The Master Passion, Gain

I would like to pass on soft platitudes to my children; to tell them that the race is not always to the swift, or that it is better to have loved and lost, or that effort is more important than outcome. But I do them no service by hiding the cruelty of the world from them. They will be told, at an early age, that the world is about gain; about trampling the other fellow; about what happens, not what ought to happen. It saddens me that humanity can generate no nobler wisdom than this, but it saddens me more to think that my children shall be crushed and conquered by those who possess a superior understanding of the world.

But gain, powerful as it is, is yet subordinate to love, grows from love. I gain on behalf of my children. I enlarge my purse only to enlarge theirs. Poverty is the only only unforgivable vice. Poverty cannot be apologized for or safely eulogized. It is the stark sum of judgment, the absence of license, the absence of movement, death. Be harsh and masterful, but do not be poor. Be halt and cock-eyed, but do not bounce a check. Money blows a warm wind over love -- so put money in your purse, my babies.

There will be no reckoning of how I broke my back for you. There will be only the bills, the tuition payments, the mortgage, the health insurance, the cost of the funeral, the cost of insemination, and how much money God is asking for on the television. You will be glad never to face starvation, and glad that I put you beyond starvation. This is no airy, abstract love but the root and concrete of all feeling. This is the gain that I will you.

LSAT and Babies

My babies were, in retrospect, my first LSAT proctors. I know this now, some days after having taken the December 2008 LSAT. My babies happen in fact to be the sweetest babies who have yet babied, but it turns out that they are quite loud--louder than expected, to judge by their tiny bodies and hesitating steps. They can produce preternatural sounds, prodigies of roaring and gurgling and all kinds of mewling especially; I imagine them to be at home on Prospero's Island, where they might be vexing Caliban even now. In any case...we were speaking of the LSAT. This, as you may know, is the test administered to those damned and damnable souls off to law school. It consists of several sections, each more difficult than the last, and is said to take great concentration of soul. I took the test in four or five hours of what I considered silence, deadly silence--the kind of silence found in dental waiting rooms and French bivouacs before night battles. That kind of thing. But afterwards it transpires that the room was very noisy. I was reliably informed by a fellow test-taker, one of those chappies who strikes up parking-lot friendships in the aftermath of standardized tests, that the testing room was an orgiastic chamber of noise. There were, if you please, pencils scraping like dying elephants, highlighters going off like atomic bombs, and the dying walrus squeals of erasers. The parking lot chappie could not concentrate in consequence. But my babies, my beloved, wailing babies, had proctored me through this particular danger. I noticed nothing. Indeed, it was news to me that anyone had sat next to me at all. I remember squinting at the fellow as if to place him; he might as well have dropped down from the moon. When I leave the House of Babies, which is seldom, the world is enveloped in a singular and melancholy silence, from pole to pole; the kind of lonely silence in which nothing is noticed, and anything can be done. I don't much love this silence, but I intermittently take advantage of it to achieve something or other. The LSAT was one such occasion. I do not yet know how I did, but I experienced it unperturbed, like a nun on Valium. It passed right through me and over me and the only evidence that it is done is the fellow in the parkng lot and the silence of the pencils. I am especially grateful to my babies, who have the odd distinction of having given birth to me (who am their father, further complicating things). I find that, whatever I do and whoever I become, it is become of them and their mother. And, though I am the oldest of any of them, I am always only one day old.

And yesterday I took the LSAT.