This Is the Life

A meditation on cultural relativism and human meaning. Dillard observes that any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: "to wit, as everyone else does." Whether the consensus is making a contribution at work you love, knowing Rome's best restaurants, taking the next tribe's pigs in thrilling raids, or burning captives — everyone around you agrees. The piece is a quiet, devastating examination of how the universal certainties of any community look entirely contingent from outside, and what that should do to the seriousness with which we hold our own.