Canoe Rental
Jill Lepore wrote “Battleground America” for an April issue of The New Yorker:
When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
She’s right. But even more to the point:
… former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
This, now this is a bánh mì sandwich. Mykala made this from super fresh bread, garden fresh cucumber, fresh cilantro, fresh jalapeño, top secret tofu preparation, vegan mayo, and love. Anyway, I tasted love when I had it. Stupendous.
If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality.
As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan.
Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenge of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers:
I capital-h hate killing things. I hate killing small things, hate killing big things, hate killing things that are nuisances. I can sometimes make exceptions for flies and mosquitoes, but not always. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” is the only refrain I can come up with if I have to get rid of a spider from our bedroom. And right there, I wrote ‘get rid of’, preferring the euphemism to the reality—I killed a little piece of life that never did anything to me.
I hate to see old buildings torn down. I’m always straightening piles, tightening screws, touching up, wiping off, oiling, polishing. I physically react when I see clear-cutting of the rainforest, the enduring tree chopped down for transient finances. Most boys run around pulling up grass, breaking walls, throwing rocks at windows. I was always looking to build and maintain.
Years ago in my immunology class, I was the only one in my group who was able to wrangle our lab mice. I had to take a lancet and pierce the mice at the neck, so we could take blood samples for antibody measurements. Their scapulas felt like the fine edge of a guitar pick, and they squeaked when pricked. It wasn’t a nervousness that I felt, like when your stomach clenches before a big speech — this was different, like a deep, clawing, despair. Puncturing their skin, feeling the membrane stretch before the desmosomes gave way, made me feel atrocious. The pointlessness of our ersatz research (simply to confirm what the textbooks already told us) made it even more awful. If such a thing was a means to an end, if mice were being poked and injected for a greater good in medicine, I would understand. After all, the mice went about their business and kept living after we got blood samples. At the end of the semester, it was time for them to be killed with gas—I made someone else do it. I left the classroom and looked out the window at an early spring day, trying not to imagine what it’s like to die.
The other day I saw a video that was mostly lovely — a man had taken a GoPro high definition video camera on a sport tuna fishing trip. He modified it to work underwater, and captured breathtaking video of a pod of dolphins swimming with the boat. But there’s a few seconds at the beginning of the video, before the underwater shots begin. The men are standing on the boat, one steering, others watching their lines, and one gets annoyed because a tuna is flopping around on the deck. Now, keep in mind this is a pretty big fish, so flopping around really can create a commotion. The guy grabs a heavy, blunt, bat-like thing, and casually beats the fish into a bloody pulp. I don’t know, maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I just really really did not like seeing that. I don’t even like writing about it right now; it doesn’t feel cathartic at all to revisit how I felt.
I think it’s that I love to see things working like they’re supposed to. A crown fits on a tooth, a stove heats a pan evenly, a tree puts down roots and gives shade, an animal twitches or swims or pounces or sprints. I love to see things working, and I have a hard time when I feel like I’m undoing that.
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