3

“Order in the court! Order in the court!”

Stifled hubbub. Papers shuffled. Muffled grousing.

I am in the witness box, seated in a large chair between low walls of ornately carved wood, a spot of grandeur in this mostly austere—but large, packed, a seemingly random assembly of anonymous onlookers—municipal courtroom. Slightly to my right, a line of old men stare at me from the far side of a similarly ornate wooden table. Their expressions are dour, their faces ancient, sunken, like portraits on loan from the attic of Dorian Gray. Now and then, one of them wheezes out some fusty rule or rotten intellection, poisoning the air with the rarified mouth-stench unique to this species, the smugly entrenched academic.

Am I really going to go here? Just because certain personal realities are very powerful and keep resurfacing as you lie motionless in the dark, and take over your imagination and fill it with thoughts you would rather not think, that doesn’t mean you have to think those thoughts, or are entirely powerless to avoid them.

You are not entirely powerless.

But mostly, yes, you are powerless.

“Am I to understand”—Keynes, now dressed in British tweed, stands casually but with poise in the carpeted space between my box and their table—“that these gentlemen seated before you, whom until recently you counted as colleagues, and who in theory, if not in practice, counted you the same, that this grumbling line of bitter visages not only voted against your tenure application at the department level, effectively ensuring your dismissal from the university and instantly transforming you into the academic equivalent of ‘damaged goods,’ such that finding a position elsewhere will be ten times harder than if you’d never taken that job in the first place, in effect sending you and your family into the proverbial street—not, of course, in the way that people less fortunate than you get sent into the actual street, which is a lot of people, around the world and in your own community, so many people in situations so much worse than yours that anyone with a conscience, finding themselves in your position, would probably feel ashamed for worrying about themselves or ever complaining about anything—except that it’s scary, yes. You’re allowed to feel scared. All those years of work only to find yourself stranded without career or plans or prospects— Am I to understand,” Keynes collects himself, “that these men not only denied you tenure, but that you actually believe they never intended to support you in the first place?”

That is correct.

Gasps!

This isn’t even what a real courtroom is like.

“And what evidence can you cite to support this claim?”

Well, everything, right? The way they looked down at me, the way they spoke down to me, when they spoke to me, their wildly inappropriate comments on my appearance—What happened to you? being easily the most memorable, since I didn’t even know what that referred to, and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what was wrong with my hair or outfit. Or the litany of nasty looks the one time I wore gym clothes in the department office. I wasn’t even teaching that day, just making copies, if there wasn’t always such a line for the copy machine, I wouldn’t have had to squeeze it in. Not to mention all the meetings and student gatherings the older faculty skipped. All the grad students I had to advise, which is extra work I was not supposed to be given, but the students asked for me, they specifically requested me, not that I blame them, the students like me and I like them, teaching I like, working with students, a fact my colleagues were more than happy to exploit, knowing of course that all that extra work would count for nothing, tenure-wise. All the interstitial extras that never counted for anything, tenure-wise. How they turned every day into a test. How any time I would successfully fulfill some expectation, they would add others on top of it, like a boss who can’t even keep track of all the meaningless crap he’s asked you to do. How they kept upping the expectations and darkening the forecast, so that the more I did, and the further I advanced, the less likely it seemed that I would ever arrive.

“They pushed, pushed, pushed,” offers Keynes, “while at the same time they discouraged, they condescended, they picked apart.”

Which for the longest time I convinced myself was a sort of tough love, you know? As if secretly they were just trying to make me stronger, my CV more ironclad. For the longest time I held on to this illusion, maybe because Ed kept telling me that had to be it, that there was no way they were actually this horrible, because why would they hire me and start me on the tenure track in the first place if they only wanted me to fail? And I said, No, it’s only because Maggie was there and she was looking out for me. She was the one who got me the job, but then she left. She pulled me in the door on her way out. But Ed countered that one person alone can’t get you a job, not in academia anyway. Academia is all about committees. It’s where committees go to die, or where people go to die in committee. And I said, Maybe, okay, but what if Maggie cashed in her chips? Over the course of her career she’d put up with so much from them, the only woman in an all-male department. She’d accumulated so many chips on her shoulder, and they knew it. They knew her shoulder was stacked with chips and they knew what they had done to put them there. Maybe the chips on Maggie’s shoulder were stacked in my favor? Even back then I understood this. Even back then I said this to Ed. Her last act as an academic was to muscle me in, then she packed up and moved to New Zealand. Mic drop. I was Maggie’s Obamacare. Disgruntled incumbents started dismantling me the minute she was out the door.

