Fall II
Mosab Abu Toha, writing from Gaza:
I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves this time. I just want to make sure that the pages are intact. My brother Hamza will do the same thing with his Arabic grammar and literature books, which he has spent ten years collecting. Both of us pray that in the coming days, it will not rain and soak their pages.
I am afraid, each day, that I will hear news that Mosab and his family have been killed.
Katherine Rowland writing at the Guardian, ‘We’re sedating women with self-care’: how we became obsessed with wellness:
The late social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a sendup of what she saw as an “epidemic of wellness” in her book, Natural Causes. Our obligation to the self had become, in her opinion, an endless gauntlet of obligations. Our commitment to augmenting and bettering ourselves threatens to overtake, rather than improve, our minds and bodies. “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it,” she wrote. “Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”
If we were to take the obligation to wellness seriously, wouldn’t it, ultimately, center on that possibility?
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