Cutting short his vacation, the President dashed back to Washington: what does that mean? Such a question the pundits make their living by answering: a familiar kind of question, addressing a normal use of the human intelligence, which probes events for their sutures, seeking ways to decompose them into meanings. His programs are in trouble, his vacationing drew a bad press: such would be specimen meanings.
But some rare events are so absolute they defy the intelligence, and such events lodge in the memory like no others. The most memorable news story I ever read (in the San Francisco Chronicle; alas, the clipping is lost) pertained to a pet duck in a Bay Area suburban back yard. Waddle, peck, quack was its life, but not its whole life. It would also fly for short distances, would this duck: launch, labor, desist, descend. And one afternoon, before a sufficiency of witnesses, the duck waddled with purpose, it broke into a run, it flapped, it heavily took off; became airborne; and—exploded.
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