Rooftop cat organizer (by Avantgardens)*
I’M ALWAYS ASKED
WHERE I AM FROM
After the hundredth time I knew
I’d hear that question
for the rest of my life.
I cried myself to sleep.
Many times. Many times.
Then I woke up and asked,
Where am I from?
Whose words do you speak,
my Old Church Slavonic mouth?
Who do you long for,
my Sephardic thigh?
Feet, did you walk
all the way from Ur?
Arms, did you build
the pyramids?
Hands, did you glean
in foreign fields?
Whom did you give birth to,
hips, licked by tongues of
firelight, steep bent shadows
kneeling down? Where
are we from? Let us ask
our mother, the Great She-Bear,
our father, the wolf.
~ Oriana
Relevant? Yes — because: Where are we from? especially if we keep on going farther and farther back? The multiplicity of “home” is staggering.
Catrin Welz-Stein*
WHAT HEMINGWAY CUT FROM FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Spain became a battleground in the fight between freedom and fascism. Fascism prevailed. To gain a powerful and palpable impression of the civil war in Spain you can do no better than to read Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is a story about a young American volunteer in the International Brigades, named Robert Jordan, who is attached to an anti-fascist guerrilla unit in the mountains of Spain. All of life—hope, fear, and love—plays out in three days of intense action. Though entirely a work of fiction, it transports you to that time and place so that you feel as though you have experienced it yourself. For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s longest and, for many readers, finest novel and his most in-depth treatment of war. It is also simply a great story.
An ardent lover of Spain since his first visit there, when he was twenty-four, to see the bullfights at Pamplona in 1923, Hemingway followed the Spanish conflict from its inception. At the onset of the war he supported the Loyalist cause as the chairman of the Ambulance Committee for the Medical Bureau of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy and through his own personal contributions to buy ambulances, a form of support sanctioned by the U.S. government, which was not yet involved in the conflict. Having volunteered as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, Hemingway knew from firsthand experience the critical value of medical aid in wartime. He also supported the Spanish Republic when, in 1937, together with Jörg Ivens, he produced the movie The Spanish Earth, which was for him a new kind of writing endeavor.
In his speech to the American Writers Congress at Carnegie Hall on June 4, 1937, Hemingway discusses how a writer needs to write truly in order to create “in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it,” how dangerous it is to write the truth in war, and how no good writer can do his job working in a fascist state, which is built on lies. It received a standing ovation and remains to this day a powerful commentary on the importance of a writer’s accurate record of war and its atrocities.
Myths about Ernest Hemingway—the hard-living, hard-drinking, celebrity he-man—have proliferated almost to the same extent as his literary fame and have inevitably clouded opinions of his work, especially for those who have not read it or read it closely. Even a writer as fine as Orhan Pamuk has misjudged Hemingway’s literature, referring to “his war-loving heroes” since war is the focus of so much of his writing. Such an assessment of Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s greatest literary war hero, would be totally inaccurate. To be sure, Hemingway appreciated the deep bonds forged in wartime among its fellow combatants, but he viewed war itself as a crime against humanity. He explained to F. Scott Fitzgerald why he thought war made such a good subject for writing: “. . . war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” The complexities of war and its many contradictions can make it very difficult to write about, but Hemingway succeeds beautifully in For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of the greatest war novels of all time.
His regimen was to begin writing at eight-thirty in the morning and continue until two or three in the afternoon, the same practice he had established with A Farewell to Arms. He frequently recorded the number of words he wrote each day, which ranged from about three hundred to over a thousand (see Figure 7). On the fourth of April he wrote to his friend Tommy Shevlin: “It is the most important thing that I’ve done and it is the place in my career as a writer where I have to write a real one.” Later that month, Martha Gellhorn, his new love, joined him in Cuba and found Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”) in San Francisco di Paula outside of Havana. Hemingway soon moved in with her and continued to work on the book there until late August 1939. By May 23, 1939, he had completed 199 pages of the manuscript, and by July 10, 352 pages.
By April 20, 1940, he told Max Perkins that he had thirty-two chapters completed. That month he decided on a title. As he had done in the past, he turned to the Bible and Shakespeare for inspiration, and after considering some twenty-five possibilities he settled on The Undiscovered Country. But he was not completely satisfied with it. Persevering, he looked to the Oxford Book of English Verse where he found a quote from John Donne, which expressed the interconnectedness of humanity that matched the aspirations of his work. On April 21 he wired Max Perkins that he had decided on the title For Whom the Bell Tolls. By the beginning of July he was working on the last chapter and contemplating how to end it. He considered having an epilogue, which he sent to Max Perkins, who describes it in some detail. However, he ultimately decided against it. On August 26 Hemingway wrote Perkins:
~ You see that the epilogue only shows that good generals suffer after an unsuccessful attack (which isn’t new); that they get over it (that’s a little newer) Golz haveing killed so much that day is forgiving of Marty because he has that kindliness you get sometimes. I can and do make Karkov see how it will all go. But that seems to me to date it. The part about Andres at the end is very good and very pitiful and very fine.
But it really stops where Jordan is feeling his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.
You see every damn word and action in this book depends on every other word and action. You see he’s laying there on the pine needles at the start and that is where he is at the end. He has had his problem and all his life before him at the start and he has all his life in those days and, at the end there is only death there for him and he truly isn’t afraid of it at all because he has the chance to finish his mission. ~
There are many cases where Hemingway expands on passages from the first draft to make them more poignant, such as the lovemaking scenes between Robert Jordan and Maria or El Sordo reflecting on life during his last stand on the hilltop (Appendix III, n. 25). The manuscript shows how Hemingway grappled with trying to translate certain words in the Spanish language. He was also very familiar with the danger of censorship and its impact on book sales, having dealt with these issues in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he tried to avoid such problems as much as possible at the outset while still conveying the realism that was central to his storytelling. His editor, Max Perkins, and publisher, Charles Scribner, had very few criticisms of the manuscript text. Scribner objected to the graphic wording of the scene in chapter 31 where Robert Jordan masturbates the night before battle. Hemingway cut the offending sentence, “There is no need to spill that on the pine needles now,” and wrote instead, “There are no pine needles that need that now as I will need it tomorrow.”
