Mom Planted Petunias

I’ve started questioning reality.

Every turn around the Internet block makes me feel like I’m in the fiction stacks of my local library, where I’m picking books at random, reading a few pages, then placing each back on the shelf to see if there are any new fairy tales I can add to my growing collection.

Luigi Giussani wrote in The Religious Sense, “The Cross has stripped away this defense, this reality that exists through deception.” I happened upon this sentence on the first page of a reading journal I took from my cabinet, and I don’t know that I could find more timely words if I searched them out specifically.

God is real. My husband, dog, and six kids are real. My neighbor, who stopped by the other day, is real, as are the chair that holds me now, the keyboard beneath my fingers, and the desk upon which the keyboard sits. Beyond that, I’m not so sure.

Like Giussani, Leo Tolstoy, the man Gary Saul Morson has called “a philosopher of the present,” was on to something when he focused his author’s eye on the tiny details that seem insignificant but somehow add up to create a life. Tolstoy rejected historians’ takes on this battle and that leadership decision. He was more inclined to believe that a bit of bad beef was responsible for any one of Napoleon’s losses than bad intel or a stronger enemy. Who’s to say that he’s wrong?