Having to...

In a world in which, were I alone in it, it would be my aristocratic First Principle to do nothing, only two things would motivate me to do anything:  (1) Necessity--like peeing and pooping, and eating, and trimming one's nails, and cutting one's hair, and bathing, and occasionally sweeping one's room--and (2) the Delight that one naturally takes in doing things, both necessary and unnecessary.  In a world in which I were not alone, my aristocratic Second Principle would of course be to provide care and nurture to the children in it, and to ensure that they, and their children, inherited the world in as pristine a condition as I found it, in the way that  aristocrats are supposed to bequeath things on the one hand, and inherit them on the other, without any diminution or attrition of aristocratic perquisites and privileges,  or of the material means, lands and property that are necessary to secure and enjoy aristocratic perquisites and privileges.   It all gets frightfully complicated immediately I acknowledge that I am not alone in the world.

Among my first awarenesses of the problematic complications of not being alone in the world, was when, as a seven year old, having taken a very urgent shit with intense pleasure and satisfaction, I burst forth from the bathroom, crossing my paternal grandmother who was going in, and exclaimed to her, "It feels really good to poop!" And I could tell from her reaction--or from her careful lack of reaction--that I had spoken the unspeakable.  Not that I wanted to discuss it with her particularly anyway.

I was reminded of my failed attempt to communicate the joy of a good dump to my grandmother, when, many years later I read an uncensured account of the graffiti in the recently excavated, curious, standard, two-holer privies of Pompeii, among which was found "Aristodemos took a really great shit today!"  Like my seven year old self, Aristodemus just had to tell somebody, and we may assume that he resorted to scratching on the wall of his privy with a convenient lump of charcoal to convey his message, because there was, by chance, no one sitting on the hole next to him--to whom, in the apparently usual Ancient Roman fashion, albeit in the demotic Greek spoken by the Magna Grecians who made up the majority of the population of old Pompeii, he might have confided, "Xenon, I'm glad you're here, because I must tell you that I am having the most amazing shit!"  And Xenon, instead of answering with an edge of disapproval and disgust, as we (of the Modern Age) would probably, nay certainly, do, "Why tell me about it, Aristodemus?  Do you think I can't smell it?" would have said something cordially appreciative like, "Good on you, Aristodemos!  Yeah, that really stinks!"

How did we become such different people?