I wrote this, in continuation of the previous entry, in a notebook where it's languished until now. Then I went canvassing in Indiana, where I learned the answers to some of my questions.

11 October 2008, Chicago

Once we've admitted that our nature, as members of the human species and as distinct persons, is expressed in relationships rather than in abstract properties, the question becomes how to define and develop them. Immediately it's clear that we're not looking for static definitions; when I say that so-and-so and I are close friends I refer to a bond that is growing, or shrinking, or taking on new forms. One thinks of Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey, whose friendship takes Patrick O'Brian some twenty books to develop, and which still seems fresh and capable of further development even though the author is dead. We define our relationships, and as a consequence our own nature, through immersion, not through analysis.

Because history is the totality of human relationships, it remains (gloriously) opaque to the sorts of distinctions historians like to draw. Tolstoy illustrates this better than anyone, but he neglects to mention that although history eludes our efforts to understand her, she is more than ready to respond to them. Our explanations of cause and effect do not escape the fabric of reality; they possess their own life. The only standard of their validity is how the patterns change.

Like Tolstoy's generals, we remove ourselves too much from the sources of history the moment we try to develop them from on high. The only place we have traction is individual relationships. If there is a calculus of these relationships, it is one that must have developed organically, springing from the same sources. What is this calculus? Who knows how to use it?