But Ed couldn’t get his head around that, so I couldn’t really get my head around it either. That people could actually be that way, not just in government but in actual life. We couldn’t believe anyone would want to devote such purely destructive energy to . . . well, anything. That even with the discourse having shifted and despite whatever progress has been made, in an academic culture of heightened awareness and accountability, of student demonstrations, rescinded invitations, and faculty diversity training, at the end of the day, it’s still just angry old men marking their territory. We were sheep, you see, trusting sheep. Is that why Trump became president? Because people like Ed and me were raised to be sheep?

“Or because people like them were raised to be wolves,” offers Keynes, indicating my ex-colleagues, who make aghast faces but basically just have to sit there and take it, because this is my imagination, assholes.

You know what being on the tenure track was like, Keynes? I had this realization the other day. Being on the tenure track was like having Obama for president. There were global terrors and political unrest and social injustice, the world was its usual mess, and worse underneath than anyone realized—but it still felt like we were working toward something. Toward safety, and open-mindedness, and security. And that’s tenure: the job you love that’s yours forever, the stability and freedom from worry that allows you to think creatively, to challenge the status quo, to embrace the utopic potential of the imagination to fundamentally rethink economics, or political science, or the shape of human society, or whatever. And Obama was the promise of that for everybody. I mean, he wasn’t, of course, not really, but at the time, just having Obama there felt like its own sort of security blanket. Tenure for everybody! A safe and healthy future for everybody! Whereas being denied tenure was Trump. Suddenly we’re out on our butts. I’m out on my butt. The world of security and possibility falls away and we’re plunged into a new Dark Ages where nothing is stable, nothing is good, where anything good we may have put into the world up to this moment is now meaningless, pointless, gone. Where the imagination, wellspring of optimism and possibility, has turned on itself, and now spends all its time obsessing and making everything worse.

“So you jumped all the hurdles,” Keynes brings us back. “You sat on all those committees, served as academic advisor to a small army of undergraduates, as faculty advisor for student organizations no one else wanted to advise. You went to lectures your colleagues skipped, attended the poorly attended parties. God help you, you schmoozed. Most importantly of all, the only thing that academia truly seems to care about: you published! For three years you churned out peer-reviewed articles at the expected rate of one per year in Tier 2 journals whose impact factors were within the acceptable range, after which something happened that took your work in a different direction, it’s true, but even then, you were still publishing. Your impact on the culture was probably greater, if perhaps not as easily ‘measured,’ as readily ‘factored.’ Yes, in the race to ‘publish or perish!,’ you published. Then, somehow, also perished. Can you tell the court, in your own words, what went wrong?”

I can and most certainly will.

Stirrings in the gallery. Pens at the ready. This is the part we’ve been waiting for.

Ours is an American tale, a story of random success and hard-won failure. The riches-to-rags journey of a humble idea that became an online article, that became a surprise sensation, that became an editor’s interest, that became a manuscript, that became a book. A book that was published and went out into the world, where it was met by silence. Crickets. The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all, said Joan Robinson, and I suspect this was what she meant. She meant the only thing worse than critics are crickets, while the only thing worse than crickets, which I suppose by the transitive property would also be worse than critics, is my tenure committee, which was where our humble idea, having traveled such distances, finally arrived and was bludgeoned to death.

The idea was about John Maynard Keynes, or at least it started that way. I wanted to compare two Keyneses: the creative improvisational human he was in life and the institutional symbol of unchecked governmental expenditure that history has made of him. I wanted to talk about the problem of translation, how an idea clear in concept never remains so in practice, how social and economic forces remake ideas in their own image, how it’s not just capitalism that does this, it’s any system at all, and how Keynes and his ideas were a poignant example precisely because, even though he was in his own way radically optimistic, he wasn’t some dippy idealist. He was deeply pragmatic. He devoted the greatest part of his energy to solving actual problems in the world.

“This was a scholarly article?”

Well, that’s the thing.

