The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don’t quite work are the glory of the process, a form of inquiry through which you catch sight of your errors and then reconsider, revise, or dispose of your categories. My father’s fairy-tale pronouncement was many years ago now. I have only two daughters: an industrious, loving, and optimistic twenty-one-year-old and a funny, joyful, and resilient ten-year-old. Maybe I have a third daughter: my work.
Or maybe the third daughter is me? It’s been a disorienting time. Are any of us beautiful, kind, or intelligent anymore? I was raised to believe that no human is inherently evil, that evil is a surface disturbance caused by underlying fear (F), misunderstanding (M), or ignorance (I). I’m now reconsidering. Maybe evil is a spiritual substance in and of itself. Not downstream from F, M, or I. Perhaps the mother of them. I am writing this mental note to myself while at our lab meeting, which is long and cookie-less.
The head of the lab, Bogdan, moved here from Serbia a quarter century ago. He grows peppers in tomato tins on his office windowsill, and he has gathered us to discuss what he has termed the current macro-environment. It has been decreed, he tells us, that we must turn away three of the five Ph.D. candidates we’ve accepted. The federal funding for the Bee Diversity and Native Pollinator Surveys has been cancelled, though there is still state-level funding. The funding for the Sub-Saharan Pollinator Project is frozen, not cancelled, but it is unlikely to be unfrozen in time for us to make use of the hundred-and-seventy-seven bee boxes currently in the field, in anticipation of the late spring and summer. The project on the diversity and frequency of pathogens in wild solitary bees—which is funded mostly through the Department of Agriculture—is also on hold, even though hundreds of the bees in question have already been tagged with tiny radio trackers. Bogdan has made an emergency application to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but—he throws up his hands. What do people think?
The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.
That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.
Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.
When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.
So that explains it.
These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction.
Bogdan comes into my office and tells me that the intern has arrived and that this might be a good time. A good time? I say.
He answers by leaving the room.
Bogdan is not a bad man. He is a bee man. But I suspect that for reasons connected to his being a Serb of his generation he is a tough guy and maybe, on some level, beyond good and evil.
Our last intern avoided eye contact. The one before that wore headphones and a dark T-shirt. This one stands up and shakes my hand. He is so excited to meet me, he says. The whole internship is exciting. He was blown away by what he learned in Bogdan’s class about honeybee decision-making. It is so wild, he says, that honeybees can make collective decisions, like about where to build a new home—how they share their ideas and debate and work through their differences.
I point out that much of the lab’s focus is on solitary bees.
That sounds epic, the intern says. And he knows it sounds silly, but he also likes how bees put behind them the carnivorous ways of their wasp ancestors, that they recognized the bounty that is all around us—
There are some carnivorous bees, I say. For example, the vulture bee.
That’s awesome, he says. He adds, Hey, have you ever been stung? I know that’s a cliché question. . . .
I take a seat and invite him to do the same. I’ve never been stung, I say. When I was eleven—the age my younger daughter will soon be—I discovered an old cabinet in a mildewy back room of the church where I sang in the choir. The cabinet door had a large V where the paint had peeled off, and I thought it looked like a seagull. Something sticky was dripping out of the cabinet. I pulled at the silvery handle of the door. Inside was a civilization of thousands, and a honeycomb. I didn’t startle. Not one of the bees stung me.
The intern says that he had intuited that I had that kind of wild inner peace. He has hazel eyes with a pie wedge of brown iris, like my twenty-one-year-old does. My twenty-one-year-old, who has been sluggish and teary for weeks, since she and a boy who always wears a cantaloupe-colored hoodie broke up. She’s unemployed. There are no jobs, she tells me, especially for new graduates like her. The unemployment rate is 4.1 per cent, I want to tell her. I want to explain that this is a very low percentage.
I say to the intern, The funding for your internship has been cut. Not by the university—by the government. The government has cut it. Yes, yes, the intern quickly says, I’ve read about the cuts. It’s horrible. What it means for you, I say, is that your internship is over. He pauses. O.K., he says. You should ask for the decision to be communicated to you in writing, I want to advise him. You should feel free to ask for information about the precise basis of your termination. You should ask about the money. You do not have to be so polite. Is it just me, or is it hard to know what to say to young people right now? About the world, I mean.
The spring intern says, O.K. Wow. O.K. I guess I’d better go then!
I’m sorry, I say. An instant later, I am already thinking about my ten-year-old.
When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.
Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.
When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.
My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.
I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.
It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.
The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.
Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.
