The Red Caddy by Charles Bowden

“There is a clutter to life that ideas can never tolerate or make go away. To unravel something, you have to have a thesis. But to understand the dead ends, back alleys, and side roads of life itself, you have to mistrust your thesis and constantly keep an eye on it lest it blind you to detail, contradiction, lust, love, and loneliness. I can’t write about a friend and make it neat and tidy unless I intend to kill my friend. And this is not my intention. To be an expert on someone you know, I truly believe, is never to have known them at all. Which is why we assign such work to scholars. We say they will be objective, while we ourselves cannot promise such a feat. But we also think they can be certain, while we cannot comprehend such a fantasy. To really know someone, to break bread with them and talk and drink and laugh and argue, is much like knowing an ecosystem. You can get the drift, draw a map, know many trails, but the more you know the more convinced you become that absolute knowing is impossible.”

-Chuck Bowden, 2018