In response to Scribner’s objection, Hemingway also changed at the galley stage Robert Jordan’s status as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party to someone working under communist discipline. However, while Perkins and Scribner were both concerned by Pilar’s discussion of the stench of death and suggested removing it, Hemingway insisted that it was important and left it as he wrote it originally.
Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820), his graphic etchings of the Spanish struggle against Napoleon’s army, were well known to my grandfather, who owned a set that was made from the original plates during the Spanish Civil War. Goya’s images of executions, such as the etching entitled “Y no hai remedio” (“And there is nothing to be done”), are a visual pretext for some of the more powerful scenes in the novel, like the brutal execution of citizens described by Pilar in chapter 10. In a passage cut from this very chapter of the novel, Hemingway wrote that “You heard about it; you heard the shots. You saw the bodies but no Goya yet had made the pictures.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls was an immediate success. Hemingway wrote to his first wife, Hadley, that it was “selling like frozen daiquiris in hell.” It has had tremendous impact and has been valued for its accurate depiction of guerrilla warfare. Fidel Castro famously said that he had used it as a kind of training manual for his military insurrection that began in December of 1956 and played out in the southern mountains of Cuba until his reverberant guerrilla triumph over the government of Cuba in 1959. When I visited Cuba in early November of 2002 as part of a delegation to preserve my grandfather’s papers at Finca Vigía, I had the opportunity to meet Castro. I asked him what parts of the book were especially instructive for him and he recalled that the passage about machine-gun placement in the mountains was perhaps the most instructive.
In their recent documentary on the Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick interviewed a Vietnamese woman, the writer Le Minh Khue, who as a youth volunteer working on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War carried with her a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Le Minh Khue greatly admired Robert Jordan and learned a great deal from his character about how to endure war. These are but two testaments to the realism of the book in its many parts.
Hemingway, in his own words, believed that “A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a goodwriter is creating something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth.” As Graham Greene wrote in his review of the book, For Whom the Bell Tolls is “a record more truthful than history.” ~ Sean Hemingway, one of Hemingway’s grandsons
https://lithub.com/what-hemingway-cut-from-for-whom-the-bell-tolls/?fbclid=IwAR341vMwzFGzjjv4nTP90SAN1LEMeqz0sdxDqB2p1Vq6Lb9hJQ1FATy8QrY
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“Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. . . What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.” ~ Ray Bradbury
WARREN BUFFET: THE TWO-LETTER WORD THAT CAN MAKE YOU A TOP ACHIEVER
~ “Billionaire Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, is in his late eighties and still capturing the world's attention as the second richest person on the planet (as of this writing).
So, how has he done it? Actually, it's not so much about what he has done as it is what he hasn't done. With all the demands on him every day, Buffett learned a long time ago that the greatest commodity of all is time. He simply mastered the art and practice of setting boundaries for himself.
That's why this Buffett quote remains a powerful life lesson. The mega-mogul said:
"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."
Whether he meant saying no in the investment sense is not so important; what is important is that his advice, in whatever context, can apply to anyone arriving at the crossroads of daily decision-making.
We have to know what to shoot for to simplify our lives. It means saying no over and over again to the unimportant things flying in our direction every day and remaining focused on saying yes to the few things that truly matter.
Steve Jobs agreed. It’s about focus. Jobs prophetically supported this notion of saying no at an Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997. Here's what he said:
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
Like Jobs and Buffett, it's hushing that loud voice in your head when it tempts you with yet another sexy proposition that might steer you off course. You say a resounding NO! when it asks, "Should I take this opportunity? It may never come around again." Sometimes, the best course of action is not taking any action.
Jim Collins, famous author of the mega-bestseller Good to Great, once suggested that instead of to-do lists, we should make "stop-doing" lists. Because in obsessing over to-do lists full of things that don't really matter, we spend less time saying yes to the things that do." ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/warren-buffett-says-this-1-simple-habit-separates-successful-people-from-everyone-else?utm_source=pocket-newtab
And let's not forget to give credit to the Bauhaus architect Luis Mies van der Rohe who said LESS IS MORE.
I know I'm preaching to myself. My natural tendency is to run to excess, so I need keep remembering this.
Also, as I must have quoted this a gazillion times: "We manage best when we manage small." ~ Linda Gregg
"Cultivate one garden, and you'll birth worlds." ~ Kate Braverman
"Too many plants" ~ José, commenting on my gardening
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WE NEED BOTH FANTASY AND THE RETURN TICKET TO REALITY
~ “I’ve been saying there’s nothing wrong with escapism except when people pretend it’s real for an extra rush. I’ve been acting like it’s a simple choice to remember that you’re embracing myths while still getting the rush and motivation you need from them.
It’s possible but not easy to visit fantasy but keep the return ticket to reality in your pocket.
Setting aside the enormous difficulty in distinguishing real from fantasy, our fantasies are guidance, our impetus for focusing our willpower power. We often need to treat our fantasies as real. We’re not just indulging in pretending they’re reality for extra buzz. Soldiers need to feel they’re fulfilling their true patriotic duty. Those suffering enormous hardship in this life often need to believe in a mythical afterlife just to keep on keeping on.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Four Bishops Fountain, Saint Sulpice, Paris (I'm in love with that lion)Oriana:
We need the myth of Paris as much as we need the real city. Of course we are more likely to donate toward the restoration of Notre Dame than to various other causes that logically are perhaps more pressing — but don’t have the myth and the beauty to inspire us.
Sure, it’s easy to go to a movie like Star Wars and thoroughly enjoy what we know is “not real.” And yet, even so, those characters deeply enter our psyche because the ground is ready. Yoda, with his calm voice and unflappable manners of a sage, has become a guru to millions. Princess Leia, for all the toughness she shows as one of the leaders of the Resistance, wears a long dress and a strange hairdo (a crown substitute?) because she has to fulfill the archetype of a princess, which we are far from successfully updating — note any bridal outfit, the virgin-white dress and veil. So even when we are aware that something is fantasy, the myth can affect us more than our mundane reality. And when we are not even aware, as may happen with political ideologies — all false, all doomed — we need an enormous drive for truth, an unflinching skepticism, to keep from falling for it.
