“Sperm whales sleep while hovering motionless in a vertical position, usually somewhat close to the surface. I've been lucky enough to witness this several times in Dominica over the years and every single time it takes my breath away.” ~ Amanda Cotton *
STATISTICS
I dream I'm teaching
statistics — and who enters
but my grandmother,
robust, smiling, looking
“like a doughnut in butter,”
as she herself would say.
I wonder what sense it makes
for her to study this dry subject,
especially since she is dead.
But no subject is boring
for her who was taken
out of school in the fourth grade,
put to work in a textile factory
to pay for her brother’s education.
Now she’s going to college at last —
wants all that has been denied.
She sits in the front row.
Her eyes are wild for it.
~ Oriana
I am so glad that I had this happy “justice is restored” dream. My grandmother finally gets the education that has been denied to her; as my mother said, “A crime was committed against this bright little girl.”
James Hillman posits that dreams are an Underworld. We travel to it, and, not surprisingly, meet the dead — that’s where they live, in the underworld of our dreams. Without getting too literal about this, I can see something to this theory. It’s the same longing that has people posit the afterlife: how do we compensate for the unjust world?
Justice and injustice are human concepts, not anything that exists in nature. But the notorious indifference of nature has its own compensation in the beauty of nature. I feel I owe my survival thus far to two main factors: my curiosity (including the curiosity about what happens next) and my delight in beauty.
*
WRITERS AS PRODUCTS OF THEIR TIME
~ "Not long ago, during an Amtrak ride, I met a college student who told me he was a fiction writer. I asked him what he’d been writing and reading, and he said that he was writing a novel about time travel, and that he was reading — well, he had been reading Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” but after about 50 pages, he said, he’d tossed it into the trash.
“The House of Mirth,” which was published in 1905, describes the efforts of a young woman named Lily Bart to find an acceptable husband. The student explained that he had been sailing along until he came to a description of one of Lily’s suitors, Simon Rosedale: “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with … small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.” At that point, the student said, he lost sympathy not only for Lily, but for the novel as a whole.
It would have done no good for me to lecture him about the difference between a character’s point of view and the author’s. Whenever Rosedale appears in the novel, Wharton describes his repulsiveness with such gusto it’s clear that she isn’t just describing Lily’s feelings; she’s describing her own.
Wharton’s anti-Semitism, the student said, filled him with rage. “I don’t want anyone like that in my house,” he said.
Anyone who’s taught literature in a college or university lately has probably had a conversation like this. The passion for social justice that many students feel — a beautiful passion for social justice — leads them to be keenly aware of the distasteful opinions held by many writers of earlier generations. When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked to, but many perform an equivalent exercise, dumping the offending books into a trash basket in their imaginations.
It was only after the student left the train that I had the rather obvious thought that an old book is a kind of time machine too. And it struck me that the way he’d responded to “The House of Mirth” betrayed a misunderstanding of what kind of time machine an old book is.
I think it’s a general misunderstanding, not just his. It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.
As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.
I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.
The difference in perspective, the clarification of who exactly is doing the traveling, might lead to a different kind of reading experience.
If we were to sign up for a trip to the New York of 1905 — Wharton’s New York — we’d understand, even before buying our tickets, that we were visiting a place where people’s attitudes were very different from ours. We’d know that nearly everyone we’d meet, even the best, most generous minds — rich or poor, male or female, white or black — would hold opinions that would be unacceptable today. We’d be informed of this in the contract we’d be required to sign, at the same time as we’d be given our inoculations and fitted for our period clothing — our hoop skirts, our waistcoats, our top hats.
Knowing all this before we went back in time, met Wharton and discovered that some of her opinions were abhorrent, we’d be prepared. We wouldn’t be outraged or shocked.
Instead, we’d probably be curious. We’d probably be interested in exploring the question of how one of the most intelligent and fearless minds of her time was afflicted by moral blind spots that are obvious to us today.
And maybe, without overlooking or forgetting about Wharton’s blind spots, we’d be able to appreciate the riches she had to offer — her aphoristic wit; her astonishingly well-wrought sentences; her subtle sense of how moral strength and weakness coexist in each of us; her criticisms of the cruelties of her historical moment, which are not unlike the cruelties of ours.
And if we stuck around in the past and observed her in the context of her contemporaries, we’d see that although Wharton held many views that were reactionary even then (she was writing, after all, during a moment when the whole world was watching the Dreyfus Affair, and when thoughtful people understood anti-Semitism to be a sordid prejudice), she was ahead of her time in other ways, particularly in her awareness of how women of her era were suffocated by the social roles imposed on them.
