Playing at self-reliance takes different forms in different people, and you can probably tell a lot about a person by his choice of atavism: whether he’s drawn to the patient and solitary attentiveness of fishing, the strict mathematical syntax of building, the emotional drama of the hunt, or the mostly comic dialogue with other species that unfolds in the garden. Most of us have a pretty good idea which of these jobs we’d try for if somehow a time machine were to plunk us down in the Pleistocene or Neolithic.
