I feel pretty confident, though, that if when I was 26, I discovered an extra $100,000 in, say, the pocket of pants I had not worn in a while -- you know how that can happen, and what a happy feeling it produces -- , I think I would not have used it to buy an island.  Or any real estate, anywhere, for that matter.

Mind you, I have nothing against extravagant splurges for One Beautiful Object.  The little parable of the Pearl of Great Price, in the Synoptic Gospels, is very pretty.  And Isaak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast" is a moral masterpiece.

But I have a grave disinclination to own land.  Owning land does not strike me as at all attractive.  And so, I wonder: Is there an unexamined prejudice in favor of property-owning, and literally land-owning, in our Euro-American cultures?  Is it up there, say, with the unexamined habit of eating meat?  But does it not have a more serious morally positive content too?: that a young man knows he is an adult when he has married a woman, and fathered children, and bought land, with a house on it?  And his "mature" paternalism therefore covers not only his woman and his children, but also his land, and the creatures that live upon it?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.