Regarding a writer like Wharton as a creature of her age might bring a further benefit. It might help us see ourselves as creatures of our own.
When we imagine that writers from the past are visiting our world, it subtly reinforces our complacence, our tendency to believe that the efforts at moral improvement made by earlier generations attained their climax, their fulfillment, their perfection, in us. The idea that we are the ones who are doing the time-traveling doesn’t carry the same implication.
If, whenever we open old books, we understand from the get-go that their authors have motes in their eyes regarding important ethical or political questions, it might help us understand that the same thing could be said of us today.
To take an example almost at random: Most of us rely on technology that can be traced to child labor or even slave labor. We know this — or we should know this — but we don’t think about it much. When we’re texting or using social media, we don’t tend to be troubled by the thought that the cobalt in our phones may have been extracted by 10-year-olds in Katanga working 12-hour shifts for a dollar a day. We don’t stop short, seized by the realization that taking part in the fight against global inequality is more urgent than anything else we could possibly be doing. We finish the text or the tweet or the email and go on with our lives.
If you or I were to write a novel with a passage in which someone takes a casual glance at his phone, how might this strike a reader from the future — someone whose understanding of human interconnectedness is far more acute than our own? I’m guessing that readers from the future might find our callousness almost unbearable, and might have to remind themselves that despite the monstrousness into which we could descend in passages like this, some of what we were saying might be worth listening to.
If we arm ourselves with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of curiosity (those essential tools of the time-traveler), we’ll be able to see the writers of the past more clearly when we visit them, and see ourselves more clearly when we get back. We’ll be able to appreciate that in their limited ways, sometimes seeing beyond the prejudices of their age, sometimes unable to do so, they — the ones worth reading — were trying to make the world more human, just as we, in our own limited ways, are also trying to do.” ~ Brian Morton
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review/edith-wharton-house-of-mirth-anti-semitism.html?fbclid=IwAR0Opk07JHZyAimesS9KAhraQkvrp3P2gE0z88BRP7qTarchWa6IH3Wr0pY
Oriana:
This is a tremendously important article. I’ve known a few people who’ve become unmoored and tossed away masterpieces because the author offends our modern standards by being sexist, for instance (think of Milton; nor can we quite absolve Tolstoy), or a “classist” like Virginia Woolf, or indeed anti-Semitic like Wharton. Not that we have to ignore the views they express that we find repugnant. We can duly note these — and still appreciate these authors when they are at their best — when they speak from the kind of depth and timeless insight that makes their work still alive today.
Mary:
I agree that the article on who is doing the time traveling when we read is an important one. It speaks to our blindness about our own limitations of vision and understanding. It is easy to look at characters and authors from the past and fault them for not being as enlightened as we are, for having prejudices and attitudes we find reprehensible and abhorrent — but only if we forget that our own attitudes and ideas are as much determined by time and place as those we feel we have outgrown.
Our sense of moral superiority depends on the invisibility of injustices so embedded in our present social reality they seem "natural", and thus neutral, not part of any created system, and thus not "chosen," and certainly not part of our moral responsibility. To condemn writers for the limitations and injustices embedded in their historical era, determined by circumstances of class, race, gender, geography, politics, etc., is to assume we are somehow free of those same limitations in our own circumstances And of course we are not.
Reading with attention to history is both more rewarding and more interesting, shedding light both ways, on the world that produced the author and the book, and the world that produced the reader, with all her ideas and tastes, giving a richer and deeper experience beyond simple dismissal. We cannot read books from an earlier time as they were read in that time — we must see it through the lens of our own historical moment — but while understanding that is what we are doing. Only then can we see the dynamic between art and audience with clarity and justice.
Edith Wharton, 1889. Restricted life, anyone?Mary:
The Hat, the Sleeves, the Dogs, the Expression!!!! No wonder she looks sad.
Oriana:
As you once said, clothes were prisons for women. Oddly enough, it seems rich women were more imprisoned that way.
*
~ “Most of the film boils down to a single undeniable assertion: Much of what we believe about the world is a product of the place and class into which we are born, and the vast majority of these beliefs and values don't hold up under scrutiny. "We are not born free," as one interviewee puts it, but instead are programmed from birth in ways that aren't even seen as programming by most of the people doing the job. (Science fiction has been teaching this lesson for generations, doing a job conformity-minded schools avoid.)” ~ (from the Hollywood Reporter review of Lottery of Birth)
“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Oriana:
Hmmm, was he already pondering White Fire? I rather like to see it happen: footnotes that pursue their own thread only tenuously related to the main text. That’s where the author is having fun.
