A man with his little sister
Discoveries
November 12, 2003
The Iranian
A man with a little sister is a different thing. He hears
about a side of life that many men do not. It is a side
that he might know about without the benefit of a little sister,
but which is difficult to feel. He'll be going along,
doing his own thing, reasonably sure of what the world is about,
and then one day his little sister will call him up.
She'll tell
him
something about men and how they can be, and he will have to
stop and remember that he is only one man. But there is something
inescapable about men's behavior, and a young woman, his
little sister, is going through life making these discoveries
on
her own, as part of her own learning about life. In our case, my sister called me up from college. She
was a member of various political organizations. In one
of them, she had met a fellow whom she liked. They had
struck up a relationship. She had liked the way he was
politically, thinking of justice for countries that had
gone without
it and thinking of the best way to achieve it.
She had
liked the way he was older and had some experience in an area
she was beginning to learn and felt strongly about. She
had had a good time with him. And then one day she had
learned that the whole time that he was with her, he was with
another girl in the organization as well, who was also younger
and new to the organization
She didn't understand it. It
wasn't so much about how he treated her, but the fact that he
could be romantic and still believe in
something
good politically. It didn't fit; they were contradictory, she
thought. She
said she believed that the personal was political, that
they were the same principles
a person
ought to carry around all the time.
I listened and thought
about the issue. It was a
hard one, as far as what she was asking of life. I was
all in favor of her raising the issue. I was in favor of
anybody asking anything hard of life, because no matter how hard
it was,
it still seemed easier than not asking it. I just hoped
she would find the right way to ask it. I didn't know
what exactly that was. But I thought there should
be some kind of balance between the presence and the absence
of what
she was
asking.
It was the kind of thing that someone might call naive. But
I didn't think there was much thrill in that. I didn't
think that would get me anywhere worth getting to. I listened
and said I agreed that it didn't fit that those two should go
together, but that it did seem like it happened sometimes. We
didn't know what was going to happen in life, but it was nice
to agree that it didn't fit; that it did happen sometimes.
I
was glad she had called me up to tell me about it. We
hadn't found any answers, but we had brought a little of our
own discoveries about the world together for a while, and that
was a significant thing, the same as it had always been. We
had done that from the beginning, and from the beginning it had
been good to have somebody whose discoveries seemed to have an
equal worth, even if they were not the same ones and they did
not come about in the same circumstances. There was always
something to tie them together, however different they might
be.
And I was glad to remember that no matter how much it might
seem like a man was the one discovering the world, because that
was
what I happened to be, a young woman was doing it just as much. And
for her, much of that discovery was of men. It is good
for a man with a little sister to hear about these discoveries,
because he can remember how much his own are connected
to everyone
else's,
how they will play a part in the discoveries that others will
make.
It's something he could've remembered without
the benefit of a little sister, but there was always one part
of his life that was meant to be easy, that was meant to be both
essential and extra at the same time. He had been going
along fine before she was
born. He had felt like he had the world pretty much figured
out. And then he had seen that what the world was to somebody
else was as important as what it was to him.
And it was
too wonderful of a thing to hate the world together, when they
might have done so on their own. It was too wonderful even
when they were older and she was telling him about a man who
had treated her unjustly. And as for loving the world together,
that was when it seemed too easy, when it seemed that there was
nothing that could match it, and there was nothing to do but
to let that carry them where it would.
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