sorry for her. But when she takes the money, she is not surprised that you have given her twice what she was supposed to get. She doesn’t even think you’ve made a mistake.
“‘. . . but the gods put in your breast a spirit not to be placated, bad, for the sake of one single girl. Yet now we offer you seven, surpassingly lovely, and much beside these. Now make gracious the spirit within you.’” — Telamonian Ajax to Achilles,
Iliad
9:636
This is why we find those accents so charming — the Southern, the Scottish, the Russian — anything remote, anything that might suggest the ignorance is reinforced, that geography has made it even more extreme than it would have been otherwise.
There is so much sociobiology I could bore you with. For example, I could point out that one would expect women and not men to lose their attractiveness with age since it is only women who lose their ability to breed. Or that the security older men can typically provide their offspring more than compensates for their deteriorated health. Or that most corrections to beauty are not, in fact, abstract aesthetic decisions but rather directed efforts to appear less congenitally hazardous. Or that until the last thirty-odd years (and even then only in developed nations), natural selection would have favored women with the ability to make men care more about protecting and supporting them than other women. You might even find it uninteresting that the more recently they have orgasmed, the better men perform on Mensa entrance exams. Yes, I could tell you about any number of dull things like the altruism gene or R selection or Occam’s razor. But I won’t. Instead I will just tell you this:
We have known for some time that male mammals are separated from female mammals by a difference in genetic material of about 0.5 percent.
But we have learned only recently that men are separated from mice by a difference in genetic material of no more than about 1 percent.
Which has led us to believe that once we finish mapping the human genome along with those of the higher primates there is a very real chance we will-discover men share more genes with male gorillas than they do with women.
We were on the Upper East Side in February about a year before we were divorced. It was a Saturday and we’d been to a classical Greek art gallery on Madison. They had a horse from the Homeric period someone thought I might be interested in. I liked it but pretended I didn’t. I was already thinking I might not want you to know about everything I owned, least of all a two-inch iron horse that cost more than a small house and could be easily hidden.
Where we crossed Seventy-second Street, two men were cleaning an asphalt cutter. It was an enormous metal wheel with blunt titanium teeth and mounted on its own vehicle. The men were facing the crosswalk and spraying the cutter down with a hose, their view of the crosswalk blocked. It was cold and the water was freezing where it pooled. As we passed the cutter a bit of spray caught you on your mink. You walked around to the other side of the cutter and said to the men, “Hey, come on, look —” you showed them the wet spot on your coat. “Just be a little careful, OK?” you said. You were trying to be a good sport, trying to let them know that the next person might not be as understanding as you.
I told you to leave them be.
And when we were children, why did we look up four-letter words in the dictionary? Did we think the words could tell us what the things were like?
“Toughen the boy up a little, see if he has what it takes to succeed.” You know this is always a good idea but you never think about what it takes or from where. You never think about the fact that, in the end, what it takes is all he will really want.
And yet it takes a puppy some time to become cautious in its approach to other dogs.
A friend calls you. He is younger than you. Not by much but by enough. He is, like you, single. He tells you
“‘. . . but the gods put in your breast a spirit not to be placated, bad, for the sake of one single girl. Yet now we offer you seven, surpassingly lovely, and much beside these. Now make gracious the spirit within you.’” — Telamonian Ajax to Achilles,
Iliad
9:636
This is why we find those accents so charming — the Southern, the Scottish, the Russian — anything remote, anything that might suggest the ignorance is reinforced, that geography has made it even more extreme than it would have been otherwise.
There is so much sociobiology I could bore you with. For example, I could point out that one would expect women and not men to lose their attractiveness with age since it is only women who lose their ability to breed. Or that the security older men can typically provide their offspring more than compensates for their deteriorated health. Or that most corrections to beauty are not, in fact, abstract aesthetic decisions but rather directed efforts to appear less congenitally hazardous. Or that until the last thirty-odd years (and even then only in developed nations), natural selection would have favored women with the ability to make men care more about protecting and supporting them than other women. You might even find it uninteresting that the more recently they have orgasmed, the better men perform on Mensa entrance exams. Yes, I could tell you about any number of dull things like the altruism gene or R selection or Occam’s razor. But I won’t. Instead I will just tell you this:
We have known for some time that male mammals are separated from female mammals by a difference in genetic material of about 0.5 percent.
But we have learned only recently that men are separated from mice by a difference in genetic material of no more than about 1 percent.
Which has led us to believe that once we finish mapping the human genome along with those of the higher primates there is a very real chance we will-discover men share more genes with male gorillas than they do with women.
We were on the Upper East Side in February about a year before we were divorced. It was a Saturday and we’d been to a classical Greek art gallery on Madison. They had a horse from the Homeric period someone thought I might be interested in. I liked it but pretended I didn’t. I was already thinking I might not want you to know about everything I owned, least of all a two-inch iron horse that cost more than a small house and could be easily hidden.
Where we crossed Seventy-second Street, two men were cleaning an asphalt cutter. It was an enormous metal wheel with blunt titanium teeth and mounted on its own vehicle. The men were facing the crosswalk and spraying the cutter down with a hose, their view of the crosswalk blocked. It was cold and the water was freezing where it pooled. As we passed the cutter a bit of spray caught you on your mink. You walked around to the other side of the cutter and said to the men, “Hey, come on, look —” you showed them the wet spot on your coat. “Just be a little careful, OK?” you said. You were trying to be a good sport, trying to let them know that the next person might not be as understanding as you.
I told you to leave them be.
And when we were children, why did we look up four-letter words in the dictionary? Did we think the words could tell us what the things were like?
“Toughen the boy up a little, see if he has what it takes to succeed.” You know this is always a good idea but you never think about what it takes or from where. You never think about the fact that, in the end, what it takes is all he will really want.
And yet it takes a puppy some time to become cautious in its approach to other dogs.
A friend calls you. He is younger than you. Not by much but by enough. He is, like you, single. He tells you
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