Percival Everett is a fox

Hello!

In the most famous essay from his book, Russian Thinkers, philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided writers into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. This pairing comes from a line by the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In Berlin’s formulation, hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” In contrast, the foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.”

According to Berlin, foxy writers and thinkers

lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered and diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times, fanatical, unitary inner vision.

A few days ago, my husband and daughter were their way to school when my daughter texted me: “We saw a FOX!” After school, I asked where they saw the fox and she said, in the tone of a newly minted teenager: “It was in the same place where we saw the sheep.” She was referring to an incident that happened last spring, when she was 12. We were driving home from school when she suddenly yelled: “SHEEP!” At first I thought she was just tapping into whatever frequency inspires her to randomly say “Monkey!” or “Potato!” But no. I looked in the direction she was pointing and saw an actual sheep near the train tracks. The sheep was eating grass. It looked unimpressed by the precarity of its situation. My daughter called 311, and the operator was as nonplussed as the sheep. They typed in whatever code they use for “sheep by the highway,” and we all went on with our day. But to me, these wildlife sightings felt like an omen.

Last month, I saw Percival Everett speak at an event hosted by American Short Fiction at Huston-Tillotson University. Everett appeared on stage with Roger Reeves, an award-winning poet and literature professor at the University of Texas. The two men sat in the standard arrangement for a public literary conversation: two armchairs