"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. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don't quite work are the glory of the process,"
"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."
A person finds calm in the nearness of bees and other agitating things. Childhood memories recall a father who ate watermelon with cheese and labeled his three daughters beautiful, kind, and intelligent. The person now has two daughters and tentatively considers work or self as a third. A belief that evil results from fear, misunderstanding, or ignorance is questioned; evil is reconsidered as potentially a spiritual substance and parent of those conditions. A lab meeting reveals funding cuts, potential dismissal of Ph.D. candidates, frozen projects, and uncertainty for ongoing fieldwork with hundreds of bee boxes.
#bees-and-pollinators #family-and-identity #classification-and-categories #research-funding-and-academic-precarity
Read at The New Yorker
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