Words&Dirt

“‘My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone,’ Daniel finally says.  ‘To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse.  He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666––Number of the Beast and all that.  I was, therefore, produced in 1646––as always, Drake’s timing was carefully thought out.  When I came of age, I would be a man of the cloth, with the full university education, well versed in many dead classical languages, so that I could stand on the Cliffs of Dover and personally welcome Jesus Christ back to England in fluent Aramaic.  Sometimes I look about myself––’ he waves his arm at the tavern ‘––and see the way it turned out, and wonder whether my father could have been any more wrong.’

‘I think this is a good place for you,’ Enoch says.  ‘Nothing here is going according to plan.  The music.  The furniture.  It’s all contrary to expectations.'”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 42

“Why am I here?  What am I supposed to be doing with my life?  Who am I, anyway?  In short, what’s this whole human drama all about?

In addition to these grand issues about the nature of reality and our human quest for meaningful lives, there were very concrete and specific moral concerns.  For example, there was the profound and pressing question of the ‘three zones.’  You know what I am talking about.  Zone 1 was from the neck up.  Zone 2 went from the shoulders down to the navel.  And then there was zone 3––a zone about which young people showed remarkable ignorance, moral uncertainty, and a nearly manic obsession.  Good Heartland Christians were not even supposed to think about, much less talk about, zone 3, which meant that it therefore occupied a large portion of the average teenager’s interest.  This was back in the mid-1960s, before the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1968, at a time when the zones were pretty serious business.  It is easy to forget how uptight about sexuality we were back then––women wore girdles, people weren’t supposed to talk about sex, Roe v. Wade had not yet been enacted and so abortion was illegal, and Playboy and the lingerie and undergarment sections of the Sears Roebuck catalogue were prime sources of young men’s sexual (mis)understandings and fantasies.

Pretty much everyone thought you could kiss all you wanted––go all out in zone 1, although even then there were often qualms about kissing versus “French” kissing.  Some people thought zone 2 was more iffy.  But why, I wondered.  What’s the moral difference between copping a good feel (zone 2 action) and kissing someone (zone 1 action) with one of those kisses that went on for who knows how long and steamed up the car windows and left you with a sore tongue the next morning?”

––Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson, pg. 7-8