20.

Once when Joshua was sixteen he sat up late with his mother. Marcus was at the office that night, deep into some business or other with the firm. His work never really mattered to his family, and Clara and Joshua alike considered it uninteresting. They had only a vague notion of what it really was to be a lawyer.

Joshua filled a glass with whisky and blind Clara heard the tumbler clink, but did not say anything.

"What is it you want in life?" she asked him, somehow certain that she'd never learn of whatever heroic story or utter tedium his life would become.

"Adventure," he said; "I want to experience--I want to look and be astonished."

"What if you find nothing astonishing?" she said. "What if you climb mountains and travel through Cambodia and visit Athens but you shrug and say, 'So what?' "

"I will make my life mean something--I will, I will do something."

"Some people in this world do what you are supposed to do--go to college, get a girl, get married, work in some office. And even if they visit Rome or Moscow--even if they camp in Guatemalan jungles once or twice--nothing, nothing amazes them. Not because they lack talent, not because they have no capacity to be amazed, but because--because--" And she stopped and sipped her liquor.

Joshua was listening to her words, staring into the auburn circle of liquor in the bottom of his glass.

"I want--I want tragedy," he said, and she understood him perfectly. And he did not fear the most terrible tragedy there could be, and being spared tragedy so far in life he had no notion that it could be terrible at all. Sometimes men use words and know the place in the sentence where they must go, and know the context in which they are to be used--though they have no notion of the meanings of these words. In this way did he used the word "tragedy"--and Clara suspected this was the case, and knew her son would one day learn what that word really meant, and finally lament it.

That night as Joshua lay contemplating the banalities of the plaster of his bedroom ceiling, his clothed back against the cool material of a stripped bed, he noticed something that he'd never noticed before. But then it passed from him, so that he chased after it with thoughts that sought to bring it back, so that he wished to understand what had been so clear to him a moment earlier. But he chased it in vain, whatever it was being now entirely forgotten; and the thought crossed his mind that this must be the way dogs think and the way fish think--the instinctual acceptance of everything as a given--and he thought that perhaps wisdom did not come from doubting every P and Q, but in realizing there was never anything that we did not know already to begin with, from the nature surface of the sun to the quality of the core of the earth.