More thinking

And which to choose? Of course. What possible derivations of his life would be fulfilled or extinguished based on the choice, if in fact he had a choice that he made? This was why people wrote novels and made movies: To answer just this sort of question. What might life be like if lived in two directions? It was nonsense, of course. And not just on an intellectual level, but it was the sort of nonsense that seemed to him, characteristic of life in the twenty first century. People didn’t want to make a choice, they wanted all the choices. This was the sort of thing they were teaching kids in preschool. He’d worked in one briefly and witnessed, firsthand, the building up of America’s youth. The children were no longer told that something was inherently wrong, or bad to do. They were encouraged merely to make a different choice, the temptation was removed. But what did that teach them? That it was all right to throw rocks into a window as long as you stopped if asked? It struck him as characteristically lazy and liberal thinking, that nothing could be wrong. Everyone would just live their lives in some sort of blissful happiness. And yet, the world, or at least the world that he wanted to live in was contingent on people making the right choices, on people making hard choices. The simple example was a freeway, where if everyone was totally out for themselves, traffic fatalities would burgeon even higher than their already unacceptable rate. But this sort of thinking applied to the social contract as well. It was impossible for a person to both go on a golfing outing and use that same money to support a local charity at the same time. It was not possible to always have every choice work out. And this was influenced as well, in his mind, by the fallacy that any of the right choices would actually fulfill a person. 

At root a person is, or so he believed, who they are by a certain age, and it wouldn’t radically change them to be attached to one sort of woman instead of another. Sure it might siphon of little changes, bring out a sense of humor, a temper, but, in the end, would not that person wind up arguing over paint colors or television or chandelier aesthetics, precisely because it was impossible not to differ in a myriad of ways no matter what human being you attached yourself too. The fallacy lay in thinking that some sort of grand marriage was possible. It was not, and so his decision was made easy. And as he rounded the corner on twenty fifth, ducking beneath the branches of a low lying maple, half-listening to the siren in the distance, he was reminded that he still had no clue what decision he should make, and he started to round the block again, this time identifying women pushing strollers, noting the time left on parking meters, the position of the violet clouds in the deep blue sky, a pair of fat pigeons pecking idly in the street, and he didn’t think about any of the women at all, or what a possible union for him would mean, he thought about the gossamer threads of a web strung between a tree and a lamppost, glinting and rainbow colored, how man was probably destined for the country, since it was from the country and the back roads he had came. And that it would take centuries perhaps for the reality of a city to sink in, the proximity of one’s neighbors, dogs and birds and all that. There was peace to be found on a quiet green bench in front of a fountain, a small boy playing amongst two rocks, water spurting forth from his mouth, and a small garden snake twining itself around its heels.

He felt that there was something missing from his life, something that would have been a prerequisite a couple of hundred years ago: an element of danger, of something to discover. Certainly the stories of the explorers were full of rape and slaughter of innocent people, entirely unjustified, but the quest itself, the drive to see something new, perhaps that’s what he needed. A place to be that wasn’t here.