CREPUSCULAR RAWLS

Picture it—because of course you will—John Rawls, late-night edition, drifting across the Harvard Yard like some massive, spectral Daddy Longlegs with tenure. And please don’t pretend you aren’t already delighted by how wrong this is; I can practically hear you leaning forward. Rawls isn’t walking so much as moon-loafing, the particular kind of ambling done only by men who have spent a lifetime thinking about fairness and have decided—quietly, begrudgingly—that nighttime is the only time when the universe isn’t actively heckling them. His limbs, embarrassingly elongated, sway with the gentle inelegance of a man who forgot his body a hundred pages ago and only just remembered he still has one.

Picture the Doric columns—Harvard has so many columns, in case you didn’t know, which you probably didn’t—standing around like smug marble adults supervising a very tall child who has decided to go feral. Rawls weaves between them, his coat trailing behind him in a way that might be dramatic if he didn’t look like a man trying to remember where he left his metaphysics.

And then—because in this universe he’s apparently part amphibian—there’s the tongue. That absurdly long, DFW-footnote-worthy appendage that flicks out with the soft, horrifying elegance of something that should never have come from a moral philosopher.[1] A squirrel chitters. A blur. A wet snap. And then: silence. Rawls, almost apologetically—like he’s afraid the squirrel will lodge a complaint in the Original Position—chews. He is diffident even in predation. He is shy even in monstrosity. He is polite even while digesting. This is the Rawls your world deserves: a towering ethical cryptid wandering Harvard Yard, worrying about justice while involuntarily snacking on local fauna. A man both deeply committed to fairness and also, apparently, a mild threat to the rodent population.

Now imagine—no, feel—the stenching moonlight, which is not a typo but an atmospheric condition somehow unique to Harvard after 2 a.m. The moonlight here doesn’t illuminate; it seeps. It oozes down the sides of the Widener Library like spoiled milk, pooling in crevices where undergrads once cried about their dissertations. The air carries that faintly sour smell of old books, old scandals, and at least one professor’s abandoned thermos of soup fermenting in an office no one has had the courage to unlock since 1998. Rawls moves through all this with the shy, towering awkwardness of someone who knows the world isn’t fair and feels personally responsible for it, but also knows he cannot, by any rigorous construction, be blamed for the stenching moonlight. His steps make a soft, sticky schlop on the grass. His coat whispers against the columns like an apology. And then there’s the guilt-ridden mastication. It’s not loud—Rawls would never be loud—but it’s somehow emotionally audible.

A sort of shameful chk-chk-chkkk, like he’s trying to chew quietly out of courtesy to both squirrel and cosmos, as if fairness requires consuming one’s prey with dignity and restraint. Occasionally he pauses mid-chew, brow furrowed, as though wondering whether the animal had been given a fair opportunity in the hypothetical state of nature. He swallows with the soft, harrowed sigh of a man who suspects it had not.

And then come the moral apologies.

Not booming, not indulgent, but whispered—Rawls doesn’t do anything without a layer of diffidence so thick you could spread it on toast. He mutters things like:

“Regrettably necessary.”
“Were c-c-circumstances different, friend…”
“Consider this an u-u-u-unfortunate but symmetrical deviation f-f-from ideal theory…”

Passing raccoons—Harvard’s true faculty—pause mid-trash raid to stare at him. They’re not afraid; raccoons have seen worse. One of them, a particularly judgmental-looking one with a torn ear, tilts its head as if evaluating Rawls’s entire ethical system.

[1]There is no historical evidence Rawls possessed an anuran feeding mechanism. But there is also no historical evidence that he didn’t. Anuran (frog/toad) feeding involves a rapid, ballistic tongue launch from the front of the mouth, using three main mechanisms: mechanical pulling (muscle contraction), inertial elongation (momentum transfer), and muscular hydrostatic elongation (muscle pressure) to hit prey, followed by powerful retraction and swallowing, often aided by eye closure.

LLM