Torii Kiyomasu II
Sanjō Kantarō as a Woman Arranging Her Hair Before a Lacquer Mirror
(before 1763)

"…Prosperity stands in good company because of this."

I have a physicist friend who seems to hold vast amounts of arcane knowledge. He can pull full-blown proofs out of seemingly non-existent air. He often corrects my misconceptions, and I never fail to find fault with myself then for not having accumulated what he considers casual knowledge, but then we held different foci both in our choice of professions and in our personal lives. It was a wonder we ever encountered each other, given how different our worlds seem. We have each retained our grounding orientation, though we agree on more than either of us probably had any right to anticipate. We are vastly different and also quite disarmingly similar. As a result, we are quite compatible.

I remember the first time I encountered the kind of knowledge the world might expect me to retain. I had taken a day off work so I could sit for a so-called Scholastic Aptitude Test, the infamous S.A.T. It consisted of innumerable multiple-choice questions, most of which were far beyond my knowledge or experience. This experience obliquely introduced me to many concepts I’d never even imagined before: arcane mathematical structures, grammatical terms, obtuse logics. I found the experience extremely disorienting and easy to dismiss. I could not believe any institution could reasonably expect anyone to have encountered that variety of information. I tried to imagine how I could have assimilated a tenth of what I found presented there. I concluded it would have been impossible, even if I had studied diligently instead of experiencing my childhood. I had already been declared Not College Material, so I thought little more of the experience other than to hold a slight grudge about the cost I’d had to cough up to sit for the damned thing.

I construct my explanatory stories out of materially different stuff than my physicist friend does. This fact seems inescapable. We both keep constructing these stories even though neither of us could possibly construct terribly accurate explanations. I suspect that we both probably default to making preconscious presumptions about whatever’s going on around us, and then let those stand as if good enough, the best we have. I was reminded yesterday as I spent two hours out of my day removing the battery from my stricken pickup. Since this was a mechanical operation and I’ve never accused myself of being a mechanic, I felt the depth of my misunderstanding of this world. My physicist friend’s father was an auto mechanic who trained him in the mechanic’s crafts. My father was mechanically like me. Somebody should have posted a sign on the hood of his car declaring that no owner-serviceable parts were under there.

My point here might be that we very likely have no realistic idea about how very much of anything works, our Prosperity probably most emphatically notwithstanding. We carry instead more or less carefully constructed explanatory stories adequate to satisfy most inquiries, much as I just resorted to guessing on that long-ago S.A.T. What alternative do any of us have to, at some level, just accepting that we have to presume? I suspect most of us become so fluid in our presuming that we more or less forget what we’re doing, and so believe we know. We might even believe we actually understand until we encounter some disconnection where our fictions fall apart. I might have properly responded to all the S.A.T.’s trigonometry questions, but only because of randomness. I still couldn’t properly identify a trigonometry question if my life depended upon it. Fortunately, it never has.

I carry my Prosperity similarly. I have no real clue how it came to be or what sustains it. Viewed from this perspective, my Prosperity seems like a form of magic. My explanatory story usually satisfies my need to understand whatever’s going on around me. During times like these, though, when I experience severe disruptions in my Prosperity’s continuity field, I try to fall back on what I firmly believe I understand about maintaining my beleaguered Prosperity. I don’t understand much. I have a collect of folk wisdom rattling around in my head, stories that were supposed to work in an emergency like this. Instead, it’s easy to feel like I’m just a victim. I felt remorse for my misspent youth at the tender age of sixteen, before I’d even finished experiencing my youth. That S.A.T. exposed me to the utter futility of proper preparation, for it seemed to me then that the only way I could have properly prepared for that examination would have been to have previously passed it. Even then, my experience would very likely have proven materially deficient. How else could I have seen even a sample of the sorts of information required to ace the damned thing?

Because I live my life forward, I am ill-informed. Because life does not offer trial periods, I draw unwarranted conclusions. Because I require some modicum of self-esteem, I presume I understand when I probably don’t. I experience many disconnections, more, it seems, as I’ve aged. This might be the wisdom that age once promised. I might be better attuned to the world that existed fifty years ago, before the bulk of my lived experience even happened, for I then felt more preconsciously presumptive. I knew more before I focused on studying this world and my presumed place in it than I ever have since I found my place in it and my Prosperity. I’ve come to believe that all Prosperity has to be Presumptive, that there couldn’t possibly be any other kind. When our Prosperity seems threatened, we’re all likely to be about as prepared to address the situation as I was to remove my pickup’s battery or to sit for that god-damned S.A.T. It might be that all life and experience are at root Presumptive and that Prosperity stands in good company because of this.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #PureSchmaltz, #Prosperity