And we can’t expect unflinching skepticism from the young. They needs ideals, and role models to look up to. We need to remind them that nobody’s perfect — but gently, gently.
On the other hand, I’ve been through severe hardship (OK, not combat) without needing the myth of the afterlife or some protective Big Daddy in the Sky. Some things, once you stop believing in them, nothing can make you believe in them again — once you see, you can’t unsee it — but then I speak only for myself and for some people I know, who said, “No, I wasn’t praying — I was too busy just suffering.” As Anne Sexton put it, “Need is not quite belief.”
Or, as Orwell shows in 1984, it takes torture to make you believe that 2+2=5. Or severe early indoctrination. You could say that 2+2=5 is religion. Once you leave it, it's very very hard to suspend your thinking and rejoin the stuff you outgrew — no matter how bad the heartbreak (or chronic physical pain).
Mary:
Yes . . . no matter how much you want the comfort of belief, it's simply impossible.
Oriana: THE KIND OF COMFORT AVAILABLE TO NON-BELIEVERS
In spite of the way I was brought up, eventually I’ve learned total self-acceptance and the principle of never criticizing yourself, of being completely supportive of yourself. I’ve learned the technique of baby steps. I’ve learned that not falling apart and “bravely soldiering on” was actually easiest. But even with life wisdom, you need to remain on guard against ideas that are basically magical thinking, or air-headed New Age delusions. Yes, as Jeremy says, it’s not easy to always keep the return ticket to reality in your pocket.
In part I blame Plato, who set out to make us think that what’s in front of our eyes is inferior: shadows in a cave, meager distortion from the ideal. He may not have invented the myth of the Missing Half, but he popularized it — though now we use terms such as Soulmate or Twin Flame. But Missing Half is best and easiest to debunk. As James Hollis points out, we are not spheres — we are complex polyhedrons. We are lucky to meet people (it won’t be just one person) who align along certain facets, but don’t ever expect a perfect fit. And without that expectation, and knowing that “nobody’s perfect,” we becoming more accepting of others in general, including potential mates.
Yet without the myth of the Missing Half, would we see similarities in a potential love object quite as readily? Thank goodness we don’t apply such fantasy standards of compatibility to friends. “Friendship is more important than love,” my mother used to say — but not when I was going through my first loves. I understood it only when I was ripe for that piece of wisdom.
Mary:
It seems to me that the essential return ticket to reality may be getting harder and harder to hold on to. Of course we have the continuous assault on reality that seems a central strategy of our current president and his minions… the torrent of lies and constant referrals to 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' has the unsettling effect of making reality seem a slippery and untrustworthy game of confusing shadows and conflicting stories. What does a phrase like 'alternative facts' mean but that there are no facts — or you simply choose the ones you believe will suit your purpose? And in such an unreliable world, with nothing solid to stand on, how is action even possible?? Doesn’t it become harder and harder to evaluate what is being broadcast on all channels??
It reminds me of the “everyone's entitled to their own opinion”— which tends to flatten reality in the same way, as though every opinion has an Equal Weight, and the significance of opinion trumps the significance of fact. So even opinions based on ignorance, prejudice, blind faith, hatred or fear must be allowed for, given voice, given a stage, respected.
None of this bodes well for us. But it all seems part of a trend well under way before our current political leadership entered the race. So much of our culture has become involved in fantasy life. Think of "reality TV." The premise that what we see is "real" is itself so thin and flimsy that is is laughable — everything is so obviously staged, so manipulated, and yet people watch, avidly, the "naked and alone" who are being filmed by fully clothed and well-fed cameramen, the hungry "survivors" competing in a "game" where food and safety are right there, but just outside camera range, The "bachelor" and "bachelorette" are seeking true love and commitment from someone they have to choose from a panel of hopefuls, while the camera and audience watch.
On some level the audience must know the whole thing is artificial, staged, edited, manipulated, and yet people follow these narratives closely, and seem to make an emotional investment in the characters and stories, as though these inauthentic narratives are real. Yes we do this with novels, and movies, but here there seems to be a deliberate blurring of the border between real and fake, true and false. Also disturbing is the development of online reality "worlds" that started out like games but are more like "alternative lives" for those involved, who recreate themselves as avatars in these artificial worlds, and lead busy fantasy lives there, often using real money to buy imaginary things for their imaginary lives.
This is all very Orwellian, and frightening. People are investing themselves in these alternative realities to a degree that makes them ever more vulnerable to obfuscation and manipulation . If you can no longer distinguish reality and fantasy you lose the foundation for freedom of thought and action. And you might even be convinced it was all your own idea.
I don't know if I've explained this clearly enough, it's not simply enjoying a bit of escapism, it's choosing to remain in the false narrative and being unable to see it as false...disappearing into a story you cant find your way out of.
Oriana:
That’s exactly what Hannah Arendt kept saying: The essence of totalitarianism is not, say, militarized police, but constant lying that makes it impossible for the average person to tell truth from a lie. It’s an assault on our sense of reality.
It’s not just politics. Religion has been a non-stop lie since the dawn of time. And later came advertising — lying in a perfectly legal way!
Nowadays it’s become a recurring theme: it’s getting harder and harder to have a solid sense of reality. Not that there is such a thing as “absolute truth,” but some statements have much more reliable evidence behind them than others. But there is an assault on such statements: an assault on science is especially bothersome.
And as for reliable news reporting: about Russia, for instance, you can already say, “First they came for the journalists.”
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Vogelherd Horse, 35,000 years old, carved in mammoth ivoryMary:
Just looking at that horse I know what it would feel like in my hand.
