Just after you are born, it’s amazing how much patience everyone has with you. If you make an error, they just say, "O, he was just born—he doesn’t know about our world yet." When I was born, or rather just a couple hours after I was born, no one dared reproach me for anything—they all said, "He was just born," as if it were my first day at a job, and I couldn’t possibly be guilty of anything. I wasn’t, however, cognizant enough to take advantage of this status—rather I was terrified of everything, and dared not to make the slightest move at all, existence was so new and frightening to me. But much later on I would be listening to a lecture by a professor, daydreaming about this time, about my birth. The professor would be lecturing about a certain statistical fact—schizophrenics who are fat are much more likely to pursue the priesthood than schizophrenics who are thin. In fact, schizophrenics who are fat are so likely to pursue the priesthood that the Catholic Church is absolutely full of these fat, schizophrenic priests and bishops. The Pope himself, after all, Pope John Paul II, is one such fat schizophrenic. Why does that sound like an insult? Anyway, it is thought that schizophrenics who are fat are fleeing their uncomfortable fatness into the comfortable life of the priest, while schizophrenics who are thin, though just as uncomfortable, have nothing so concrete to flee from. This would all be explained to me a long time after I was born, when they no longer said of me, "He was just born," and now, during this later time, everyone felt perfectly comfortable reproaching me. This lecture was one of those times when everything comes together and I say, "Aha." It was a time when the things said suddenly fit together into some gap in some complex system of belief that I have spent my entire life bringing together, and so I said, "Aha," and felt very much as if this were a very profound moment in my life. It was a happy moment, but it passed just like everything else, so that later that day I was no longer still saying to myself, "Aha," but had forgotten all about it. But sometimes I think of that time just after my birth and say, "What has happened to me? Everyone seems so willing to reproach me now." It was like that when I first started working, washing dishes at 14. My first day on the job, if I made an error, they all said, "It’s all right—he’s new." This attitude prevailed for nearly a month. Then one day I made an error and someone said, "It’s all right—he’s new," and someone else said, "How long are we going to say that of him?—that he’s new." And from then on if I made an error I was reproached just like everyone else. I often said to myself when I was reproached, "I wish they would still say that of me, that I’m new. But now I have been working here a year—how can I expect this now?"