I was three years into my tenure clock, Ali was five, and I hit a patch, or stumbled into a rut, or something. I was full of feelings. Exhaustion, for one, the accumulated exhaustion of early motherhood, watching that first stage of motherhood end and experiencing already how quickly it goes, how soon it’s all over. Plus anxiety about tenure, the pressures of chasing an academic career amidst growing doubts that I even wanted one. Sick of all the hoops. Worried about how much of myself I was losing. In that fraught moment, I wrote an essay more personal than a scholar would typically write, but I didn’t care, I didn’t second-guess it, because I didn’t think anyone was paying attention or ever would. It was ostensibly about Keynes, but as I wrote, it became more about myself, about what I have always found interesting in Keynes, and how those things have tended not to be what history or society has found interesting about him. Which then led me, in the article, to consider what that says about me and the field I’ve chosen, or about my relationship to the world I come from, my innate antagonism toward the culture’s way of seeing things, which is weird because of course this is the same culture that made me what I am. What does it say about a culture that it churns out citizens full of antagonism toward itself? It says, “freedom of thought,” of course, but it also says a lot of other things. This was before Trump, back when people could still write on topics other than Trump. I wrote about myself and the culture, about being a part of society versus standing apart from it, how skepticism is not indifference but its opposite, Burke’s comic corrective, Baldwin’s being alone, a bunch of other stuff. I went wherever my brain took me, then sort of flimsily looped it back to what the culture’s done to Keynes, as if I’d planned that all along. I mean, if I had to say what the article was actually about—which I did, when the editor who published it didn’t like my title and asked for other suggestions—it was finally about optimism. Optimism as a form of antagonism. Thinking as a model for living. In truth, it wasn’t a very good article. Or maybe it was: I go back and forth about it. The online magazine that published it was popular but not peer-reviewed, so I knew it wouldn’t count for much, career-wise. But so what. My academic work was ahead of schedule. I would get back to my professionally sanctioned Tier 2 scholarship soon enough. In the meantime, I would publish this, whatever it was. It would go online, I’d send the link to a few old grad school friends, and that would be it.

“What you did not know,” here Keynes steps in, “what you never would have guessed—because how could you?—was that this messy little heartfelt essay would go ‘viral,’ in the way online articles occasionally do for no apparent reason. Not cat-video viral, but viral enough that an editor at a mid-sized university press contacted you. They were launching a series of small non-specialist books, written by scholars but for non-scholarly readers, and he asked if you wanted to turn your article into a book for his series. That must have felt validating.”

Very.

“After all, you had not always followed the prescribed path. Since undergrad and particularly through grad school, you prided yourself on your renegade inclinations; not only were you a feminist economist but, in your polymathic interests, your tendency to look outside the accepted sources and topics, your refusal to stay within the intellectual confines of the discipline or to wed yourself to the cult of metrics, you had positioned yourself as an outsider in other ways as well. You had taken the road less traveled, and while chasing after tenure had forced you to compromise some of that renegade energy, had threatened to normalize your spirit in ways that worried you, here, by a twist of fate, you had the chance to prove to yourself that you were, in fact, the person you’d always planned and hoped to be. You would write a book. You would put yourself, your thoughts, into the world in the form of a professionally printed, purchasable, publicly available book. You would frame it as a response to one of your favorite essays, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,’ then would incorporate the rest of your ideas from there. It would flow out of you easily, just as the article had flowed, like blood from an open vein. It would take . . . six months? Six months at the very most. Hardly a hiccup in the tenure schedule. But it did not take six months.”

No.

“In fact, you struggled quite a lot, trying to turn that article into a book.”

Yes.

“We needn’t go into all the reasons—”

No.

“—since the point is that you finished it. Despite the challenge of raising a child and dealing with an unsupportive department, and despite the various creative and emotional stumbling blocks you met with along the way, you did finish and publish your book within the allotted timeframe of your tenure clock, even if it meant you were unable to write and publish additional peer-reviewed articles during that time.”

Keynes stops. He steps to the table on my left, the prosecution’s table, and takes a drink from a water glass set there. He has a settled expression, though it’s unclear whether he is allowing the story-so-far to sink in or is mentally gathering himself for revelations yet to come.