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“Human beings are by nature actors, who cannot become something until they have first pretended to be it.” ~ W.H. Auden
ONLY THE INNER CHILD “GETS RESPECT”
The concept surfaced in 1963 as part of Transactional Analysis. It’s part of the “three selves” theory: Child-Parent-Adult. The child stands mainly for feelings, the parent for collective rules, and the adult is the thinker who can make wise, “autonomous” decisions. The adult is not on automatic, simply repeating behaviors from childhood or copied from parents. The adult questions the rules, but doesn’t assume that if you just let the inner child finger paint and play with the food, all will be well.
Whatever the usefulness of this model may be, what interests me is that only the “inner child” gained popularity. The phrase has entered the language. Thus we are urged to take good care of our “inner child.” That’s the self (or sub-personality) that’s valued most. “Take good care of your adult” would be met with incomprehension. It’s assumed that the best and most “fun” part of ourselves is the inner child.
I don’t know if this has to do with the broader culture: little children are adored, but as they grow older they are seen in less positive light and meet with harsher treatment. They enter the winner/loser system. The frequency of stress-related illnesses and depression should probably make us pause and ask some questions about values and priorities. Do we perhaps have “adult abuse” -- bad work environments, for instance, inadequate pay, abusive bosses, etc.? Is it OK to expect a new mother to know how to take care of an infant with no help? Or, if a parent develops Alzheimer’s, it’s OK to expect the daughter to assume the burden of care?
I was very grateful to the hospice workers for helping me when my mother was dying. I was extremely grateful that someone came every day, and that I could call 24/7 if I had a question. Such beautiful care when a person is dying . . . I began to wonder if this kind of care would be possible before then, when the person is not dying but simply under severe stress. The invariable answer was that it would cost too much to have such programs. Hospice actually saves money (it’s very expensive to die in a hospital), so it took off. Other helping programs would be in the “humanitarian” category, and thus get very low priority — if any.
Another point where I disagree with the worship of the inner child is creativity. The element of playfulness in creative work should not blind us to the fact that Michelangelo sculpting the Pietà is not like a child playing in a sandbox, and Yeats writing 56 drafts of “Sailing to Byzantium” is not like a babbling four-year-old who’s having fun with words. A culture that disvalues the “adult” may be admitting that typical adulthood is not very rewarding and creative venues are scarce.
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IS THE STEREOTYPE OF MASCULINITY STIFLING BOYS’ FEELINGS?
~ “While society is chipping away at giving girls broader access to life’s possibilities, it isn’t presenting boys with a full continuum of how they can be in the world. To carve out a masculine identity requires whittling away everything that falls outside the norms of boyhood. At the earliest ages, it’s about external signifiers like favorite colors, TV shows, and clothes. But later, the paring knife cuts away intimate friendships, emotional range, and open communication.
There’s research connecting this shedding process to the development, in some adolescent boys, of depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. In her 2014 documentary The Mask You Live In, the filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom features the voices of dozens of teen boys describing their progression from childhoods rich with friendships to teen years defined by posturing and pressure to prove their manhood. Some of the boys, who present tough exteriors, admit to having suicidal thoughts. The film flashes news clips from the most notable mass shootings of that time—Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook—each committed by a young man.
“Whether it’s homicidal violence or suicidal violence, people resort to such desperate behavior only when they are feeling shamed and humiliated, or feel they would be, if they didn’t prove that they were real men,” the psychiatrist James Gilligan, who directed Harvard’s Center for the Study of Violence, says in the film.
There are so few positive variations on what a “real man” can look like, that when the youngest generations show signs of reshaping masculinity, the only word that exists for them is nonconforming. The term highlights that nobody knows what to call these variations on maleness. Instead of understanding that children can resist or challenge traditional masculinity from within the bounds of boyhood, it’s assumed that they’re in a phase, that they need guidance, or that they don’t want to be boys.
According to the San Jose State University sociologist Elizabeth Sweet, who studies gender in children’s toys throughout the 20th century, American gender categories are more rigid now than at any time in history, at least when it comes to consumer culture. There may be greater recognition in the abstract that gender exists along a spectrum, but for young children (and their parents), consumer products have a huge influence over identity development and presentation. “Toymakers are saying, well, we can sell each family one toy, or if we make separate versions according to gender, we can sell more toys and make families buy multiples for each gender,” Sweet told me. The same holds true for clothes, baby gear, school supplies, even snack food. And parents begin gender-coding their children’s worlds before those children are even born, sometimes kicked off by “gender reveal” parties, a sort of new version of the baby shower, in which parents-to-be discover the sex of their baby alongside family and friends through a dramatic, colorful display.
“Most nonconforming adult men, when they talk about their upbringing, say their first bully was their dad,” reports Matt Duron, whose wife, Lori Duron, wrote the book Raising My Rainbow, about their gender-creative son. Matt, who had a 20-year career as a police officer in Orange County, California, has been a vocal supporter of his son, though in their conservative region, his stance has been attacked. The Durons’ son, now 11, gave up dresses years ago, but he still loves makeup and wears his hair long. Classmates bully him, but he finds support from his family, and lately at Sephora in his local mall, where male employees demonstrate a different way to be grown men in the world.
There’s a word for what’s happening here: misogyny. When school officials and parents send a message to children that “boyish” girls are badass but “girlish” boys are embarrassing, they are telling kids that society values and rewards masculinity, but not femininity. They are not just keeping individual boys from free self-expression, but they are keeping women down too.
It is lopsided to approach gender equality by focusing only on girls’ empowerment. If society is to find its way to a post-#MeToo future, parents, teachers, and community members need to build a culture of boyhood that fosters empathy, communication, caretaking, and cooperation. But how? Could there be a space or an organization for boys where they’re encouraged to challenge what’s expected of them socially, emotionally, and physically? What would the activities be? What would the corresponding catchwords be to the girls’ “brave” and “strong” other than “cowardly” and “weak”?
It’s a societal loss that so many men grow up believing that showing aggression and stifling emotion are the ways to signal manhood. And it’s a personal loss to countless little boys who, at best, develop mechanisms for compartmentalizing certain aspects of who they are and, at worst, deny those aspects out of existence.
