There was a time when I believed that rights and wrongs were relative, that there was no ethic based on a truth beyond challenge. Pressed, I would attempt a definition of right in terms of some temporal good, the good of the many. Pressed further, I would admit that this was Utilitarianism and had been seriously discredited by G. E. Moore, but I would ask, with what I thought was disarming honesty, what credible alternative there was. I was taking a course in philosophy at the time. I gave it up soon after I met Simon. How pointless it all was, how shallow. And yet how hard it was to step out of that shallow pool where the children play, into the sea. How frightened we are that in that thundering immensity we will drown. Why has no one ever told us we are built to swim? All we have to do is let go. See, and understand. There is nothing hidden. There never was. All systems of knowledge are irrelevant. All systems of secret knowledge are not merely irrelevant but a fraud. The book of the universe is open.
