My father loved my mother with a childlike devotion, and my mother loved him back with a kind of maternal exasperation. She would ask why he couldn’t just believe in something he didn’t understand, and I would watch my father frown and ponder that question as if it, too, might prove useful in some hyper-rational way. If my mother had really pushed—which she never did—he would probably have answered that believing things you don’t understand is either obedience or desperation, and neither leads to the truth. Would we believe in God if we didn’t die? Would we believe in energies if all illness
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