More than a century ago, in the October 1902 edition of London’s Cornhill Magazine, the writer and poet May Byron wrote a piece called “The Little Boy,” in which she talked, among other things, about boys’ evolving mode of dress as they move through childhood. She tied it then, as I do now, to a mildly tragic departure from a boy’s richest relationship with himself:
“Petticoated or kilted, in little sailor suits, and linen smocks, and velvet coats, and miniature reefers, he marches blindly on his destiny,” Byron writes. “Soon he will run his dear little head against that blank wall of foregone conclusions which shuts out fairyland from a workaday world.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/today-s-masculinity-is-stifling?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Bleeding heart — not to be confused with "love lies bleeding”*
IS MARX STILL RELEVANT TODAY?
~ “On August 24 1857 the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed. Within months, more than 1,400 banks had collapsed across America and the shockwave spread outwards to Liverpool and London. By the end of the year it had reached continental Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and Asia. In London, where the suspension of the Bank Charter Act of 1844 had freed the Bank of England to take whatever emergency action was necessary, an obscure German exile was fired into intellectual action. He set himself to diagnosing a new phenomenon, a global economic crisis. Over the previous millennium the world had been swept by religious movements, political upheavals, plagues and famines. 1857 was the first worldwide convulsion in the system of production, credit and exchange. From the efforts of this lonely scholar, known then only to a narrow circle, would emerge an intellectual tradition that would find its place alongside that of Darwin as one of the great legacies of the Victorian age. It would inspire a political movement that spanned the world.
Reading Friedrich Engels’s reportage on The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Marx glimpsed a new reality. He did not use the term capitalism — that would be later coined by his students — but there was no denying the massive dynamic resulting from the combination of competitive capital accumulation and technological change.
Marx and Engels were far from alone in their criticism of the effects of the industrial revolution. But whereas many of their contemporaries reacted by opting out, seeking salvation in utopian communities, the two Germans remained true to their upbringing in Hegel’s philosophy: there was no escape from history and its logic. The two men wagered that the revolutionary transformation of capitalism would come not from without, but from within. For all its terrible side effects, the enormous dynamic of industrial development could not be suppressed or sidestepped. It would have to be transcended.
The real drama of world history was the epic of capitalist development. In particular, Marx was fascinated by the spectacle of America’s relentless expansion. The really decisive event in 1848 was the conquest of California and the ensuing gold rush that promised to reorient not just the American but the world economy towards the Pacific. It was both dazzlingly dynamic and terrifyingly unstable. Nine years later, the crisis of 1857 revealed how connected the world had become. News of a financial failure in the Missouri river valley sent markets in Britain crashing. Would this be the “big one”, the crisis that threw open the door to the new type of revolution? Marx would surely have insisted on the need to stare the full drama of our current situation in the face.
Despite Marx’s feverish activity in the reading room of the British Museum, the pace of events outran him. By 1858 the rebound was already in full swing. His effort to grasp in real time the first crisis of global capitalism resulted in a mass of notes later known to aficionados as the Grundrisse or “Groundwork”, but no finished analysis. Marx knew that he would have to dig deeper. As revolutionary ardor dampened and in the 1860s, the world entered the age of Bismarck, blood and iron and realpolitik, Marx set himself to the analysis of capitalism’s inner workings, concocting a unique synthesis of economic theory, empirical data drawn from factory inspector reports and economic history all mixed with Hegel’s dialectical logic. The result was not economics as we know it, so much as an analysis of how capitalist production and exchange, down to the commodity form itself, gave rise to a world of appearances that conventional economics then sought more or less naively to explain.
The safest thing is to consign Marx to the 19th century. He was the acorn and nothing more. Others take a gloomier view. The seed was blighted from the start. The dismal end was foreseeable. It was not by coincidence that Marx could not finish Das Kapital. It was riddled with contradictions. His personal frustration anticipated that of the Soviet Union.
Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win narrative is pitched in a more upbeat key. His Marx is not a historical relic, nor is he the harbinger of a 20th-century shipwreck. He is the initiator and inspirer of a live intellectual tradition and a model of the kind of capacious thought that is necessary to grasp contemporary modernity. Liedman’s strength is as a political philosopher and he is superbly well-equipped to take us on a tour of Marx’s intellectual workshop. Rather than harping on the incomplete nature of much of Marx’s work, he exposes the richness to be found perhaps particularly in such unfinished works as Grundrisse and the early “Paris manuscripts” of 1844.
What makes returning to the original Marx worthwhile for Liedman is the conceit that with the passing of the 20th-century era of welfare states and Soviet communism, the world of globalized free-market capitalism we inhabit today has much in common with the world about which Marx wrote in the mid-19th century. “It is the Marx of the 19th century,” he tells us, “who can attract the people of the twenty-first”.
Women welders at Lincoln Motor Company, 1918 — don't they look like aliens in a SF movie? Alien slaves . . . This photo makes me grateful for manufacturing robots.What speaks to us today is the true Marx of the mid-Victorian period, not the traduced Marx of the 20th-century state ideologies. This historical ellipse from the first, Victorian age of globalization to the present is seductive, but it ignores the uncomfortable reality of the 20th century, whose legacies include not only the failure of Soviet communism, but also China’s formidable state capitalism, American hyperpower and the existential threat of climate change. It hardly seems likely that Marx would have approved of such a historical sleight of hand. Rather than relying on casual historical analogies, Marx would surely have insisted on the need to stare the full drama of our current situation in the face and in doing so we can indeed take inspiration from his pioneering effort to make sense of both the political failure of 1848 and the economic crisis of 1857.
In 2013, in the wake of another global crisis of capitalism, another European economist published a comprehensive account of recent economic history. Thomas Piketty named his book Capital too. If you read Piketty and Marx back to back, you will not be surprised that generation after generation of readers have been drawn back to Marx. Even the best 21st-century social science pales beside the complexity and richness of Marx’s protean, 19th-century thought, to which Liedman’s readable biography provides a comprehensive and reliable guide.
https://www.ft.com/content/cf6532dc-4c67-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4
Marx traffic lights in Trier, Marx’s hometown in Germany
from another source:
~ “Marx was the first great critic of capitalism,” says Richard Wolff, a visiting professor at the New School in New York and one of the few Marxian economists in American academia. “And nothing has for certain guaranteed the presence and future of Marxism than the existence of capitalism, of which it is, you might say, the critical shadow.”