By the way, I have that feeling about poems — that these are scraps, fragments of some greater and unfinished whole.
*
Oriana:
This reminds me of another statement by Solzhenitsyn. He suggests to a person in extreme circumstances (e.g. being a Gulag inmate): “Think of yourself as already dead.” Don’t try to defend your life because then the guard has total power over you. But if in your mind you see yourself as already dead, then you can still preserve your dignity.
Some will be reminded of Janis Joplin’s “freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.” There's something to be said for "nothing left to lose." The feeling of freedom of real!
MUNCH’S SCREAM BASED ON A LIGHTBULB?
~ “It has long been assumed that the howling figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream – an archetype of angst that still flickers above the popular imagination more than a century after it was created – was indebted chiefly to the aghast expression frozen on the face of a Peruvian mummy that the artist encountered at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. But Munch was an artist concerned more about the future than the past, and especially anxious about the pace of technology. Surely he would have been even more deeply impressed by the breath-taking spectacle of an enormous lightbulb filled with 20,000 smaller bulbs that stood on a pedestal and towered over the pavilion in the same Exposition? A tribute to the ideas of Thomas Edison, the sculpture rose like a crystalline god heralding a new idolatry, flipping a switch in Munch’s mind. The contours of The Scream’s yowling face reflect with extraordinary precision the drooping jaw and bulbous cranium of Edison’s terrifying electric totem.” ~
Interesting that Munch created four versions in paint and pastels, (the one in blog is pastel) as well as a lithograph stone from which several prints survive. Both of the painted versions have been stolen, but since recovered. One of the pastel versions commanded the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction.
*
“JEWISH WOMAN SELLING ORANGES”: PHOTO AND PAINTING
photo by Konrad Brandel , 1879~
Aleksander Gierymski: Jewish woman selling oranges, 1881. The painting was looted by the Nazis, and returned to Poland only in 2011. You may be wondering why the Nazis would want a painting of a Jewish woman. Well, they had a special book that was created by German art historians, of all paintings of special value. And the title could be changed simply to "Seller of oranges."Oriana:
The photograph moves me more. The painting has the advantage of color, but I still respond more strongly to the photograph. Also, in the painting, the knitting is not convincing. You don’t knit standing up.
*
ALFONSO CUARON, CREATOR OF ROMA, ON RACISM IN MEXICO
~ “Much of Mexico remains divided along stark ethnic and racial lines that were drawn hundreds of years ago. When Spanish colonizers first showed up in Mexico, they instituted a race-based caste system. Spanish men from Spain were on top. Spanish men from the new land, Mexico, were next. Then came Mestizos, people with one indigenous parent and one Spanish one. Fully indigenous people followed. Last in this social hierarchy were black people. In each of these categories, women were lower than men. The caste system persisted throughout the colonial era until 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain.
In practical terms, however, remnants of the system persisted. A couple of decades after Mexico's 1910 revolution, President Lazaro Cardenas spearheaded efforts to change this worldview, but his administration's efforts were highly flawed. "Their approach to indigenous people was this deep romanticizing," says Marjorie Becker, a historian and scholar of Mexico at UCLA. "They believed the indigenous were natural artists who sang and danced — of course, that was racist, too."
Cuaron, who grew up identifying as white, says his countrymen still obfuscate the corrosive nature of racism. Mexicans often speak about systemic inequalities using euphemistic language that obscures the real problems. "People like to talk about these issues of inequality and discrimination by using the term 'classism' — as if that would make it better," says Cuaron, shaking his head with disgust. "But let's call it for what it is. It's racism.”
The director found himself delving into some of these themes during long discussions with the real-life Cleo, Liboria Rodriguez, an indigenous woman from Oaxaca who was the core source of his emotional nourishment as a child. Within the middle class, vast inequalities persisted between relatively wealthy, white families like his own and the indigenous people hired to help them.
Yalitza Aparicio, who plays Cuaron's main character Cleo, says she experienced racism as an indigenous woman growing up in Oaxaca. She was raised speaking her native language of Miztec at home, but found that non-indigenous people made fun of her if she spoke it elsewhere. Cleo, while loving and being loved by the family, is never able to forget that she is a maid and employee first.