Ed said: Maybe we won’t have to move? But how could we possibly stay? Those that don’t know how to be pros get evicted. Said Queen Latifah. It’s not just a question of money, though his adjunct salary is not going to cut it. It’s that one way or another, one or the other of us is going to have to find a new job, a raise-a-family sort of job, a position, which means either becoming something new, launching into some entirely different profession, preferably one that pays well and requires no particular skills or enthusiasm, or else—at best—means lingering on as a less impressive version of the academic outlier I already am, but in a new town, a new life, a situation much less promising. A position with no future, at a school no one’s heard of, with a teaching load twice as large. A one-way dead-end move to a town with nothing for Ed to do and far fewer opportunities for Ali. No history museums or art galleries or science centers, just weedy soccer fields out past the public pool. Just a Cineplex with twelve screens showing the same three movies, a strip of fast-food drive-thrus and car dealerships, and a high school that looks like it was designed in the 1960s by a notorious architect of prisons. The town’s population will be almost entirely white, with a range of business-conservative, rural-conservative, and suburban-liberal values, but with zero interest in activism or public debate. A deeply homogenous town. A willfully insular town. Worst of all, there will be nothing to suggest to a curious promising young person like Ali that the world outside might be more interesting or varied or in any way different from the town itself. It will be exactly like where I grew up.

But now Keynes’s expression has grown more intent, with a simmering glint in his eye. What is he up to? He puts down the water glass and picks up another object, a sad small item that lay unnoticed on the table this whole time. He holds it up for all to see. It is my book.

“Was it the perfect book she had imagined in her head when she first set out to write it? Of course not. No real book ever manages to live up to the original vision in one’s head. Was it a reasonable approximation of the groundbreaking work she’d hoped she would someday write? Perhaps not that either. But was it tenure-able? That is all that matters here today, and the answer,” announces Keynes, “is, unequivocally, yes.”

“Perhaps not in itself,” he qualifies, “no one is saying this book was tenurable in itself, but in combination with her considerable scholarly portfolio? I submit exhibit A,” he swings my book toward the audience, toward the judge, toward my colleagues, “which is also exhibits B, C, D, all the way to Z. I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that by any metric that gives weight to creativity and curiosity, to the actual work of the mind as opposed to mere mindless adherence to university tenure guidelines, the answer is, irrefutably, yes! And since my client had already, prior to embarking upon this book, quite sufficiently demonstrated her ability to churn out Tier 2 academic papers on a schedule, therefore the only reasonable response by her tenure committee to her ambition to go beyond those papers and those guidelines would be unqualified enthusiasm and support. Is that how the book was received by your colleagues, with unqualified enthusiasm and support?”

Obviously not.

“But the question is why!” Keynes shouts, suddenly slamming the book to the table, surprising everyone.

“Because there were so few reviews? Surely that is the fault of the publisher as much as the author. Because you were writing on original subjects in an original way? It’s no secret that the academy has a vexed relationship with novelty, always preferring to re-tread existing critical paths rather than blaze new ones. But the real reason, ladies and gentlemen, or at least the only specific reason given by the committee chair—and then only after my client had cornered him in the hallway and made him feel extremely uncomfortable—was the letters! The outside assessments.”

Instantly, a burst of objections from the defendants.

“Oh, I know we are not supposed to talk about those,” Keynes shouts over the objections, “those are supposed to be held confidential, and it’s true that I do not have copies to submit as evidence here today! But it was cited, Your Honor. It was the only tangible item clearly if unofficially named by the defendants in denying the plaintiff tenure, and it raises a very interesting question, a terribly important question for us and for academics everywhere: Should one negative letter be grounds for derailing a career? Not even a whole letter, it took just a single word, a seemingly judicious but in truth insidious word, a word whose menace hides behind lilting iambs and calming soft vowels, but that nonetheless pummels the heart every time it is uttered. Derivative.”

God, I hate that word.

“Derivative!”

There’s no need to repeat it.

“The absurd thing, of course, being that my client had not even known of Deirdre McCloskey’s work until after she’d published that original article, had you?”

It wasn’t an area I’d been working on, no.