A central thesis of Marxism is that capitalism has given rise to two hostile classes: the workers, who in order to survive must exchange their labor for wages; and the bourgeoisie, who own the businesses that pay the workers. The bourgeoisie generate profit by paying their workers less than the entire value of the goods that they produce, keeping the rest for themselves.
This extraction of “surplus value” from workers, say Marxists, produces a fundamental contradiction. Employers must maximize profits by keeping wages as low as possible, but they must also continue to sell products, which becomes increasingly difficult as workers’ buying power is limited by low wages. From a employer’s revenue standpoint, the ideal would be to have poorly paid workers and highly paid customers, but that ideal becomes unattainable when pursued by everyone. The system, according to Marxist theory, inevitably feeds upon itself.
“Capital is chasing all over the globe for the cheapest possible labor that it can find, working it as long and as hard and as cheaply as it can,” says Wendy Brown, a political theorist at University of California, Berkeley. “Marx could have explained that to you 200 years ago.”
“The regimes that used his name,” says Professor Sperber, “don’t have a whole lot to do with Marx’s ideas. They were very centralized and bureaucratic. And Marx deeply, deeply hated bureaucrats.”
But even if Marxist regimes failed to implement his ideas, those ideas nonetheless spread. “Marxism in one form or another has penetrated into the history and culture of every country in the face of the Earth,” says Professor Wolff. “It has intermingled with every language, culture, level of historical development, and set of economic conditions and circumstances.”
Seven decades after those first shots were fired in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks’ grand and bloody experiment came to an abrupt halt with economic collapse and dissolution. To many observers, communism’s collapse in 1989 signaled the end of Marxism’s relevance.
But something unexpected happened along the way to what should have been capitalism’s triumph. In late 2007, the global economy imploded in a spectacularly Marxian fashion, leaving the banks themselves suddenly beggared and in need of a public bailout. The central myth of neoliberal capitalism, that market economies are inherently self-regulating, had been punctured, observers say.
“The crash opened up, in the very upset of conventional ways of thinking, a willingness to re-examine old issues that had never been resolved,” says Wolff.
To Professor Brown, the question of Marxism’s contemporary relevance has two answers: yes and no.
“He has tremendous relevance for our time. And I think there are limitations that have to do with his 19th-century context,” she says, noting that Marx never predicted the central role financial institutions would play in industrial economies.
Yet the critical tradition that Marx spawned, which extends across the humanities and social sciences, makes it impossible to contain Marxism entirely in a 19th-century context.” ~
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2018/0504/Karl-Marx-turns-200-Are-his-ideas-still-relevant
Marx’s statue in Chemnitz, Germany. I guess this is brutalist sculpture.*
*
Oriana:
Here I'm reminded of Hollis’s criterion for decided whether or not to do something: Will doing it make you feel like a larger or a smaller person? Nevertheless, Buffett's advice about paring down your focus and saying no to most things is also relevant. "We manage best when we manage small."
*
PROUST: THE ABSENCE OF RELIGIOSITY
“Though I think of Proust as belonging more to the late 19th century, his minute psychological and philosophical explorations of memory were secular. Memory was the only afterlife, the only resurrection.” ~ Edmund White, quoted in the New York Times
~ Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a savior.”
Oriana: A “mystical atheist”! — this is how I first tried to describe myself, honoring my sense of the mysterious and the sacred. Then I realized that “mysterious” was enough, and that my worldview was basically scientific, including the awe at the grandeur of the universe. As for “mystical experiences,” they were created by the brain with the same ease with which the brain created the cinema of dreams and fantasies. Even hallucinations were a perfectly normal neural phenomenon. There was no need to invoke mysticism.
from a blog on Proust: “. . . the notable absence of religiosity in the Narrator's grandmother's death bed scene.
Sure there is a perfunctory priest praying in the corner, but he serves a function not unlike a piece of furniture: he is there simply because he is supposed to be there. We read as the Narrator grapples with many things -- his changeable emotions; the shock he feels when he witnesses what his grandmother has become ("a beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes... panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions" (ML, 458)); the "long, joyous song" that she makes as she nears the end; the improprieties of visitors and servants; and so on. But nobody in the chapter appears to grapple with thoughts of the afterlife, God's divine will, etc. Thankfully, there is no talk of how all of this is according to an unknown, but nevertheless perfect, Plan.”
It strikes me that this may be a good time to review some of the indications that Proust has given us, so far in our reading, as to his relationship with religion. Here are four few passages that I have underlined along the way:
1. While clinging to a hope that he might rekindle his relationship with Gilberte in the new year, the Narrator comments:
“For all that I might dedicate this new year to Gilberte, and, as one superimposes a religion on the blind laws of nature, endeavor to stamp New Year's Day with the particular image that I had formed of it, it was in vain... [I]t was passing in a wintry dusk.. the eternal common substance, the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of old days and years” (WBG, 82).
(In the margin I scrawled: “Yes! atheist!”)
2. While discussing (once again) the unique experience of awakening from sleep, the Narrator off-handedly speculates:
“What is it that guides us, when there has been a real interruption — whether it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourselves? There has indeed been a death... No doubt the room... awakens memories to which other, older memories cling ... And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory” (GW, 111).
(Here I wrote in the margin: “Not likely.” After all, I ask you, if we ascribe the “resurrection of the soul” to a “phenomenon of memory,” doesn't this make absurd the claims of an afterlife? This, it seems to me, is a refutation of religion cleverly disguised as a concession.)
3. When the Narrator first recognizes that his grandmother has suffered a stroke, and is therefore that much closer to death, the Narrator finds that he cannot take her conversation at face value anymore. Her words, he remarks, "assumed a baseless, adventitious, fantastical air, because they sprang from this same being who tomorrow perhaps would have ceased to exist, for whom they would no longer have any meaning, from the non-being -- incapable of conceiving them -- which my grandmother would shortly be" (GW, 425).