You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. During a family trip to Philadelphia, he told us that the Quakers believed, or maybe still did, that if freed from evil influences a person could more easily maintain the light of goodness within them and come closer to God. This idea was the noble origin of solitary confinement for prisoners. On that trip, we bought a knickknack: a small figurine of three monkeys. One monkey with its hands covering its eyes, another with its hands covering its mouth, and a third with its hands covering its ears. The nipples on the monkeys had more texture and realism than suited me. Were the monkeys party to some evil that they were intent upon ignoring? Or were they refusing to speak, hear, or see it so as not to increase evil’s presence in the world? In short: were these monkeys mafiosi or aspiring Buddhas? Not long after that trip, when a bad asthma attack put me in the hospital, on steroids, the three monkeys came to me in a vision-dream-nightmare. I was on a school bus with them, and they were laughing and one was holding a pillow against my face, smothering me, and the thought came to me, as if written on the wall in blood, that they were not monkeys—they were chimpanzees! Everyone was operating on the erroneous and perilous footing that they were monkeys. But why? What was going on? It was these sorts of irritations, I have come to believe, that turned me into a scientist.
After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.
The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?
It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability.
Each week in my graduate seminar, a different student presents on the week’s reading. This week, a gentle, pale boy is presenting on Martin Lindauer, who made foundational observations about scout bees—the bees who search out sites to build new hives. Lindauer was born in a Bavarian village, one of the youngest of fifteen children. At age seventeen, he was conscripted to dig trenches for Hitler’s army. After a bit of that, he was sent to the Russian front, where he was hit by shrapnel and dispatched back to Munich for care. One of his physicians suggested he sit in on lectures given at the University of Munich by Karl von Frisch, who studied fish and bees and had come to prominence with controversial work suggesting that bees could see color, something that now seems obvious but at the time was vigorously contested. Lindauer said he was healed by von Frisch’s lectures. He said they put him in touch with a new world, a humane one.
The presenting student begins: He was a Nazi soldier, so there’s that. His big work was with how did bee swarms know where they were going. He would wait around for the bees to swarm and then chase them across town. That seems like pretty poor experimental design to me today, but he did make some cool observations, and no experiment is ever perfect.
He continues confidently, following what looks to be a printout of bullet points. My pedagogical philosophy prioritizes minimizing the inevitable authority assigned to the instructor, and this means that I make every effort not to interrupt or derail students, but on this occasion an impulse overwhelms my philosophy and I ask him how he would have followed the swarms.
He says with radio taggers maybe.
The girl next to him remarks that our modern practice of refrigerating bees for sedation and then marking them with paint or superglued trackers is not exactly keeping one’s fingerprints off experimental results. Then another girl says she doesn’t think they had taggers way back when.
The boy presenter nods agreeably. Anyhow, what’s cool is the Zen part when he stood still and just watched the swarm for hours and hours until they made their move, he says. He noticed that some bees would leave the group and then return with soot on them, or with flour, or bits of red clay. And they didn’t have pollen on them. And they weren’t carrying nectar. And that was weird, and what is weird is always worth thinking about. That’s really the big thing that I got from this guy. He finishes his presentation by saying that it was that weirdness that gave Lindauer the idea that, when bees left the swarm, they were scouting sites for a new home—a chimney, maybe, near a bread factory, somewhere with clay—
Western honeybees are central-place foragers, the first girl interrupts, and starts talking about the behavioral consequences of having a home rather than living as a nomad. She says that’s what makes these honeybees so brainy—they have to not only find food, sometimes miles away, but also be able to find their way back home and explain to their sisters what they found and where, and, like, she herself can’t even, like, visit her best friend without Google Maps.
Um, yes, the presenting boy says. That’s what I was going to say.
When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.
You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.
That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.
Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.
He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.
The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.
Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.
O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.
When he is out of sight, I am overwhelmed with a need to lie down on the sofa. I’m not a lie-down person, I’m a do-many-things person. But maybe I am not a person to be classified. It is wrong to classify people. At least sometimes. For example, my twenty-one-year-old daughter, the one who seems to have committed a crime, or certainly a wrong, is a person named Heidi. She spent years drawing lions. She still has her box of things that are yellow that she collected over the years. I was once so lovesick that I switched schools to get away from the person I thought about from morning to night. That young man in my seminar; the alien my daughter loves; that too-pliant fired intern—aren’t they trying to reimagine manhood? The generally acknowledged truth that the world is going to hell should remind us that we do not currently live in Hell. I have three daughters, and my three daughters all have a mom—that’s nice. As I lie on the sofa attempting to untangle many knots in my mind, and to get all the wolves to howl together, as an ensemble, Bogdan knocks and enters. Could we have a word? he says. In my office.
