Under the Fir Tree

This past weekend I took my two-year-old daughter (Chiara) to the zoo. That sentence should probably be allowed to remain as uncomplicated as it sounds. She’s two. It’s the zoo. There are elephants. There are giraffes. There are animals she knows mostly from board books. There’s something almost miraculous in the conversion of a picture into flesh. The elephant turns out to be considerably larger than the page. A little girl should be allowed to delight in this. Her father should probably be allowed to delight in her delight. And I did. Still, somewhere between one enclosure and the next, I began thinking about what a zoo teaches us without ever intending to teach us. Not because zoos are sinister. They aren’t. And not because keeping animals in enclosures somehow explains modernity. It doesn’t. The connection is quieter than that. A zoo concentrates, in one pleasant morning, several habits that've become almost second nature to us: we classify things, arrange them, make them visib...

There’s a mercy in discovering some battles can be escaped. Close the door. Put down the phone. Stop answering texts. Let the voices go on without you for a while . . . The world, surprisingly, survives. Abba Antony knew what solitude does. It takes weapons out of other people’s hands. No accusation reaches you unless memory carries it in. No praise can intoxicate you unless you pour it yourself. There’s no face across the table to irritate you, no careless sentence to correct, no beautiful thing to possess with your eyes. Hearing grows quiet. Speaking stops. Seeing has less to feed upon. Three wars end. And then the fourth begins. This is the unpleasant gift of silence: eventually there’s no one left to blame for the noise. We imagine solitude will give us peace because we imagine other people are the principal authors of our unrest. If the office were quieter. If the children needed less. If the news weren’t so maddening. If that person would stop saying that thing. If someone final...

Borges understood something unnerving about us: we don’t simply live in the world. We live inside what we’ve decided the world means. We name things. Sort them. Draw borders around them. We build theories, institutions, political systems, theologies, diagnoses, stories. We make maps because the world is too large to hold in the mind all at once. We need the maps. The trouble begins when we forget we’re holding one. St. Paul puts the whole problem into a few words: “For now we see in a mirror dimly . . . Now I know in part.” I know in part. There’s humility in that sentence, but no surrender of truth. Paul doesn’t say we know nothing. He doesn’t say the mirror lies. He says it’s dim. We see something real. We just don’t see all of it. And nearly every human way of understanding carries the same temptation. We discover something true and, because it’s true, begin asking it to explain too much. Economics reveals something about us, and soon everything has a price. Psychology discovers wo...