(Here, the way I read it anyway, I think Proust is revealing, almost inadvertently, his true estimation of what happens at the expiration of life: i.e., "non-being".)
4. Last one. After recovering from his grandmother's death, the Narrator gladly goes back "into society." One evening, while commenting the unthinking grace and nobility that Saint-Loup brings to everything he does, the Narrator reflects:
"An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise for God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with the creator" (GW, 568).
(This comment strikes me as intended to be a witty one — not a serious argument against the atheist viewpoint. Note that he does not assume it as his own; he introduces it with the phrase "it has even been said.”)
(alas, I’ve lost the link to the article)*
Steve Davidson:
Man created god in his own image. It's in the book of Genesis. The translators just got the words turned around.
Oriana:
I started suspecting that early on. Then as I learned about mythology, it became increasingly obvious that as the image of man kept evolving, the image of god(s) kept changing too. One fascinating thing is that the Yahweh of Genesis definitely had a body, just like the Greek gods, and wasn't all powerful or the sole deity.
Bill Knight:
The turtle that holds the world up was run over by God in his pickup truck.
I'm so glad that finally someone modernized this “chariot” business! Of course these days it's a pick-up truck.
Yahweh in a chariot — nice wheels!*
Since we already spoke about mTOR and longevity, this is a further elucidation.
RAPAMYCIN FOR LIFE EXTENSION?
~ “In the 1990s, pharmacologist Dave Sharp of the University of Texas’s Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies in San Antonio was studying mice with pituitary dwarfism—a condition in which the pituitary gland fails to make enough growth hormone for normal development. The puzzle, Sharp explains, was that research had shown that these hormone-deficient dwarf mice lived longer than normal mice. “I wondered, why is being small connected with longer life?” he says.
Yeast research led by molecular biologist Michael Hall at the University of Basel in Switzerland was to provide Sharp with an unexpected lead. In 1996, a team led by Hall (who would go on to win a Lasker award in 2017 for the work) revealed a new intracellular signaling pathway, mediated by the protein targets of a compound called rapamycin. Using this drug to block the “target of rapamycin” (TOR) proteins in yeast had the same effect as starvation did: treated yeast cells were smaller, but longer-lived than normal cells (Cell, 7:25-42, 1996). For Sharp, it sparked an idea. “Maybe TOR is a nutrient response system, connecting diet restriction and growth-factor restriction,” he recalls thinking. “I proposed that if you fed mice rapamycin, they would live a long time.”
Back then, the hypothesis was unconventional. Rapamycin, a compound first identified in the 1970s in a soil sample from Easter Island, has been used for decades to suppress the immune system in transplant patients; it seemed counterintuitive that it could prolong life, Sharp notes. “Nobody would read my proposals,” he says. “They’d just laugh. You know, ‘An immunosuppressant extending lifespan?’”
But research since then has lent support to Sharp’s theory. Studies in the early 2000s showed that the drug could make nematodes and fruit flies live longer, while research by Sharp and others suggested that TOR signaling is downregulated in long-lived dwarf mice. And a collaboration between Sharp and the Barshop Institute’s Randy Strong, the principal investigator for the National Institute on Aging’s Interventions Testing Program, led to a landmark mouse study that identified rapamycin as the first drug to extend lifespan in mammals (Nature, 460:392-95, 2009). By fine-tuning dosage and delivery systems over the next five years, the pair increased longevity in male mice by 23 percent and in females by 26 percent, compared to control animals (Aging Cell, 13:468–77, 2014).
Researchers have now expanded the study of rapamycin’s lifespan-extending effects to other animal species. For example, an ongoing collaboration between the University of Washington and Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine is studying the effects of rapamycin in companion dogs. Although it’s too early to say whether the drug does indeed extend the healthy lifespan, or healthspan, of the animals, “we found significant improvement in cardiac function after just 10 weeks,” says Texas A&M’s Kate Creevy. As part of her group’s efforts to move the drug towards regulatory approval for use as a pet medicine, the researchers initiated a Phase 2 clinical trial with the animals earlier this year. And because companion dogs, like humans, are more genetically diverse than laboratory animals, the studies represent a step toward better understanding how rapamycin performs in people.
Inhibiting TOR with rapamycin limits cell proliferation, for instance, but also has other, systemic side-effects in humans that are not fully understood. One possible explanation for the longevity connection is that, via the TOR pathway, rapamycin helps to prevent age-related disease. In the 2000s, the drug was shown by multiple groups to have antitumor properties in human cell lines and mice. It also seems to reduce some traits associated with later-age cognitive impairment. A few years ago, for example, the Barshop Institute team discovered that rapamycin improved later-life memory and learning, and reduced the development of amyloid plaques—a key feature of Alzheimer’s disease—in mouse brains (PLOS ONE, 5:e9979, 2010; Aging Cell, 11:326-35, 2012).
There are also more-recent hints that some of rapamycin’s effects could be mediated by the microbiome, which has multiple effects on immune system function. A couple of years ago, a team at the University of Washington got a clue from mouse droppings. “We noticed the feces of rapamycin-treated mice were a lot smaller than those of control mice,” says University of Washington postdoc Alessandro Bitto. “We sent samples to microbiome researchers in Missouri, and they found that gut microorganisms differed significantly between the two groups.” The rapamycin-treated mice in that study not only lived longer on average, but performed better on tests of physical skill and endurance (eLife, 5:e16351, 2016).
Extending such findings to humans is no easy task: decades-long studies are rarely attractive to investors, making human clinical trials on longevity difficult to fund. But studies on the health benefits of rapamycin for humans are gaining traction. A 2014 Novartis study suggested that rapamycin counterintuitively boosted the immune response in elderly humans—last year, the company announced a Phase 2 trial to study the drug’s impact on diseases affecting older people, and on “age-related decline.” And the National Institutes of Health is currently funding a study, led by Dean Kellogg of the Barshop Institute, on rapamycin’s effects on muscle strength, cognition, and immune function in healthy seniors. Meanwhile, the last decade has seen the development of several rapamycin derivatives for the treatment of cancer. For example, the FDA approved the derivative everolimus in 2009 for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma and for multiple other cancer types since.