Exploring this, Cuaron began examining how the Mexican government had distorted and manipulated indigenous people's identity for its own cynical purposes, how people like Liboria Rodriguez were, in some sense, convenient propaganda tools for a government eager to cling to power, often using the language of the populist, leftist electorate. "There was this celebration of these folkloric views of Mexico," he says. "On the one hand, [they touted] our Indian heritage, what they called 'the heroic indigenous.' Or, it was mostly about the complete caricature of someone ignorant. There was no middle ground."
The ideology of a permanent, institutionalized revolution that hovered over Cuaron's childhood was riddled with contradictions and absurdities that crystallized when he started speaking to Rodriguez about her own life. "The revolution that was supposed to be about the peasant, forced the peasant to move to the suburbs of the city in conditions of misery," he says.
Roma depicts flashes of the political tumult that would follow. A quarter-century later, in 1994, a professor who had participated in the student protest movement in 1968 adopted the nom de guerre El Subcomandante Marcos and established the Zapatista movement, a guerrilla army of indigenous peasants in Chiapas, to try and address some of these lingering inequalities.
After his father abandoned his family, says Cuaron, Rodriguez and his mother eventually took on co-equal roles as parental figures in the household. During a recent conversation, Rodriguez told Cuaron, "It was as if [your mother] was the husband and I was the wife." Cuaron and Rodriguez grew so close that he often called her mama. "We became a part of [Libo's] family, but it was not always like that," he says. "Even if there was love and care, there was also a very marked journey, which conveys a certain abuse." ~
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alfonso-cuaron-real-problems-challenging-mexico-1176331
Thinking of black-and-white movies, I never tire of this image from High Noon.
CAREFUL HOW YOU SALT YOUR FOOD — OR “NO DEAL” WITH JAPAN
Imre (the man in charge of my solar panel project) told me a story about having gone to Japan, seeking a business deal with a Japanese firm. The two Americans did their presentation, and then a meal was served to all. Imre’s boss reached for the salt shaker and sprinkled salt over his food. From the changed facial expressions of the Japanese team, Imre suddenly knew: no deal.
The concluding words from the leader of the Japanese team were: “If he had tasted the food first, and then salted it, we would have signed the deal. But since he salted it before tasting it, we know what kind of person he is and we don’t wish to work with him.”
I don’t know if they perceived the American boss as careless, illogical, impatient, thoughtless, impulsive, or what (maybe, more than anything, impolite toward his hosts) — but this small act wrecked the deal.
Wild boar, Book of Hours, Bruges or Ghent, 15th century*
MARTIN LUTHER KING’S 1967 SPEECH: “BEYOND VIETNAM”
~ “Most Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.
It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today.
Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers. Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”
In his speech, which he delivered exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, King foresaw how the war implied something larger about the nation. It was, he said, “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality … we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ committees for the next generation … unless there is a significant and profound change in American life.”
King’s prophecy connects the war in Vietnam with our forever wars today, spread across multiple countries and continents, waged without end from global military bases numbering around 800. Some of the strategy for our forever war comes directly from lessons that the American military learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass bombing; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of gruesome images from the battlefronts; and encouraging the reverence of soldiers.
You can draw a line from the mantras of “thank you for your service” and “support our troops” to American civilian regret about not having supported American troops during the war in Vietnam. This sentimental hero worship actually serves civilians as much as the military. If our soldiers can be absolved of any unjust taint, then the public who support them is absolved too. Standing in solidarity with our multicultural, diverse military prevents us from seeing what they might be doing to other people overseas and insulates us from the most dangerous part about King’s speech: a sense of moral outrage that was not limited by the borders of nation, class or race but sought to transcend them.
What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”
Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today.” ~
http://time.com/5505453/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam/?fbclid=IwAR1ruITKsk77zQHSO_2akQF2texfDVJTa2pFSSGwyHqJ5GO7-4BhyeU9Tg8
Oriana:
I especially love the notion of the “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” If that shift happens, a lot will naturally follow.
John Guzlowski:
I saw some stats recently suggesting we have been at war with someone somewhere for 93% of the time we’ve been a nation. I think Americans like to ignore this about us. They like to think we’re the peaceful kingdom. I remember when I was teaching a course called War Stories. I would always begin with the students writing how they were touched by war. All of them had no trouble writing it. All of them had been touched by war.
