Wisdom from Marc Hamer’s Spring Rain: A Life Lived in Gardens, in Rivka Galchen’s review:
“There are two kinds of old people,” Hamer writes. “There
are the old people who are in pain and are miserable, and
there are the old people who are in pain and are
light-hearted. All old people are in pain.” He has an
inclination to celebrate and express love—an inclination
that seems built out of the humus of a difficult
childhood, characterized by an angry and critical father.
“There’s nothing else to do with life but celebrate it,
believe me; I am old, and there’s truly nothing other to
do with life than celebrate the fact that it exists.”
I’ve been thinking about that last sentence a lot lately.
Almost two thousand years after it was built, the
Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced
concrete dome.
…
It is one of the best-preserved of
all Ancient Roman buildings, in large part because it has
been in continuous use throughout its history.
…
Throughout the day, light from the oculus moves around the
interior in a reverse sundial effect: marking time with
light rather than shadow.
…
The large bronze doors
to the cella, measuring 14.6 ft wide by 24.7 ft high, are
original.
It is incredible that, at so many times in millennia past, humans have stopped fighting and worked together long enough to build things of timeless beauty and monumental scale, things that only existed in imagination before they were wrought: first in two dimensions, wispy tendrils of imagination captured from the astral and fixed to the lines, curves, compression, tension of the terrestrial; secondly in construction, sweat of brow and blood of veins both spilled to compact and level and hew and fit and lift and carve and assemble something we could only make together.
It is equally incredible that, seeing the works of those before us, we have invariably plundered their metal, battered their sculpture, stolen their casings, and trampled them to ruin.
The Pantheon is the exception that proves the rule.
Through the lens of genetic exceptionalism, society often
envisions genetic predictions as infallibly deterministic.
Consider the demand for direct-to-consumer genomic
technologies and the foresight consumers believe it will
bring. In reality, much of genetics is inherently messy
owing to, among other things, the complexity of polygenic
risk profiles, especially in light of unknowable
environmental considerations.
[GATTACA]’s warnings against allowing these statistical
likelihoods to become self-fulfilling prophecies remain
apropos. This is especially true for the increasingly
pervasive ‘walking sick’ — those who underestimate their
disease probabilities — and the ‘worried well’ (or, as the
film refers to them, the ‘healthy ill’) — those who
overestimate their statistical predispositions to future
genetic conditions. Arguably, geneticists in their
professional capacities can also sometimes seem to view
genetic information as too deterministic. Even scientists
can fail to fully appreciate the inexactness of many
genetic predispositions, given penetrance, expressivity
and external environmental factors that modulate the
genetic information.
…
In light of the continual encroachment of genetic
surveillance on privacy, there is a growing
dissatisfaction with the government’s use of genetic
information. In particular, this past spring, a class
action lawsuit was filed against the New York City Police
Department for hosting a genetic database comprising
samples from thousands of people who live in New York.
According to the lawsuit, DNA was surreptitiously
collected, without consent, from gum, drinks and
cigarettes offered to those in police custody, including
minors, regardless of their eventual guilt, and
principally from minority communities. Problematically,
the New York City Police Department’s database lacks the
regulatory oversight of state and federal DNA databases. A
similar lawsuit was filed in Orange County, California,
the year before, about an even larger DNA database of the
County District Attorney’s Office.
If people acknowledge that there are also poor whites,
they will have to acknowledge that it is not a ‘black’
problem. It is a problem with how we reward work, the kind
of work we reward most generously, and how we conceive of
society’s responsibility for its poor and not just to
them—in other words, people are poor because society makes
them that way and keeps them that way, because it is more
important to most of America to pay millions of dollars to
bankers than it is to pay a decent salary to teachers and
sanitation workers and store clerks, and because they need
to keep people poor enough to accept work they may not
want to do. If people admitted all these things, then they
might have to do something about it.
The term poor white trash serves the same purpose—to
dismiss, to deny, to denigrate. If you’re poor, it’s
because of something you did. If people acknowledge that
there are poor whites, they must acknowledge that they
themselves could also be poor at any moment—if they think
about it, perhaps they already are. This threatens the
narrative of American exceptionalism, that anybody can get
rich in America if they work hard enough. That is not
true. It has never been true. But people fervently believe
it; some so that they can view their own success as a sign
of virtue and the result of their own hard work, others so
that they can imagine their struggles as temporary, a bump
in the road to their own eventual American Dream.
This is, my god, so well put. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to not only memorize, but internalize what Livermore is saying above.
None of that changes the fundamental principle of human
autonomy: people have to be able to make their own
decisions in matters that profoundly and intimately
affect their own bodies and the course of their lives.
Regret and ambivalence, the ways that one decision
necessarily precludes others, are inextricable facts of
life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the
extent to which individuals may feel such emotions,
hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for
legislative bans and restrictions.
If you took this paragraph and published it even twenty years ago, everyone would nod along and say “well, of course.”
But publishing it now? In the midst of (if you follow the reasoning in the Dobbs dissent) a torching of decades of legal progress for human rights? Well, suddenly it takes on new meaning, doesn’t it?
But the idea that I should only pay for things that
benefit me directly is anathema to me. Every single thing
on that list benefits me in some way, because it benefits
the community around me. Kids’ education matters not
because they’re my kids, but because education matters,
in general. I might not need rescue services in the woods
out in the corner of the county, but some day, maybe I
would.
Which reminds me of this Steve Jobs note:
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am
totally dependent on them for life and well being.
So there’s a meme that goes around regularly and it’s introduced in terms of “food for thought”. It goes something like this: “One day, your mom will pick you up, put you back down, and then never pick you up again.” I’ve seen it a bunch of times by now, and every time, it rips through me. Kind of like how I felt for the entire duration of the movie “Inside Out” (which, to this day, I can not yet watch once more), but in meme-form. I think this trips the same part of my brain that wrote a farewell post to my dorm room or to our first house.
Suppose you’re taking a class on medieval history and the
final exam is coming up. The final exam is supposed to be
a test of your knowledge of medieval history, right? So
if you have a couple days between now and the exam,
surely the best way to spend the time, if you want to do
well on the exam, is to read the best books you can find
about medieval history. Then you’ll know a lot about it,
and do well on the exam.
No, no, no, experienced
students are saying to themselves. If you merely read
good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you
learned wouldn’t be on the test. It’s not good books you
want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading
in this class. And even most of that you can ignore,
because you only have to worry about the sort of thing
that could turn up as a test question. You’re looking for
sharply-defined chunks of information. If one of the
assigned readings has an interesting digression on some
subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it’s
not the sort of thing that could be turned into a test
question. But if the professor tells you that there were
three underlying causes of the Schism of 1378, or three
main consequences of the Black Death, you’d better know
them. And whether they were in fact the causes or
consequences is beside the point. For the purposes of
this class they are.
I wish I could go back in time. I would tell myself to submit to this reality and actually get smart about tests and grades and working the system. I wasted a lot of time.
Getting a good grade in a class on x is so different from
learning a lot about x that you have to choose one or the
other, and you can’t blame students if they choose grades.
Everyone judges them by their grades — graduate programs,
employers, scholarships, even their own parents.