Bogdan and I enter the elevator. He presses the button for the second floor. It does not require great intelligence to suspect that the word he will have with me is a word relevant to my no longer having a job. My mind begins responding in advance. I will say: Who authorized this? Could I have it in writing? Why me rather than others? I won’t take this lying down, Bogdan. What about food security? Did drawing names from a jar constitute an ethical reason to throw someone overboard? Are you aware that the unemployment rate is high?
I am unpersuaded by my words, all of which seem off, false. Maybe the truth is simple and beyond Bogdan’s powers of explanation: I am not kind or beautiful or intelligent enough.
Back in Sunday school, a few days after the choir-practice finding of the bee civilization—which was relocated by a fireman and a bee hobbyist—the teacher instructed us to make a list of all the words we might have for God, for what we thought he was like: cruel, good, powerful, vengeful, all-loving, tall. The teacher was young, handsome, often wore a pink button-down. Good, he said to the class, writing one adjective after another on the chalkboard, even those that were less than flattering to the Almighty. Chalk dust glinted like pollen or asbestos in the sunshine coming through the window. Had any of us given the correct word? The teacher said, Every word on this list is wrong! He paused, assessed our faces. Because God is inconceivable, he said. Whatever word we thought of—anything we could come up with—would be just one more thing that God was not. What God was: not any of the thoughts that we or anyone else had, ever, not even this one. I did like that. I can’t say I believed or even understood it, but it gave me a little shiver of pleasure, the way that learning about the UV vision of bees—their peculiar world—had given me a shiver of pleasure when my fourth-grade teacher, the strict and marvellous Mrs. Burns, who I know is no longer alive, told us about it. O.K. Well, I am going to walk into Bogdan’s office and tell him that I care for him and respect him but that he has disappointed me. Or maybe I am going to be forgiving? His choices are not of his making, this man who grows his own peppers in the unfavorable conditions of his windowsill. Is he even my adversary? There is so much talk about the one who casts the first stone, but doubt should surround the casting of even the second and third and hundredth stones.
Bogdan has no sofa in his office, only chairs and a desk. First, a drink, he says. He sets out a bottle of plum liquor and two small glasses, one tinted pink and with a green stem, the other clear but rimmed with blue and shaped like a doll-house goblet. He tells me that he has been hearing good things about the beaches of Albania.
I tell him I don’t know anything about them.
He takes a sip, I take a sip. The drink tastes like clover and hot chile. My daughters still sometimes drink grapefruit seltzer from glasses like these, I don’t know why, it is a thing between them. It is not a good idea to think about my daughters when I am trying to find my anger. The thought of being separated from my third daughter, my work—too terrible for words.
O.K., he says. Well, I have a proposal. An ask. He wants me, he says, to finish up the two protocols he has going on, the one with the broken-belted bumblebees and the one with the American bumblebees. He takes another sip—a gulp, really. He has finished his drink and is now pouring himself another.
Why are you saying this? I ask.
He says that I am trustworthy and sensitive to details, that I am a gifted scientist, that I am not as loony as other people. I will understand that he doesn’t want his bees to have lived a limited and caged life for no reason. His position is being eliminated, he explains. He is out of here. It is O.K.! I shouldn’t worry about him. He’s thinking that he’ll book a flight to Tirana, because of what he has heard about the beaches, which he has never seen. He will have a swim in the Ionian Sea, and then decide what to do next. No hasty moves. Rather, reliable rolling-waves moves, predictably unpredictable, patterned but not in a way that repeats.
I also like that about waves, I say. And sand.
He says that he loves swimming in cold water, so May is a good time, even April.
I say, You look happy?
I am, he says. It’ll wear off. How are your girls?
I take another sip of the fiery fermented sugar water. I inform him that Heidi is lovesick and out of her mind and that Grace has been swallowed by a wolf gaming app.
He laughs. That’s excellent, he says. You’re lucky. I’m remembering that Bogdan once taught my girls to whistle through their hands in a way that sounded like a warbler.
You’re not afraid?
Of the sea?
I was more thinking of the world, just generally.
He says that is nonsense. He says he’s a happy, enraged, and curious person, but not a fearful one. He says that even if he dies tomorrow he will feel he’s had more than is reasonable to ask for. That’s why he has nothing to fear. He could have died in infancy. He could have been born a bee, lived only a year. The world could have not existed at all. If you asked him the question, as a scientist, Is it more likely that existence is possible or impossible, more likely that there is something versus there being nothing, he would answer that nothing is far, far more likely, asymptotically approaching total certainty. He would add that it would be radically unreasonable to come to any other conclusion. And yet it would be the wrong conclusion. Anyhow, that is his idea for now. It sounds like something my dad would have said. ♦