The Anthropologists

I’d adapted too quickly to the idea that autonomy should come above all else. I thought of this as a moral value, an unquestionably desirable state. This was surely the type of thing that would make me strange in the eyes of my family, if not a stranger.

It was a shock to be reminded of my youth, which I had recently abandoned. It seemed to belong to another time, when the future happened on its own rather than being shaped by our efforts.

This was the other thing: it seemed that our interests could be legitimized only if we made something of them—a book, an exhibit. We often said what a shame this was; we romanticized artists of past decades, doing work with great joy and creativity without turning it into a product.

My daughter’s friends are my daughters, she said, and I was flooded with emotion. It was a life we’d given up long ago, Manu and I, by choice or circumstance, I wasn’t quite sure. A life where we would have been sons and daughters to many people, could show up to eat unannounced.

But her entry into the relationships was always a rejection of her own ways—to know and to experience more of the other person—taking on shadow selves that she inhabited for stretches at a time.

I cannot say that we felt familiar, only that we wanted to become familiar, and so we accepted the city’s ways. Besides, we’d always known that wherever we lived would require us to change. There was no place where we could feel at ease, no language that, after so many years, we could sink into like a deep sleep.

There was also the sense that we were merely checking up on each other while I was away on a long trip, and that we would fill in the details once I returned.

was one of the aspects of our lives we still needed to bring into focus, so that we could better picture a future home. The process was an act of imaginary acrobatics, trying to launch ourselves forward, with only a guess of where we wanted to land.

It was often the case, for people our age, that an interesting job was tantamount to being an interesting person.