One Good Thing
Sam Aurelius Milam III
While I lived at Mere Keep, most of what
I needed was nearby, so I did most of my traveling on Crazy
Horse, or on foot. I had a trailer that I pulled behind Crazy
Horse, for things that wouldn’t fit into a backpack.
One day, I was at a food store, accompanied by a woman who was living
with me at the time. We were loading our groceries into the
trailer, several yards from the store entrance, where we’d locked
our bicycles to the bike rack. While we were loading things,
I saw a woman with two little children hanging onto her skirt walk into the store. The children seemed nervous. As the woman went into the store, she was fumbling with some things that she was
carrying, and she dropped something. It fluttered to the ground behind her, unnoticed. I hurried to the store entrance and saw that it was a $5 bill. I retrieved it and hurried into the store. I walked past the cash registers and into the front aisle. I didn’t see the woman. I turned right, a random choice, and walked along the front aisle, looking to my left, into the other aisles. After about three or four aisles, I saw her. She was standing there, with her two little children still clinging to her skirt. She was shuffling frantically through her purse, and she had a look of pure panic on her face. I walked up to her, held out the $5 bill, and said, “you dropped this.” She looked at me like I was an angel straight from Heaven. I hurried away. I don’t know what ever became of them. I never saw them again. Over the years, I’ve sometimes felt like my efforts as a writer, a teacher, and a philosopher have been futile, but I can console myself with the memory of that woman and her children. I expect that the $5 bill was all that she had with which to buy food for them. So, I get some comfort from the thought that, among the various errors, omissions, and failures of my life, I’ve done at least one good thing.
An Explanation of the Inexplicable
Sam Aurelius Milam III
| Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together. —from De Remedies by Francesco Petrarca |
A young man wants a woman who’s sexy and
beautiful. A young woman wants a man who’s handsome and masculine.
Since reproduction is largely the province of young people,
the propagation of the species has usually been based on the
selection of superficial cosmetic features, as judged by inexperienced youngsters. It’s difficult to imagine how any other virtues could
ever have arisen.| Matrimony has two basic flaws: husbands and wives. —from Watchers of the Dark by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. |
As a man gets older, he learns that it would be better to have a woman who knows how and when to keep her mouth shut. As a woman gets older, she learns that it would be better to have a man who’ll just do what she tells him to do.
Civilized virtues like courtesy and humility become more important. By the time that people are old enough to understand such things, they’ve already chosen their mates for the wrong reasons, and started the next generation, based on the wrong criteria. By then, it’s too late to select for any of the higher virtues. Maybe the only thing that has saved our species from returning to its origins, and rejoining its animal ancestors, is that essentially everybody reproduces. Thus, such higher virtues as have inexplicably arisen are inadvertently passed on to future generations, even though nobody’s selecting for them.| Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here. —A Bumper Sticker |
If our ancestors all selected mates based on appearance, then it’s amazing that we haven’t degenerated into a bunch of beautiful idiots. Oh, wait. Maybe we have.
That would explain a lot of things.| June 2023 | Frontiersman,0c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507 http://frontiersman.org.uk/ | Page 1 |
