Her search for what one human can be to another
"Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard's office hours every week to talk about Aristotle. At the last session of the quarter, in the spring of 2011, they discussed Aristotle's treatise Metaphysics, and what it means to be one—as opposed to more than one. "It was the sort of question where I felt it would be reasonable to feel ecstatic if you made some kind of progress," Arnold told me. Agnes was the only person he'd ever met who seemed to feel the same way.
Agnes specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics, but she is also a public philosopher, writing popular essays about experiences—such as jealousy, parenting, and anger—that feel to her like "dissociated matter," falling outside the realm of existing theories. She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. "How has it come to pass," she writes, "that we take ourselves to have any inkling at all about how to live?"
She was married to another philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, Ben Callard, and they had two young sons. To celebrate the end of the term, Agnes had made cookies for her students, and she gave an extra one to Arnold, a twenty-seven-year-old with wavy hair that fell to his shoulders, who was in his first year of the graduate program in philosophy. As Arnold ate the cookie, Agnes, who was thirty-five, noticed that he had "just this incredibly weird expression on his face. I couldn't understand that expression. I'd never seen it before." She asked why he was making that face.
"I think I'm a little bit in love with you," he responded.
Agnes had felt that there was something slightly odd about her weekly sessions with Arnold, but she hadn't been sure what it was. Now the nature of the oddness became apparent. "I think I'm in love with you, too," she told him. They both agreed that nothing could happen. They leaned out her window and smoked a cigarette. Then Arnold left her office.
The next day, Agnes and her sons flew to New York to visit her parents. Ben had gone to Philadelphia to see his mother, who was recovering from surgery. On the plane, Agnes said, "it felt like I was having a revelation in the clouds." For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had access to a certain "inner experience of love," a state that made her feel as if there were suddenly a moral grail, a better kind of person to be. She realized that within her marriage she didn't have this experience. If she stayed married, she would be pretending…"
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