Euphoria

by Lily King

Perhaps all suicides are happy in the end. Perhaps it is at that moment that one feels the real point of it all, which, after you get yourself born, is to die. It is the one thing each and every one of us is programmed for, directed to, and cannot swerve away from indefinitely.

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.

thought it was Eros at Piccadilly Circus.’ She plucked at a pencil on my desk. For a second I thought she was going to start taking notes. ‘Many people do. But it’s his twin brother, the avenger of unrequited love. Poetic to the last.’

It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’

I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong.

feminine side that night you have provided an equilibrium for this community that the overdeveloped masculine aggression of your culture often

threatens?”

They reflect on when they fished the day before—what it brought them, where they might choose to go the next day. They reflect on their children, their spouses, their siblings, their debts, their promises.’

‘It’s very kind. But there’s a taboo on childless women witnessing a birth.’

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.

Natural. I find I use this word indiscriminately. What is natural to an Englishman might not be at all natural to, say,

an American, let alone a tribe in New Guinea.

That night at Gertie’s

when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn’t say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn’t know the difference then.

But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them.

murder is one of the first natural impulses any creature has to the unknown.’

‘Funny how irony is never tragic to them, only comic.’ ‘Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,’ I said.

On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem.

Wives were always blamed for the death of their spouse, and it was believed that women could leave their sleeping bodies and do deadly deeds, and as a result, women were deeply feared. They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was

safe from male advances.

The cultures we put in the Northern vector were aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic. The id of the grid, Nell said. By contrast the Southern cultures were responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse. To the West were the Apollonian managers who valued

unemotional

efficiency, pragmatism, extroversion, while the Easterners were spiritual, introverted seekers, interested in the questi...

It was easy to slot people in.

Why are there so many tribes who share everything—food, shelter, land, income—but their stories always revolve around someone’s brother or best friend stealing his woman?’

Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. Time for you and time for me,