Peripheral Visions

might not be a good thing in those who hold leadership positions. We joke about the problem, with buttons that say, “Question authority,” and desk plaques that quip back, “My mind is made up, don’t trouble me with facts.”
    There is a paradox here, like the paradox in the Jesuit administrators who were so massively arrogant, teaching with all the authority of the church, and yet were urged to humility by their tradition and by the demands of effective service. It was a balance that only a few seemed to achieve, just enough to argue the possibility. We may not use the word humility , but it is becoming important to recognize and value new kinds of fluidity and openness to learning at every stage of the life cycle, in home, school, and workplace.
    More flexible boundaries of the self open up attention to the environment that may ultimately be essential to survival, for it is not the individual organism that survives but the organism in the environment that gives it life. We need to find ways to encourage a sense of the self as continuing to develop through responsive interaction. Relying on competition as a way of motivating learning eventually subverts not only cooperation but also the willingness to learn. The models for a more responsive sense of self might be borrowed across lines of culture and gender or be treasured from an undamaged childhood.
    Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart. Increasing knowledge of the ethology of wolves might someday replace the power savored in destroying them.
    We reach for knowledge as an instrument of power, not as an instrument of delight, yet the preoccupation with power ultimately serves ignorance. The political scientist Karl Deutsch defined power as “the ability not to have to learn,” which is exemplified by the failure of empathy in a Marie Antoinette or the rejection of computer literacy by an executive. Ironically, in our society both the strongest, those who have already succeeded, and the weakest, those who feel destined for failure, defend themselves against new learning.
    Sitting alone at my computer a little after dawn, writing seems a very private thing: my thoughts, my words, the gap between them that I struggle with. But unlike a typewriter, the computer keeps me a part of multiple conversations. A poem from a woman in California, scrolling across the screen, about the inaccessible speech of the body; the machine’s curmudgeonly messages, programmed by others, balking at instructions it finds unacceptable—these remind me that I am shaped by other minds. I sit here telling stories about human give and take, repeated encounters sometimes leading to growth, and all the words and concepts I use are old, inherited, part of the way I have been shaped by my environment. I try to become transparent to their possible meaning. The trees on the slope outside grow invisibly and move gently in the wind, shaping me more than I shape them, each one playing a role in birthing a human consciousness. With a sense of self so permeable, peripheral vision is essential, for all those others present with me now are a source of identity and partners in my survival.
    Adults are freer than schoolchildren in their writing, but I am in defiance of scientific convention and much of literary history when I claim the freedom to begin many of my sentences with the word I . Yet it rescues me from the temptation to be categorical. The word I want is we , but there are limits to the assumption of agreement, so I “personalize” as a more honest way to be inclusive. Impersonal writing often claims a timeless authority: this is so. Personal writing affirms relationship, for it includes these implied warnings: this is what I think at this moment, this is what I remember now, continuing to grow and change. This finally is contingent on being understood and responded to.

Construing Continuity
    I T WAS NOT UNTIL THIRTY YEARS after the senior year of high school I spent in Israel that I returned in 1988 for an extended visit, accompanied by Vanni. We traveled around the country, and I told her