Researchers such as Sharp have come to see such broad—and sometimes apparently conflicting—applications as an inherent feature of rapamycin biology. “Here’s a drug that could treat cancer and suppress the immune system, which is supposed to be the system that helps you not get cancer,” Sharp says. “So there’s always been a paradox with it.”
Strong sees it differently. “I think there are some gaps in our knowledge,” he says. “That’s why these things are, to us, paradoxical. When we finally figure it out, they won’t be so paradoxical anymore.” ~
https://www.the-scientist.com/notebook/could-rapamycin-help-humans-live-longer-30021
~ “Rapamycin is produced by the bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus and was isolated for the first time in 1972 by Surendra Nath Sehgal and colleagues from samples of Streptomyces hygroscopicus found on Easter Island. The compound was originally named rapamycin after the native name of the island, Rapa Nui. Rapamycin was initially developed as an antifungal agent. However, this use was abandoned when it was discovered to have potent immunosuppressive and antiproliferative properties due to its ability to inhibit mTOR. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in September 1999 and is marketed under the trade name Rapamune by Pfizer (formerly by Wyeth).
Rapamycin has complex effects on the immune system—while IL-12 goes up and IL-10 decreases, which suggests an immunostimulatory response, TNF and IL-6 are decreased, which suggests an immunosuppressive response.
LUPUS: As of 2016 studies in cells, animals, and humans have suggested that mTOR activation as process underlying systemic lupus erythematosus and that inhibiting mTOR with rapamycin may be a disease-modifying treatment. As of 2016 rapamycin had been tested in small clinical trials in people with lupus.” ~
Oriana:
Doses used for immunosuppression after kidney transplant are high and produce side effects. The doses that would be effective for lifespan expansion would presumably be much smaller. The administration might also not be continuous but rather seasonal (based on the idea that winter used to be a season of lower-calorie intake).
Alas, all this is speculative at best. Longevity drugs (including metformin, which helps diabetics live longer than non-diabetics) don’t seem to interest Big Pharma. Fortunately, there are ways to suppress the mTOR signaling pathway through diet, especially the restriction of animal protein. But while certain aminoacids, especially leucine, stimulate mTOR (the acronym stands for “mammalian target of rapamycin”), other aminoacids, including lysine, inhibit mTOR signaling.
Green tea, onions, grapes, strawberries, and cruciferous vegetables (the cabbage family) also inhibit mTOR.
In summary: mTOR is wonderful in childhood when rapid growth is a sign of health. At an older age, however, the activation of mTOR appears to accelerate aging. Broccoli sprouts, here we come!
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PUSH-UPS PREDICT LONGEVITY
~ “Stefanos Kales, a professor at Harvard Medical School, noticed that the leading cause of death of firefighters on duty was not smoke inhalation, burns, or trauma, but sudden cardiac death. This is usually caused by coronary-artery disease. Even in this high-risk profession, people are most likely to die of the same thing as everyone else.
Still, the profession needed effective screening tests to define fitness for duty. Since firefighters are generally physically fit people, Kales’s lab looked at push-ups. He found that they were an even better predictor of cardiovascular disease than a submaximal treadmill test. “The results show a strong association between push-up capacity and decreased risk of subsequent cardiovascular disease,” Kales says.
Usually when studies like these come out, pockets of experts talk about how they should “incorporate it into clinical care” or otherwise take these new metrics seriously to cut down medical costs and to monitor health in ways that are better than body weight. Then the novelty fades, and the system keeps relying on body weight. But Kales contends that metrics beyond BMI and age have to be taken seriously. This is driven in part by the Americans With Disabilities Act, which mandates that people not be discriminated against in occupational settings based on BMI or age.
“Before the ADA, a fire or police department might have a BMI standard where they won’t accept you,” Kales says. “Now they want functional standards.” That is, they want to know whether you can do the job—not if you’re fat.
The push-up study could reasonably extend beyond firefighters. “Push-ups are another marker in a consistent story about whole-body exercise capacity and mortality,” says Michael Joyner, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic whose work focuses on the limits of human performance. “Any form of whole-body engagement becomes predictive of mortality if the population is large enough.”
That is to say: Health is not simply about push-ups. There’s also nothing magic about grip strength or walking speed. But these abilities tend to tell us a lot. Firefighters with higher push-up capacity were more likely to have low blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood sugar, and not to smoke. People with the lowest grip strengths were more likely to smoke and have higher waist circumference and body-fat percentage, watch more TV, and eat fewer fruits and vegetables.
Granted, Joyner and other experts I heard from estimated that the number of Americans who can do a single push-up is likely only about 20 or 30 percent. But that’s an issue of practice more than destiny. “Most people could get to the point of doing 30 or 40—unless they have a shoulder problem or are really obese,” Joyner says.
Doing things that produce tangible, short-term results can lead to a domino effect of health behaviors. “If someone reads this article and starts doing push-ups, it would be a statement about their general conscientiousness and motivation,” says Joyner, “and that speaks to so many other health behaviors. People who follow guidelines, eat well, get their kids vaccinated—they tend to engage in other healthy behaviors.”
This “conscientious” type of behavior, Joyner notes, “is about as predictive of mortality as fitness itself.” And unlike BMI, push-ups and the like tend to encourage people to be conscious of what the body can achieve, not body image itself. Conscientiousness, Joyner says, means seeing a connection between how you live and what happens later, and behaving accordingly.
This sort of metric could equip us to cope with a treatment-based health-care system that teaches people that we can do what we like and then be healed with a pill or procedure. The marketing and sale of medical services tears down conscientiousness. Functional metrics of health could help build it back up.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/push-ups-body-weight-bmi/592834/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
ending on beauty:
WE GREW UP IN PLACES THAT ARE GONE
Why do we look
for sutures and siblings
in all the wrong places,
when Google gives us
22,950,000,000 results
for the word home?
~ Jennifer Robertson
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New Hampshire by Alex Kanevsky, 2013
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