Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

and the number of nights Jack and I order pizza now has certainly undone any of the good that organic strained sweet potato and amaranth cereal did in his babyhood.

The raw heartlessness of children continues to surprise me. Much is made of their sensitivity and purity—and those things are true of Jack—but I’ve been fascinated to observe that we aren’t born with empathy, that our own needs and wants radically trump those of all others, at least until we learn to feel otherwise.

That was too good not to repeat to Neel, who said that all of LIGO Caltech now knew about good physicists going to heaven and bad ones going to CERN.

Sometimes, sitting and talking on that mattress, it seemed as if we’d outsmarted not only other people, but love itself.

Wasn’t the kind of education Charlie and I had received simply a set of words and references that connected you to a group of people like yourself? In physics we say that we do science for science’s sake, and that there is value in that. Our knowledge of our universe itself, from its explosive early inflation to its current growth rate, has become exponentially more precise in my lifetime. We could all give a quote to a journalist, or end an undergraduate lecture with a few sentences about scientific thinking as a key component of our humanity, and I think most of us really believe those words. When a practical application is available, though—the ramifications of closing the freedom-of-choice loophole for cybersecurity, for example—we rush to emphasize it. While someone services our car, cooks our meal, or bathes our children, the sentences and paragraphs about our fundamental utility spin out like magic.

The mania to perfect things that are by their nature imperfectible is one of those areas in which I most frequently make a wrong turn.

“Parents forget everything.” “We forget a lot.” Simmi lifted her knee so that her foot was lined up on the arm of the couch, like a balance beam. She picked at the last remains of some light blue polish on her big toenail. It was hard to hear her, because her chin was resting on her knee. “They forget how much they used to love their own parents,” she said, “when they were kids.”

Suffering, but in four dimensions—what you might call yearning.

past the Pfizer building that was still under construction. In front of us the Kendall cogeneration plant released a sharply delineated white plume against the dingy sky.

Rachel Fershleiser