“No.”
They start back down the lane. The sun is setting at the end of the street, and the clouds in the western sky have turned gold, orange, bronze, violaceous, burgundy, pewter, and a touch of chartreuse. Walk on my friends walk on: Even if posterity laughs at the silly boxed lives we lead in the late twentieth century, even if we deserve to be laughed at, which we do, there are still these moments of freedom we give ourselves, walking down a lane at sunset with a child babbling on one’s back. “Oops, we left the door open.” Like a Zen master his boy whacks him on the side of the head, and at that moment he experiences an enlightenment or satori: The planet wheels underfoot. The signifier signifies a great significance. And the potatoes are to go in the oven. Happiness makes him light on his feet, very light, so light that he is almost floating, so light that if you tried to quantify this quality, if you could put him on the scale of human feeling and weigh him, his weight (in Terran kilograms) would clock in at exactly 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197…