“Not until long after you’d developed your own thoughts along similar though not at all identical lines. You hadn’t even heard of Professor McCloskey, let alone ‘fallen into’ her ‘camp,’ let alone ‘leaned too heavily upon’ her ‘position,’ as the confidential assessment unavailable here for evidence purportedly claims. And while of course you did subsequently read Professor McCloskey’s work on the rhetoric of economics, since it would have been entirely irresponsible not to, and while you admit it did seem somewhat remarkable that you both had come to a number of overlapping conclusions, and while you further admit finding her work useful, though no more useful than the work of many other unconventional economists, and in fact you ended up feeling that Professor McCloskey might have been more useful had you encountered her earlier, that by the time you came to her work you’d already read too much—you’d read Wayne Booth, for example, and couldn’t help feeling that Professor McCloskey had effectively taken Booth’s literary and ethical arguments and applied them to economics, which: big deal! I mean, yes, obviously the work Professor McCloskey has done is a big deal, her long career has been marked by brilliant achievements, but in terms of your intellectual overlap, did it not basically boil down to the fact that you’d both read Wayne Booth? Not exactly a ‘camp’! She’s not even a Keynesian, your economics are totally different, it’s just that you’re both interested in these other things, these conceptual things, and you both believe that conceptual things matter. But your ideas push beyond economics and rhetoric. Your argument is that, in its finest expressions, in its potential, economics is also utopian, which is not the same ‘camp,’ it is not even in the same state, you would have to drive for hours to get from one camp to the other. It is just totally, completely a different argument.

“Which means the writer of that letter, the de-recommender, whose words were used to sink your career, clearly did not read your work closely enough. In fact, knowing, as we do, since it is the general practice in the tenure process, that this letter would have been solicited by the very same group seated here before you, that the de-recommender would have been handpicked by them as someone who shared their views and their values, their smugness, their prejudice, is there not every reason to believe that he—and I think we can all agree that Mr. Derivative was undoubtedly a ‘he’—that he did not bother to read your book at all? He dipped. He skimmed. He drew assumptions from the jacket copy.

“We contend, therefore, Your Honor, that this highly secretive letter, the only reason ever specifically mentioned for refusing to advance the plaintiff’s tenure application beyond the department level, was in fact nothing but a pretense. An excuse, a tawdry effort by the plaintiff’s embittered colleagues to dress up their prejudice as rational assessment, to cheat the plaintiff of the position she had rightfully earned and deserved, but which they never, not for a single moment, intended to award!”

Cheers flood the court room. The audience now on its feet, the defendants’ cries of outrage drowned out by the jubilant yawps of justice finally served, truth at last exposed, the arrival of a long-awaited reckoning. Balloons drop from the ceiling. Streamers stream in from someplace. The judge gavels and gavels to rein it all in.

No gavels, no cheering. No streamers.

Silence.

Silence?

John Cage says there’s no such thing as long as you’re alive.

It’s like one person with a low voice humming very softly while someone else with a much higher voice makes tiny chittering noises, like a squirrel, or like a cat watching a squirrel out the window. And then, every twenty seconds or so, a third person crinkles tinfoil. A complicated sound. A complex of pitches and timbres that you hardly ever pay attention to. You think “air conditioner” and leave it at that.

Tonight, you hear it. You are the only one who does. You bear witness to the complexity of this sound that nobody ever notices, not really, and that nobody else, at this particular moment, even hears.

The world is filled with such sounds. Every second of every day, almost every sound in the world goes unnoticed. You could spend years in a state of perfect attention and still catch only a meaninglessly small percentage. You could devote your entire life to studying the world’s neglected noises and in the end you would have made, at most, an embarrassingly minor contribution to the field.

“Cross-examination!”

We’re back.

“Your position, if I may restate it for the record, is that you are entirely the victim in this situation? That all of the events that transpired in the process leading up to the denial of your tenure application were orchestrated to bring about your demise? That the process was rigged, utterly beyond your control? That you are personally responsible for precisely none of it?”

It’s still Keynes, though now he has put on a black robe and a curly white barrister wig. I have a bad feeling about this.

