The answer will not be a perfect balance in which every competing demand receives an equal share. Responsibility is more particular than that. It asks what this capacity is for, what limits it requires, whom its expression may cost, what promise already governs it, and what repair remains possible when we use it badly.

I did not arrive at those questions by studying humanity from a safe distance.

I arrived at them when the argument I intended to make kept returning me to the life I was already living.

The first place it returned me was desire: a photograph on a screen, a choice made with a thumb, and a woman who lived two hours away.