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I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done
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The rising tide of gangsterism felt global. I saw nothing reasonable about what was coming. Nothing reasonable at all.
“Pop quiz: on whom does all greatness and all power rest?” Drunk as I was, I knew the answer. It was the most famous passage in Maistre’s writings. “The executioner.” “One point to you. You can’t have a state without the threat of violence. It’s the only way to get people to obey. The executioner is that threat. He’s the one who wields the axe.”
Society needs fear. It’s our dirty little secret.”
There was no guarantee that the needle of crisis, which had always pointed away from us, at other families in other places, would not swing in our direction.
Ideally we want something that has the same utility as a person—that can do all the labor a person can do—but to whom we don’t owe the same moral obligations. We will eventually be able to build or grow such servants ourselves, but in the medium term we must use the ones we have, the ones over whom we hold dominion, like our ancestors did before us.”
My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?
