Published August 6, 2024
There comes a moment in one’s life when the most familiar things begin to look strange, alienated. The mind, I suppose, prepares to travel elsewhere. It begins to sever ties with familiar things.
A trivial example: I have always looked at people’s ears without finding anything odd about them. Every so often there might be an unusual pair, such as Lyndon Johnson’s, which were big and drooping like those of a Basset Hound. Or they might stick out and flap a little, like Clark Gable’s. Otherwise, they were merely ears.
Now, though, it dawns on me that they look preposterous. Why does nature impose such a bizarre design on us, like oyster shells emerging from either side of a coconut? Form follows function, but ears are absurd. Apple wouldn’t market a product so inelegant. Children, new to the world, have an old person’s sense of the strangeness of things. They laugh when you wiggle your ears, for they recognize them as clownish.
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Lance Morrow is the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focuses on the moral and ethical dimensions of public events, including developments in regard to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and political correctness on American campuses, with a view to the future consequences of such suppressions.
