Everybody's Son

by Thrity Umrigar

It was Thoreau who had introduced Anton to the idea that living a principled life was as much about what you didn’t do as what you did. That what you rejected defined you as much as what you embraced.

The beauty that had dazzled and blinded him fell away, as if he had drunk a potion in a fairy tale, and he found himself walking beside an ordinary black girl, one who hid her insecurities behind a facade of bravado and radicalism. Her radicalism is phony, he thought, because it keeps her from seeing the world, blinds her to its mysteries and charms. Even her intellectualism is suspect because it’s not open-minded and skeptical and probing but, rather, circular, chasing its own tail.