The Big Picture and the Closeup

In the world of Genesis, knowing the difference between good and evil seems to be a bad thing. Adam and Eve develop what in English we call modesty, the sense that some things should stay private, which they experience as embarrassment. And somehow that makes them God-like. And even more confusingly, God treats this as a bad thing, objecting as if He were afraid of the competition. What a thematic mess, at least for a modern-day Christian!

I placed the climactic sex scene in the house of a friend of mine in Baltimore’s Federal Hill. I knew exactly, from well before I wrote it, what the characters would do, and what they would say — and what music I wanted playing when, later on, someone made a movie of it.

The accepted metaphor for this coordination of the various branches of the law is “the seamless web.” But the tight four-part harmony of the Manhattan Transfer would have been closer to the mark.

And there in the sunroom I stood, one afternoon shortly after my father had died and we had moved into a new house and my life was all jumbled up beyond recall, with the light of the dying day filtering in through the tree outside, tears welling up as I honked through a requiem for my father with the instrument I knew best how to play.

Trust me, you do not want to work in or help create such an workplace. Despite the great prestige and the nominally higher pay that shops like that offer you, you will be much happier if you can be somewhere where you and everyone involved can feel the rubber meet the road. If you are in a firm, you want everyone to share in the ups and downs, to have a fair financial stake and a recognition and a say.