherwise genteel inlaws or friends, within it is contained the more explicit, somewhat invasive question “are you giving and receiving creampies?” Yikes. Nevertheless, you would probably embarrass—even scandalize—your interlocutor if your response included the word “bareback.” What gives? While it is true that, answered in the affirmative, “trying” implies the mutual adoption by a couple of a particular set of sexual practices, the—and this is important—intimate realities connoted by “trying” are almost always tacit and (hopefully) auxiliary to the query proper. What the aspiring grandmother really wants to know is whether or not your congress is (a) productive and (b) intentional.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally offensive about asking close friends or family members if they’re trying to have kids. It’s just funny when it comes from people who otherwise tend toward prudishness and who—in any other circumstance—would balk, cringe, or be embarrassed by such explicit coital conversation. But what alternative do they have? Regrettably, “are you trying?” cannot be replaced with the less-invasive “do you want kids?”. Both deal with propositional attitudes, but the former solicits more information than the latter. Consider:

1. Jack and Jill want kids.

   When Jill utters “Yes, we want kids”, she is asserting that (a) Jack and Jill hope that Jack and Jill will be relieved of the condition of childlessness at some point. Well, when? She doesn’t say. She may hope to be relieved of this condition tomorrow—the sooner the better!—but she could also expect to enjoy many years of childlessness before becoming a mother. The couple may plan on adopting or using a surrogate; “wanting kids” is broad and fuzzy.

2. Jack and Jill are trying to have kids.

   If Jack utters “We’re trying to have kids”, he is asserting not only (a) but also (b): Jack and Jill intend that their intercourse result in conception. Implicit is (c), the tacit acknowledgment that he and Jill are doing it on the regular, to completion, p in the v, BB. Furthermore, he modifies (a), removing the qualifier “at some point” and—basically—answering the “when?” question with “if my lunch break goes well, forty weeks from today.”

Trying entails wanting, but not vice versa.2 We want (say) promotions, Steam Decks, and blowjobs, whether or not we intend to acquire them. We don’t want (say) to get fat or develop addictions to sugar and vaping, so the role of intention is just the extent to which we intend to avoid what we do not want. Crucially, trying and wanting are neither necessary nor sufficient for getting. (Plausible in the abstract, this became concrete for me over the course of Hannah’s pregnancy, when I discovered that, for every pound she gained, its duplicate had appeared somehow on my nonpregnant body.) Intuitively, it seems like the only necessary relationship between the wanting-getting-trying conceptual triad is the one that holds between wanting and trying, wherein if one tries at something—trying to obtain, to bring about—by definition, one also wants the object of their trying.

The weekend before Hannah drew the Empress, a friend asked us if we wanted kids. We told her the truth: we had talked a lot about it, both wanted it, but we needed a little more time. Maybe after I went to graduate school, found a career that paid better than waiting tables. Definitely not until we moved out of our apartment into something with more space, perhaps with a yard.3 Little did we know that our inchoate son was already merrily burrowing his way into the lining of Hannah’s uterus—that he was technically in the room with us—and that mere days later, we would be grappling with the new reality on our horizon: becoming parents.

When Hannah and I announced that we were expecting, the bolder of our friends and family would ask some variation of “were you trying?” Asked in the past tense, the calculus fundamentally changes: no longer are the explicit mechanics of what transpired in any serious doubt. Certainly, edge cases exist: broken condoms, vasectomies spontaneously reversing, user error. Generally speaking, though, the past tense eliminates Grandma’s (a) productivity query from the equation. Clearly, life has, uh, found its way. What remains is (b) intentionality: was it, or was it not, an oopsie-daisy?

This is hard to reckon with honestly and coherently in retrospect. Eventually, I plan on writing an essay about the transformative experience of becoming a parent through the lens of philosopher L.A. Paul’s book.4

In the meantime, I wonder if it makes any sense to say that Hannah and I wanted to have a baby “someday” but weren’t “trying” when our son was conceived. It was neither purposeful nor accidental, in the same sense that it isn’t exactly suicide when, in a game of Russian Roulette, during the very first round the very first spin of the cylinder just so happens to slow and then stop as the only occupied chamber aligns with a firing pin and… well, you get the picture. The specific odds depend (I guess) on the make of the revolver, but—with a classic six shooter—the odds are 1:6, or the roll of a die. It lacks the single-mindedness of the noose or the razor, but it’s also not, say, getting struck by lightning. Coming inside of someone who probably-isn’t-but-maybe-could-be in her fertile window is like that. It may not signal a conscious intent to impregnate, but the odds were known or at least knowable, accepted by both parties (enthusiastically, as it happened), neither of whom were under duress. The biological impulse that drives that sort of gamble is, I think, teleological, meaning that the act is ends-oriented.5 In that sense, we were trying, even if we didn’t know it—even if it was also a little oopsie-daisy.