At Least Two Types of People
There are at least two types of people, the first for whom the ordinary
worldliness is easy. The regular social routines and material cares are
nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from
the creation and maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat
them as alien. And also, from them, the efforts toward the world, and to
them, the fulfillment of the world's moderate desires, flow. They are ef-
fortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand, being
hired, being paid, cleaning up, spending, playing, mating. They are in an
ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them.
Then there are those over whom the events and opportunities of the every-
day world wash over. There is rarely, in this second type, any easy kind
of absorption. There is only a visible evidence of having been made of a
different substance, one that repels. Also, from them, it is almost impos-
sible to give to the world what it will welcome or reward. For how does
this second type hold their arms? Across their chest? Behind their back?
And how do they find food to eat and then prepare this food? And how
do they receive a check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of
love or being loved, its expansiveness, the way it is used for markets and
indentured moods?
And what is this second substance? And how does it come to have as one
of its qualities the resistance of the world as it is? And also, what is the
person made of the second substance? Is this a human or more or less
than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human
whose arms do not easily arrange themselves and for whom the salaries
and weddings and garages do not come?
These are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The
first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only to
the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance,
and having, at its end, a second, and almost blank-faced, reward.