The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

of Babel and its chief architect, making his rounds among the divergent tongues, correcting misunderstandings, forging cooperation. Absorbing all differences into himself, he makes his personhood a site of conflicting views and hostile lifestyles, and by filling himself up with “humanity”—chaos of irresolvable components—negates himself. The cosmopolitan mind ambles from downtown through Chinatown in an unblinking blur. The juxtaposition is so glaring he doesn’t realize the mist of discord rising through the vents. The mixing of restaurant-cultures leaves out the obvious. He is lost in a surface of subtlety, distinguishing flavors and staring into his swirling wine glass for proof of quality. Dichotomy—that sense of incompatibility which can only be properly grasped by the country gentleman—is lost in favor of trade name variety. Under the monopoly of difference, deviation bears the same manner everywhere.

      Reverence for a Nice Story

      The most celebrated lie of our age is that we can all be birds of many feathers. This Huma bird that is all birds, this mythological Persian tale, can only be perpetuated by flying unseen high above the earth. When it alights the bird of paradise will breed hysteria. The tendency to flock towards resemblance cannot be overcome naturally; through the ornithologist’s binoculars an attraction of opposites is a confused jumble, making classification impossible until the muddle sorts itself into a hierarchy. But by then the ornithologist would not be interested in taxonomy so much as entertainment, tossing popcorn kernels into his mouth as the winged battle over seeds ensues.

      The Way of Many Peoples

      First, an open society stops deriving Ought from Is. Soon enough, it has only Is. Finally, it becomes Was.

      If there are many truths, there must be only one Falsehood. But when Truth reigns, there is no limit to the number of falsehoods that are tolerated.

      The Househusband

      A man apart, the Househusband’s sole outlet for his testosterone is to vacuum again. He has finally succeeded where the great conquerors, builders, and scientists failed—he has mastered his environment. But with the blinds closed he has no one to brag to of his domination.

      Woman’s condition is a choice of entrapments. But for man the luxury of choice is reserved only for the most courageous: to be a breadmaker by birth and not a breadwinner by trade—not to choose his path, but to realize his destiny.

      He stands in proud silence for the returning Businesswife to notice, but she only kicks off her pumps and asks about dinner. As he applies the nail polish remover, he confesses that dinner didn’t go as planned. He had felt sorry for the animal: it just wasn’t wild enough. He tried to set it free, but it just stood there at the door not knowing how to cope, and when he tried to slaughter it out of pity he made a mess of things. There was nothing to salvage from his sympathy.

      He pauses, waiting for her to notice. Before he’s toweled off her feet, she kicks away his hands and trickles nail polish remover across the rug on her way to retrieve a microwave dinner from the freezer. She only ever says something when she sees dirt.

      She doesn’t give him anything that night. In his frustration, he wonders whether he coiled up the vacuum cord clockwise or counterclockwise. Being in agreement with synchronized time would give him solace. It would assure his place within the framework of civilization. But being uncertain, he weeps. Maybe he was all those things the other men in the neighborhood called him, after all. A woman. A fag. A freak beyond the bounds of nature. A househusband.

      Should he, like Oedipus, believe he can alter his fate? Should he peruse the employment section?

      The next morning he opens a newspaper to the job listings and finds an ad for . . . a maid service.

      ***

      First moral: Mundane things are precious to all but the worldly.

      Second moral: A man who flouts tradition to enter a woman’s world is more than a man, but still less than a woman.

      Third moral: Glory and truth have lost their feminine appeal: a woman enters a man’s world today only to pay the bills men can’t. Boudicca arises to pass out her business card among the Romans; Hildegard chants pop songs and writes volumes about her inspirational experiences.

      Fourth moral: Role reversals are applauded from the conventional positions: actor, misfit, liberal.

      Fifth moral: For every door marriage closes, it breaks a window.

      The Known World

      The “hyper-rationalists”: working only towards what is certain, they sit in a room, pay their insurance bill with their welfare check, and wait for the daily mail. A force they cannot see provides them with guarantees contingent on legible prayers. In crises where their petitions sit undelivered with the flag up, they don’t panic—they call their mothers and ask for advice.

      Children’s letter to the Postmaster General: “Dear Sir, why is it that your blue angels rest on the Sabbath but my daddy has to work a cash register?”

      Playing Corvinus

      With wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses that engulfed his face, the idol wandered among his subjects in disguise, noting their habits, memorizing their mannerisms, preparing for his next big role. Since he always portrayed someone average, it made sense that he should impersonate averageness itself. Whenever he saw an interaction that seemed inauthentic, he would intervene, dispensing justice to the bad actors of life. If someone mispronounced a line when speaking to him, he would make them repeat it. If spoken with an inappropriate amount of emotion, he would start insulting them to extort the right delivery. If he witnessed a fight and saw little blood, he would step in to choreograph it and send a bystander to the store for corn syrup.

      Occasionally the idol would see someone performing a skill adeptly. Here, too, he slapped down a sense of evenhandedness. If a construction worker was building a house with too much precision, bricks had to be laid with gaps, timbers mismeasured, windows made slightly angular. The idol would then instill in him alcoholism or blindness, some character trait that made the construction worker sympathetic to his fellow men. If the idol’s waiter memorized his drink order without writing it down he would claim it was wrong, charging the waiter with anterograde amnesia after drinking the tapwater of Lethe—a movieworthy condition. If a firefighter rescued an entire family, the idol would throw one of the children back to retrieve the dog. This was a firefighter who inspired heroism in those he saved. It was the idol’s task to see that ordinary people had dramatic stories about their ordinary abilities. An unrelatable life is an unremembered life.

      Glory Days

      The movie star who jots daily thoughts in his Fame Diary . . . from dead end job to megalomania to painkillers to long weekends in the asylum . . . would he blame it all, in the end, on the writing process? If only he had never reflected on his swank, he mumbles in a pharmacological haze to the psychiatrist . . .

      The saddest cases are the celebrities without a straitjacket to restrain their dramatizations. The famous never achieve serenity, even in death: although their influence may cease the gossip carries on. Their public image is exposed everywhere, flaunted by peddlers, critiqued by pundits. Perverse details are brought to light; interpretations abound among scholars even as rumors become facts in the eyes of the multitude. The ghosts of the famous are the most tormented of spiritual beings: they can’t go on talk shows to set the record straight or give biographers the birds-eye perspective. The other side of the story remains off limits to the living.

      The Way to Perfection

      Worse than dismissive criticism is fulsome praise. The former, at least, might be true. Or at least helpful.

      Oneness of Being

      Greatness? People on television.

      Deposing Recognition, the bastard Fame is coronated from an obscure abstraction into the sensation of personhood.

      In past times the common people had no first-hand impression of the regality of greatness; the form of elevated minds was beyond conception. The scandal of Galileo was the immateriality of the celestial navigator. The name