“That you are personally not bound by your institution’s metrics and expectations for tenure, for example, simply because you find them archaic? That you are not fully aware that tenure assessments are at the discretion of the tenured faculty and require no explanation at all? Or that in embarking upon an unsanctioned book project, you were taking obvious risks with both your publication record and your time? That you hold no responsibility for the quality or the critical reception of that book? That you in no way allowed your own conflicted feelings about what sort of book it ought to be clutter the clarity of the book’s argument? That you were perhaps not actually ready to write that book, which, unlike the scholarly articles you’d written, forced you to manufacture a more personal speaker, a ‘self’ in language, that would represent you, yourself, to the world? That you never managed to regain, in writing that book, the earnest confidence of the original article, from back when you thought your audience was only a few friends and you didn’t constantly second-guess your rhetorical ‘pose’? That for too long you’d held in your head many self-romanticizing notions about your position as an outsider, notions that allowed you to feel sure of yourself and important to yourself as long as you were never forced to share them—the notions—with anyone else? That as long as you didn’t share this side of yourself with anyone else, it was all unadulterated potential, never forced to perform, never exposed to judgment. That some glimmer of this ‘self’ had materialized long enough to write that article but this self was not really you, it didn’t sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them. You are capable of being many selves but the moment you commit to one, it becomes an imposter, a dummy to dress up and roll out into the world in your place. And you hate the dummy, hate everything it says, even though it only says what you give it to say, and even though the words you give it to say are the best you can come up with. Which means, must mean, that the fault is not with the dummy but with you. That you are not as brilliant as you’ve always wanted to believe. As you’ve needed to believe. That it is easy to be impressed with yourself in private but another thing entirely to project a public self into the world—that this is a skill they don’t teach in school, yet so so so many people seem to have learned it. How did all these people, effortless at parties, easy on social media, how did they learn to be public? There must have been a moment, an afternoon in elementary school, when an imposing gray eminence showed up to class and passed out everyone’s public personas while you were in the bathroom. And here you are decades later still forced to pretend you’d been in class that day, that like everyone else you received your persona, that you’ve displayed it proudly on your wall ever since. Perhaps the real revelation today is not that these men seated before you wanted you to fail, even if that is obviously the case. Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you’d managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you’d always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused. The person who puts herself out there is always the accused. How did this never occur to you? No doubt it occurred to a part of you, the part that kept putting it off. No doubt that’s why you postponed the trial as long as possible, preferring instead to live in a juvenile state of perpetual expectation, not because of the part that assumed you would someday be amazing, but because of the part that knew you would end up here, and what now? Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there’s no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests, and if everyone else seems unfazed by this, the endlessness of everything, that isn’t because they live any less in the midst or on the spot or under the gun but because they manage it better than you do, or at least they are better at hiding it. You’re better at hiding than at hiding it, better at avoiding than bearing it, better at hoping it will all go away if you lie still eyes closed hands clenched hands clenched breathe—

Breathe.

Breathe.

Okay.

Well, that was awful.

“Yes, sorry about that.”

I thought you were my lawyer, Keynes.

“Your lawyer, your confidante, your companion on this long night’s journey through the house inside your head. But actually, as you know perfectly well, I am just your imagination. Anything I ask, you are asking yourself.”

That’s even worse.

“Is it? It means you are not really on trial. No one in reality is blaming you for anything. Your family is not blaming you. I, who am dead, am certainly not blaming you. And disappointing as it may be, even your colleagues are no longer thinking about you at all. Only you are blaming you. Only you are questioning your legitimacy, placing yourself in this witness box ostensibly to tell your side of things, to grant yourself justice, if only in your mind. The trouble being that it’s here, in your imagination, the place where you ought to feel most safe and free, that you are in fact most weighed down by doubt and fear. Part of you clearly thinks they are right about you, even though they can’t be, they have to be wrong or else your life’s work is pointless, and that is a level of personal negation you cannot possibly survive. No, there’s no room for that, no good it would do. Yet it’s precisely this fear that leads your imagination to turn your very real problems into this comic inquest, this vaudeville legal proceeding, a chance to slapstick the bad guys while pretending none of it matters very much.”

So that’s where this court scene came from.

“As a matter of fact, I think it came from children’s books. Earlier you were thinking about Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows. They both have courtroom scenes.”

That’s true. I wonder why.

“Perhaps because courtrooms in reality are so adult and boring and horrible, the place where all the worst things end up. The messiness of life organized into categories and assigned consequences. Perhaps it’s fear of messiness that leads adults to courtrooms in the first place. Perhaps it’s fear of consequences that causes children to enjoy being silly about them in books. Do you suppose you are more like an adult or a child, in this respect?”

I don’t even know what I am talking about.