Tilford Bartman:
King was successful in every single battle he fought in the South, and pretty quickly vanquished Jim Crow. When he went North and began to take on what at that time the White power structure to challenge the system of economic discrimination and discrimination in housing in the North he ran into what was pretty much a brick wall largely from urban white ethnic machine politicians and groups. I think he said that he ran into as much or more hatred and determined opposition in Chicago as he did in Alabama. He was actually beaten in the street in Chicago.
“Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Wilde at Work, a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley*
“If God created the universe, who created God? If God didn’t need a creator, why does the universe?” ~ Matt Flumerfelt
Peridot in Volcanic Lava from the mountains of Canary Islands in Spain — a kind of “cosmic egg”Charles:
The peridot egg is definitely sculpted and then polished into an egg shape.
*
The two great European narcotics: alcohol and Christianity. ~ Nietzsche
Oriana:
It’s the unexpectedness of the second narcotic that makes this a startling statement. As someone said, Nietzsche is the master of the disruptive aphorism.
To my knowledge, Nietzsche wasn't familiar with Marx's “religion is the opium of the people” (Opium des Volkes), published in 1844 but hardly paid much attention to back then (if Marx had to depend on his income from publishing, he would have starved). Yet it may be assumed that intellectuals of the era had formed this opinion in one form or another, perceiving religion as a consolation favored by the poor and the desperate. “Your reward will be in heaven” and “Christ will dry every tear” were attractive promises that until fairly recently were rarely dismissed as “pie in the sky.”
And the New Age movement? It offers what might be called an individualist-universalist perspective. Louise Hay (whose wisdom has been helpful to me) says, “In the Aquarian Age we are learning to go within to find our savior. We are the power we are looking for. Each of us is totally linked with the Universe and with Life.”
Does Nietzsche's observation still hold? When faced with an adversity (or, as a friend said, “Shit happens” is a translation of the First Noble Truth), some people drink, others pray, still others go to a therapist or a psychic (therapists themselves go to psychics), some meditate and seek an answer within — and now, increasing, many seek answers on the Internet.
It's interesting that I first remembered this quotation as “the two great American narcotics” — and, not sure who said it, I wondered if Oscar Wilde would have been so daring. Well, that's the way the brain works — instead of accuracy, it transforms a statement into what is relevant and more familiar to us.
By the way, it's unfair to Marx to use the short form of the quotation. Marx also saw religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
The decaying St. Bonaventure church in Philadelphia — odd, for some reason I never thought I'd see the decay of religion at this kind of literal level.*
A BOY OR A GIRL? IT’S IN THE FATHER’S GENES
~ “[A recent] Newcastle University study suggests that an as-yet undiscovered gene controls whether a man’s sperm contains more X or more Y chromosomes, which affects the sex of his children. On a larger scale, the number of men with more X sperm compared to the number of men with more Y sperm affects the sex ratio of children born each year.
A study of hundreds of years of family trees suggests a man's genes play a role in him having sons or daughters. Men inherit a tendency to have more sons or more daughters from their parents. This means that a man with many brothers is more likely to have sons, while a man with many sisters is more likely to have daughters.
MORE BOYS BORN AFTER A WAR
In many of the countries that fought in the World Wars, there was a sudden increase in the number of boys born afterwards. The year after World War I ended, an extra two boys were born for every 100 girls in the UK, compared to the year before the war started. The gene, which Mr Gellatly has described in his research, could explain why this happened.
As the odds were in favor of men with more sons seeing a son return from the war, those sons were more likely to father boys themselves because they inherited that tendency from their fathers. In contrast, men with more daughters may have lost their only sons in the war and those sons would have been more likely to father girls. This would explain why the men that survived the war were more likely to have male children, which resulted in the boy-baby boom.
In most countries, for as long as records have been kept, more boys than girls have been born. In the UK and US, for example, there are currently about 105 males born for every 100 females.
It is well-documented that more males die in childhood and before they are old enough to have children. So in the same way that the gene may cause more boys to be born after wars, it may also cause more boys to be born each year.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081211121835.htm
WHITE TREES
When the white trees are no longer in sight
they are telling us something,
like the body that undresses
when someone is around,
like the woman who wants
to read what her nude curves
are trying to say,
of what it was to be together,
lips on lips
but it’s over now, the town
we once loved in, the maps
we once drew, the echoes that
once passed through us
as if they needed something we had.
~ Nathalie Handal
There are plenty of trees (conifers, mainly spruce) in this photo of a mountain peak (Śnieżka) in Western Poland. They just happen to be under heavy snow.
No comments:
Post a Comment