The Lore of the World

when we are born, we experience reality with very few “priors” – preexisting beliefs, expectations, conceptual schemas through which to filter what we see. And so a child’s experience is an endless explosion of vividness. Slowly we start to make sense of the world, we start to notice repeating patterns, we start to establish boundaries between “me”... See more

Before Victoria was born, I used to grumble about couples we knew who had been lobotomized by the birth of their children. Perfectly intelligent people with whom we'd enjoyed countless debates over politics, prose, the death of the theater, or the decline of poetry now burbled at us about their little boy's first tooth or spent hours sharing the en

... See more