katherine fellows

A North Korean maritime official was on a boat on the Yellow Sea in the mid-1990s when the radio accidentally picked up a South Korean broadcast. The program was a situation comedy that featured two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex. He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. Although he was in his late thirties and fairly high-ranking, he had never known anyone who owned a private car—and certainly not young women. He assumed the radio program was a parody, but after a few days of mulling it over, it struck him that yes, there must be that many cars in South Korea. He defected a few years later.

‘I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of ny unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.’

Finally, he said, ‘I could look at this all day, but we should go back to the hotel.’ ‘Do we have time?’ I asked. He smiled sadly. ‘If only,’ he said.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Without a knowledge formation in younger years, adults function as more or less partial citizens. Reading and knowledge have to enter their leisure lives, at their own initiative. Analyzing Pew Research data from 2002 and 2004, political scientists Stephen and Linda Bennett lay out the simple fact: ‘People who read books for pleasure are more likely than non-readers to report voting, being registered to vote, “always” voting, to pay greater attention to news stories about national, international, and local politics, and to be better informed.’

Writing at a time when divorce was permitted only in cases of adultery, he took the radical position of emphasizing spiritual compatibility. If a man and woman did not get along, Milton argued, then their relationship undermined God’s reason for creating matrimony. A marriage between two incompatible people was not, according to Milton, a marriage at all.

[T]his division of basic facts from higher-order thinking runs against common sense. How middle schoolers may apprehend “historical thinking” without learning about Napoleon, the Renaissance, slavery… in a word, without delving into the factual details of another time and place far from their own, is a mystery. Newpaper reporters realize better than professors the simple truth. If you don’t know which rights are enumerated in the First Amendment, you can’t do very much ‘critical thinking’ about rights in the United States. If you don’t know which countries border Israel, you can’t ascertain the grounds of the Middle East conflict. Such facts are not an end in themselves, to be sure, but they are an indispensable starting point for deeper insight, and the ignorance of them is a fair gauge of deeper deficiencies.

Think of how many things you must do in order not to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school—history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy, and art history. You must care nothing about the current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News, network news, or NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. No books on the Cold War or the Founding, no biographies, nothing on Bush or Hillary, terrorism or religion, Europe or the Middle East. No political activity and no community activism. And your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange.

The soul you thought you left is not despondent or bereft; it’s only just begun. And, before it can stand, it has to learn to run.

Did you know that the word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek for ‘wound’? And, what is the German word for ‘dream’? ‘Traum.’ ‘Ein traum.’ Wounds can create monsters, and you—you are wounded, Marshal. And, wouldn’t you agree, when you see a monster, you must stop it?

The sky has made it back to blue. Everything that’s left is telling us the worst of it is through. Home has never felt so right; there’s nothing in the way. There’s nothing in-between us, knowing where we’re going is in sight.

You are not responsible for why. You know it in the morning and it’s gone by the night. It comes to you in sleep, but less and less each week, like a language you forget the more you write.

We learn how to kiss watching movies, we learn how to lie, how to fight, we learn how to break up—all the things we used to learn by observing each other, we now learn by observing a few highly paid stars. We can’t help but compare the lives we lead to the fictional lives we consume. We’re encouraged to live vicariously through the impossibly exciting lives of fictional characters.

What the moaners and groaners at the Republican National Convention, Fox News, and on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal refuse to accept is that freedom isn’t a one-way street. It’s not even a two-way street. Freedom is space, weightlessness, room to maneuver, to go your own way. It’s people blasting off in all directions. We should agree to disagree about certain things like say, drug use or premarital sex, and, when necessary, establish reasonable rules to prevent people from slamming into each other—such as laws against assault, rape, and murder, laws that set an age of consent for sexual activity, laws against drinking and driving. Beyond these simple rules, however, the freedom to pursue happiness must be regarded just as Thomas Jefferson described it—an inalienable right, God-given—or all our rhetoric about freedom is meaningless.

Like a person in limbo, I’m a man in progress. I’m another guy involved in all the things that I think I want, but right now, I could use it—right now, I won’t abuse it. Right now, I could use a confidant.

Ironically, the same conservatives who today argue that children raised by lesbian or gay couples will be confused about gender are the ones who argued most loudly in the 1970s—and, again, were 100 percent correct—that gender was innate. You would think these same conservatives would be confident that the innate sense of gender identity that thwarted a generation of feminist moms and sensitive dads would overcome whatever confusion a child raised by same-sex parents might have about his gender. But, no, Conservatives insist that a boy given a doll by his feminist parents will rip its legs off and point them at people and say “Bang!”, but a grown man raised by two gay men won’t know what to do with a grown woman’s actual legs.

My mom had sent four bibs. Two were a boxed set of matching “I Love Grandma” and “I Love Grandpa” bibs. The other two bibs were also from boxed sets. My mom had bought two boxed sets, opened them, pulled out one bib from each, and packaged them back up. There was a note: ‘I wanted to send you a matching set of “I Love Daddy” bibs to go with the grandma and grandpa bibs (which I expect my grandson to wear at every meal!), but there weren’t any “I Love Daddy” sets. So I had to make one.’