My son just ran into the kitchen to show me a picture on his phone. Newly born stingrays. Don’t they look like aliens wrapped in ravioli? he says. The sunlight slides down the living room walls, and the robins and mourning doves peg grubs and worms from the freshly mown lawn. But he’s right, they do. There is almost the entirety of the world in him. He thinks he knows everything, as we all do when we’re newly learning how much there is to know, but to move into consciousness, he needs to talk, hear himself say the things he’ll one day understand are buttresses to deeper, more considered understandings. It’s not that he’s wrong. Humans have been wrong for as long as we’ve been human. The world is flat. Earth is the center of the universe. Fire is brought by the gods. Death is unnatural, accidental, avoidable. For the first time in my life, I saw a bird—a bluejay, last fall, dusk nipping at the afternoon—drop from the persimmon like a stone lobbed into a pond, but rippleless.