Don't Call It a Comeback

It's been here for years

Photo by Andrew Joost

This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Dear Reader,

Systems are great! Institutions too. They’re like hard shells that house phlegmy, soft creatures that cannot stand the light of day unsheltered. We the people are salty, emotional, irrational, and so we crawled inside of rippled, iridescent shells made of rules and norms and tradition and principle well thought out.

But who made the shell, thy fearful perimetry? What mortal hand and eye framed thee, constitution? And can we get them back here for a consultation?

Lawyers are my favorite people, I swear to God. To study through the night, to leaf through volumes, to search and analyze, to form an argument and then deliver it on the spot as arrows fly? They are the best of us, truly. And now on them we shall rely.

“I thought these shells would house us forever!” we cry, only now realizing the folly of our days spent scrolling and wanting things and quitting our bowling leagues and watching movies on our own sofas to the hum of our far-off refrigerators and children upstairs not sleeping. We should have been reinforcing walls, repairing cracks. At these depths, where the sun doesn’t reach, creatures create their own light, by which I mean clutch iPads in the night to turn their faces a hot, glowing blue. Or else they have no pigment at all (no need down here) and are like white hippo embryos; you’d say translucent if there were any lucent to trans.

The shells are hard as bone, we babies cry. And framed so carefully! But what we should have been tending were the soft bodies hid inside, the pulsing stupids, the animal brains, the pre-reading ones, the mounting, swelling feelings that oozing out and crawling across the ocean’s floor are yearning to be free of shells, yearning toward imagined castles and their imaginary architects. Or thinking they’ll be fine without even a castle, fine floating loose in a zillion gallons of opportunity. The analogy is strained. What I mean to say is that we should have been all going to law school, all loving on our neighbors, all holding every “argument” in upraised fist above the water’s surface to look at carefully, turn it this way and that, and declare is fish or foul, plastic rings from soda packs or works of art.