UNREASONABLE

The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent.

- BY RIVKA GALCHEN

Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don’t quite work are the glory of the process, a form of inquiry through which you catch sight of your errors and then reconsider, revise, or dispose of your categories. My father’s fairy-tale pronouncement was many years ago now. I have only two daughters: an industrious, loving, and optimistic twenty-one-year-old and a funny, joyful, and resilient ten-year-old. Maybe I have a third daughter: my work.

Or maybe the third daughter is me? It’s been a disorienting time. Are any of us beautiful, kind, or intelligent anymore? I was raised to believe that no human is inherently evil, that evil is a surface disturbance caused by underlying fear (F), misunderstanding (M), or ignorance (I). I’m now reconsidering. Maybe evil is a spiritual substance in and of itself. Not downstream from F, M, or I. Perhaps the mother of them. I am writing this mental note to myself while at our lab meeting, which is long and cookie-less.