A Love Letter

When I was young, I used to build those plastic model airplanes you can find at hobby stores. When they were finished, instead of putting them on a shelf, my dad helped me to hang them from the ceiling; so, it looked like a dogfight between an A-10 and a P-47 in the corner of my room.One morning, I woke up to the sound of my dad’s voice saying, “Joey, Joey! Get up! There’s an earthquake!”Los Angeles and its San Andreas fault are famous for earthquakes. We lived through several that were 5-plus on the Richter scale.I sat up, rubbing sleep from my eyes and, with all the wisdom of a six-year-old, asked my dad, “how do you know there’s an earthquake?”“Look at your models,” my dad said. I glanced at the ceiling in the corner of the room. Sure enough, what had been a static snapshot of a dogfight had become bouncing and swaying model aircraft—both submitting to the motion of the quake and defying all the principles of flight.I decided that evidence was sufficient and crawled down the ladder from the top bunk to join my dad and my sister under the door frame.From that moment—the moment I, at six years old, asked my dad, “how do you know there’s an earthquake”—I’m sure he knew I was doomed to a life studying philosophy.I attended a philosophy conference—a real philosophy conference—last week... This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chapainsights.substack.com/subscribe