On babies.

My niece is nearly five months old, and every time I see her (usually every few weeks for a few days) her cognitive capacities are transformed from where they had been. Her body has changed, too: she grows, her legs thicken in preparation for eventual use, she makes new sounds, she sleeps through the night. (I.e. one six-hour stretch in the midst of one-to-two-hour chunks.) But even her bodily developments are in tandem with cognitive leaps and bounds. When my brother says "she's just discovered her legs this week," he means: her legs have come under her more direct and willed control. When she makes sounds that sound responsive, we know she isn't near speech yet, but also that this is how she becomes ready: she moves the muscles of her throat and jaw and tongue and sees what happens, and learns from it. That she has begun the years-long stage of grabbing at things means not that the muscles of her fingers and wrists have developed and not that her bones are stronger -- not mainly -- but that her brain has developed acces to new means of interacting with the outside world.

I won't say as much about the tiny teeth she can feel still perhaps months from breaking through the gum, but most of her development is in coordination and control. Her nerves are still learning to connect her muscles and vessels and organs and brain. She is in the process of what Descartes describes in Meditation Six, the pervasion of body by mind. No wonder that the older philosophers thought the soul had to be infused into the body, watching a small child; only that they believed it could be infused all at once.

On space and spaciousness.

I grew up in Brooklyn and have mostly lived in urban areas, and when I am away I notice how my sense of space has been formed by that experience. In Chicago and Toronto the streets seem impossibly broad, there are no tall buildings in Paris, any place not on the water feels lonely and stranded. I don't know how to look at a field; they all look the same to me, though trees and flowers don't. I hate the way farm animals smell and the centralized planning (via zoning laws, community boards, and community pressures) of practically every American suburb.

I have lived in smallish towns of ~20,000-30,000 and found them more congenial: a small walkable area, streets and structures grown up haphazardly, reflecting their centuries; quiet spaces discovered only by the diligent; people of different ages passing and mingling on the streets; real neighborhoods, different in feel from block to block; and much else that is inaccessible but impressive. Distinctly, an overall devotion to pleasant liveability -- by my parochial urbanite's standards, anyway.

These towns (college towns, I should note) have accepted the principle of organized space and spontaneous growth. That is the city principle -- the suburbs are arranged so as to ignore unintended consequences, but cities live and die on the unintended, the planners outwitted by time. When I say that cities grow spontaneously I of course do not mean that they have wills of their own, but that order simply can't be imposed thoroughly for long on such a large number of people and such a large number of groups of people. You can't control all of the changes all of the time.

So the spontaneity of urban growth after all has something of freedom in it. Like weeds bursting through the cracks in a sidewalk the citizens reshape what was given to them.

On being upper-middle class.

H's starting salary next year will be more than either of his parents ever made in a single year over the course of their careers. Another friend tells me the same is true of her and her mother. (All of the parents in question are public school teachers, both the young ones college professors.) We may almost feel rich, until next we stop by New York City.

Of course, we've spent much of our twenties poorish -- I mean cash-poor but with middle-class banking and saving habits and middle-class expectations -- but now we can finally catch up to the people who finished law school three years ago or med school a bit later. I'm kidding.

On privacy as power.

Rather, on the power that comes with publicly unquestioned presumption of privacy.

When I was small I hated to put on a coat. I hated to do things because others asked it of me, and I was not cold, and I was proud, very proud of my resistance, in the manner of a republican Roman -- Catiline who subjected himself to cold and hunger to train himself in case he should be subjected to cold and hunger, Scaevola ("Lefty") who acquired the name after having plunged his right hand into a fire just to show (off to) his barbarian captor that he could not be pressured. I was not quite that -- I did not harm myself for the sake of showing that harm meant nothing to me, or my body -- but I was closer than I now think right: I would not put on a coat when I felt cold because they (not my parents, others) would have me put it on even when I was not cold. That is perversity, and I appreciate that my parents let me work through it for myself.

Others were not so inclined. For instance the strangers who said: "Excuse me! Do you know that your daughter is not wearing a coat!" as if my father had not been holding my hand. I learned from this how easy it is to forfeit the presumption of privacy.

Violation of norms of etiquette -- though not of moral norms per se -- constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence: "your child is screaming." "Did you dye your hair that color on purpose?" "What happened to your tights?" "Is that a man or a woman?"

Being with child or with a child constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence: "Can I touch your stomach?" "Can I see your stomach?" "Your child is screaming." "I don't know why some people let their children leave the house looking like that."

Being beautiful constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy; or being with someone beautiful. Hence: a man rolling down his automobile window to shout at my sister, approvingly and mockingly, "Yeah! White is right!" (!) A driver telling my other sister in Arabic that she is a camel (jimal), to her great puzzlement; and when she tries to extricate herself with a pun -- "not jimal but jamila, beautiful" -- responding: "Yes, you are very jamila"; and later resuming the subject with her to assure her that he had called her jimal qua "a very beautiful animal." (But this was in Jordan.)

Sometimes just being a woman is enough or sometimes just being with a woman; and often enough just being out with someone of the same sex in a possibly romantic context. Hence: walking down Spring Street one summer day I have been whistled at by not one nor two but a whole group of sailors together. And: standing with me on a street corner late one Saturday evening after a movie, a friend was accosted by an approving shout from a light-stopped car of "Yeah! Take that ----- home, bag her, and ---- the ---- out of her." Really. (Yes. Really.) And: no one needs my help to come up with instances of people harassed for the appearance of less than fully heterosexual romantic activity or inclinations.

Being fat constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence: "Hey, big guy." "I have a terrible sweet tooth, and -- oh, well I'm sure I don't need to tell you!" And -- remarkably -- in the souk in Marrakech, a man managed to combine this with several of the above by bodily poking h in the stomach and declaring: "Couscous! Tagine!" and then looking over at my ashen face and adding (in English): "She is so beautiful, but she never smiles!"

Being exceptionally small or exceptionally tall constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence the awkward caught-gawking "....how tall are you?", hence the "Sorry ... I've just never seen someone that size," even "Are you a midget?" and "I bet you're really good at basketball." Other unusual bodily features, too: "Where'd you get that scar?" "Can I sign your cast?" "Are those real?"

We don't decide to harass other people -- well, not in all of these cases -- but because we see them as different, or as natural wards of the state, or as our natural inferiors, we have to teach ourselves to respect their privacy -- since we are not taught so from the beginning.

On irrational feelings of warmth towards the academic job market.

Oh, I still know how cruel and arbitrary you are, abstracted apostrophized Job Market. Don't think I've forgotten. Still, for the moment, I forgive you.

On victory.

This doesn't bring anyone back, and I don't know that it directly prevents any harm or death. But for the discouragement to those who would ruin themselves and harm others in pursuit of error, and for the hope brought to those who would bring change of a better sort, I rejoice.

Nevertheless. If I can spill drops of wine at the Passover seder in regret over the death of Pharaoh's armies chasing my fleeing ancestors, I should be able to mourn the necessity of Osama bin Laden's death, even if not the death itself. I have not yet taught myself to shed a tear for the death of the wicked as of the righteous; but God's midrashic rebuke to the angels celebrating at the Red Sea is with me today: "My creatures suffer, and you rejoice?"