Earlier this week, my friend Ursula quoted to me a line from the commencement speech that was alleged to have been delivered at MIT by Kurt Vonnegut, but was in fact completely undelivered and properly attributed to Mary Schmich (exposition of this confusing description available here. Full text of speech available here). It takes the form of advice, and has to do with where one lives and how much time one lives there. Implied by the advice is some descriptive content about the places one might live. So here is the line:

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

At the time Ursula brought up this line, I was eating a perfectly sweet segment of seedless satsuma tangerine (soft-skinned tangerines), and we were standing on the platform of the Caltrain, discussing our aspirations, and that of another of our friends, B. I laughed and said I already was soft, and I wanted to stay.

Being soft means knowing the joy of yielding, the pleasure of making room. It means letting your boundaries change, taking new things into yourself, even as other things slip away. It means mixing with others, having their insides become your insides, or, in the most extreme cases of softness, losing the concept of "inside" and "outside" altogether, dissolving into a fluid that envelopes as soon as encountered.

And yet, softness marks edges in time, even as it erases edges in space. Softness is a quality we associate with both youth and age, when aspiration and ambition is either inconceivable or limited. The flower is soft, and so is the ripe fruit. It is in transition that things become hard. During the sex act, the penis begins soft, and becomes hard as excitement mounts. Usually, by the end of sex, the penis is soft again. Softness/hardness reveals the difference between change and progress. Softness means beginnings and endings - change. Hardness means transition - progress. Softness is a period of crisis, when certainties melt and there are no fixed points. Hardness knows where it is going, and is racing on its way to get there.

The fruit is hard (and often sour or starchy) when unripe because it wants to discourage animals that would eat it before its seed is ready. When it is time to begin the grand genetic experiment of having offspring, the fruit becomes soft, appealing, eventually losing even the integrity of its outer skin, allowing its wet, gelatinous insides to escape, pungent, evaporating into the air or dripping to the ground, announcing its eagerness for change, a merging with the outside, escape.

If you don’t have somewhere that you need to be, somewhere that you have to go (and who among us really does?), then your proper state is softness.