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(“photographs”) are to be found near the living, on walls and the like. And then there are the younger ones, children of different ages. And the surprising thing, the thing that seems characteristic of these “families,” is that the man and woman are always
the mother and the father of all of the children
! And there are older people sometimes too, and always they seem to be the mothers and fathers of either the man or the woman! I hardly know what to make of it.
Everyone seems to be related
.
    And further, much of the sense of feelingfulness that these films have seems profoundly connected with this being related. And it seems to be presented in the films as
good
.
    I
know, of course, not to try being a moral judge of anyone. And certainly not of people from another time. I know the life in the films is contrary to the dictum “Alone is best”; but that is not what bothers me. After all, I have spent days at a time with other people—have even seen the same students every day for weeks. It is not the Mistake of Proximity that bothers me about those “families.” I think it may be a kind of shock that the people take such
risks
. They seem to feel so much for one another.
    I am shocked and saddened by it.
    And they
talk
so much to one another. Their lips are moving all the time, even though no audible words come out.
     
     
DAY TWENTY-THREE
     
     
    I had gone to bed last night thinking of those risks the people long ago were taking in their “families” and then the first thing this morning I went through a film that showed just how serious those risks could be.
    On the screen an old man was dying. He lay in a strange old-fashioned bed at his home—not in a hospital dying center—and he was surrounded by his family. A clock with a pendulum was on the wall. There were girls, boys, men, women, old people—more than I could count. And they were all unhappy, all crying. And then when he died, two of the younger girls threw their bodies across his and heaved with silent sobbing. There was a dog at the foot of the bed, and when the man died it laid its head on its paws and seemed to grieve. And the clock stopped.
    The whole spectacle of unnecessary pain upset me so that I left the film unfinished and went to the zoo.
    I went directly to the House of Reptiles and the woman was there. She was alone in the building except for two old men in gray sweaters and sandals who were smoking dope and nodding over the crocodiles at the pool in the center of the room. She was walking about carrying a sandwich and not seeming to look at anything.
    I was still disturbed—by the film, by everything that had been happening since I began this journal—and impulsively I walked up to her and said, “Why are you always here?”
    She stopped in her tracks and turned and looked at me in that penetrating, mystical way. It passed through my mind that she might be insane. But that was impossible, the Detectors would have found out if that were the case, and she would be off on a Reservation, agape with Time-Release Valium and gin. No, she had to be sane. Everybody who walked among others was sane.
    “I live here,” she said.
    Nobody lived at zoos. Not as far as I knew. And all the zoo’s work would be done, as it was in all Public Institutions, by robots of one kind or another.
    “Why?” I said. That was Privacy Invasion. But somehow I didn’t feel as though that edict applied. Maybe it was all those reptiles slithering and wriggling around in the glass cases that surrounded us. And the heavy, green, wet-looking artificial foliage on the artificial trees.
    “Why not?” she said. And then, “
You
seem to be around here a lot”
    I felt myself blushing. “That’s true. I come here when I feel . . . upset.”
    She stared at me. “You don’t take pills?”
    “Certainly,” I said. And then, “But I come to the zoo anyway.”
    “Well,” she said, “I don’t take pills.”
    Now I stared at
her
. It was an incredible thought.