A glimpse of a different era, just before the “suicide of Europe” (i.e. WW1): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Street, Berlin, 1913*
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offense
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
~ W.H. Auden
From The Guardian: ~ “September 1, 1939” is undoubtedly one of the great poems of the 20th century, one that marks the beginning of the second world war and which readers have returned to at times of national and personal crisis. It is also a work that Auden came to despise, and whose troubled history therefore provides us with a rare glimpse of a writer in the act of self-invention and self-reinvention, and with a unique insight into the many ways in which a poem might be interpreted, misinterpreted, used, reused, appropriated and recycled. “September 1, 1939” is a lesson in how masterpieces are produced and consumed and become incorporated into people’s lives – how, in the words of another of Auden’s poems, “In Memory of WB Yeats”, the work of a poet becomes “modified in the guts of the living”.
The poem was first published on 18 October 1939 in the American magazine the New Republic. Auden had arrived in New York earlier that year with his friend and fellow writer Christopher Isherwood. The two men had quickly established themselves on the US literary scene: schmoozing, carousing, making contact with editors, and undertaking speaking and lecturing engagements. In April 1939, Auden had met an 18-year-old, Chester Kallman, 14 years his junior, who was to become his life partner; in the new world, Auden was making a new life for himself. Back in Europe, meanwhile, the storm clouds were gathering.
AJP Taylor, in his famous account in The Origins of the Second World War (1961), claimed that a second world war “was implicit since the moment when the first world war ended”. It became explicit at exactly 4.30am on Friday 1 September 1939, when the German panzer divisions that had been gathering on the Polish border began their advance. The front page headline of the New York Times that day tapped out the news in telegraphese: GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO REICH. On 3 September the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the nation on the BBC: the country, he announced, was at war with Germany.
Auden’s poem consists of 99 lines, written in trimeters, divided into nine 11-line stanzas with a shifting rhyme scheme, each stanza being composed of just one sentence so that – as the poet Joseph Brodsky pointed out – the thought unit corresponds exactly to the stanzaic unit, which corresponds also to the grammatical unit. Which is neat. Too neat.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade
Who is this “I”? And why are they sitting in a dive? And is it real or is it imagined, this place? And why the double adjectives?
Trying to understand how a poem works is one thing: trying to understand what’s wrong with it is another. “Rereading a poem of mine,” Auden wrote, looking back, “1st September, 1939, after it had been published I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.”
Auden was always inclined towards radical self-editing but “September 1, 1939” is unlike any of the other poems he attempted to rewrite and abandon: it is the most famous example in literary history of a writer attempting to revise his work, and of readers refusing to allow it. Auden may have attempted to hack up the poem and destroy it but it has been saved from dismemberment and death, time and again: “September 1, 1939”, among other things, is the world’s greatest zombie poem. It won’t die – and never will – because people want it to be true.
Most famously and significantly, in the aftermath of 9/11, many American newspapers reprinted Auden’s poem in its entirety: it was widely circulated and discussed online and in print. It seemed prophetic, wise and relevant, almost too good to be true. This is partly because it mentions September and New York, circulating fears, and the unmentionable odor of death, all in its first stanza. It was the right poem, in the right place, for a wrong time. At the end of it we come away with an image of some unnamed individual, in New York, speaking directly of their fears and concerns: a lonely, frightened figure, surveying a terrifying world outside. It was a work that spoke to the moment.
Oddly, with Auden this had happened before. In the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral, Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues” – the one that begins “Stop all the clocks” – is read at the funeral of a gay character, played by Simon Callow. To coincide with the release of the film, Faber published a pamphlet of 10 of Auden’s poems, titled Tell Me the Truth About Love: there were reports of sales of more than 275,000 copies. According to the poet James Fenton, Auden’s new-found popularity came about because “it seems that a large number of people, since the Aids epidemic, have become familiar with the experience of funerals at which a devastated boyfriend has to pay tribute to his prematurely dead lover. So Auden’s poem found an audience that needed it, nearly 60 years after its composition.”
My explanation for the long life and afterlife of “September 1, 1939” is that it’s one of those poems that seems to provide simple answers to difficult questions, which is not necessarily a good thing. In studying it I’ve come to the conclusion that poetry can indeed uplift and sublimate and help us to make things good, but that it can also encourage us in false and sentimental ideas and emotions. Poetry can guide us, and it can lead us astray. And we have to acknowledge this, if we want to grant poetry its proper place in our lives.
“The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts,” wrote Auden, “is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.” Auden died in 1973, most of his best work produced in the 1930s and 40s. It turns out that we need him now as much as ever.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/31/wh-auden-september-1-1939-poem
Oriana:
September 1 is a difficult date for me because of an un-erasable memory: It was the first day of school, and the first thing we were told in the Assembly Hall was: “On September 1, 1939, Polish children did not go to school.” And we were told, again and again, about how the Nazi invasion began — in general terms, softened so we wouldn’t be terrified (but we already knew worse stories from our parents).
A patriotic poem was typically recited (“I Announce an Alert for the City of Warsaw” was the most frequent choice); then some Chopin was played on the piano, either rousing or melancholy. I forget if we had to listen to the sound of the air-raid sirens as well — even if we didn’t, mentally the howling was there. The first day of school was an ordeal, not only as a commemoration of a tragic day in Polish history, but also because we felt another world war could break out any time, one that would be even more horrible.
The first time I read Auden’s poem, I could barely get past the opening — there was Auden, distressed by the news but completely safe and comfortable, in a bar or café in New York. But soon enough I let the irrational resentment pass, and could read the poem — never a favorite — to get to the famous line “we must love one another or die.” In fact I was under the impression that it was the last line — the last stanza, which I now admire most, somehow didn’t even register.
Now, decades later, every time I read this poem, something else speaks to me with a particular force. I was never bothered by "We must love one another or die" because I understood it meant dying of wartime violence and not of natural causes due to old age — of having many years of life stolen from you because of the hatred and stupidity that drives any war. But this time I was struck — again — by “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return,” and by the metaphor of being lost in a haunted wood. The strangeness and uncertainty of our times, the environmental disasters (the pandemic being largely caused by habitat disruption), the confusion even among the scientists — that does bear a certain similarity to being lost in a forest (and if you've ever had the experience, you know how frightening it is).
Let’s look again at the “lost in the haunted wood” stanza:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Auden rightly points out the importance of routines for preserving “normalcy” and distracting us from the menacing uncertainty of the “new abnormal.” I'm deliberately using the last phrase to point out why this poem has become so relevant again. 1939 was the beginning of the apocalypse of WW2. Now the times feel apocalyptic again, and many serious writers publicly wonder if humanity can last past 2050, with the earth becoming less habitable every year. But we don’t want to hear those trumpeters of doom; we want to cling to our “average day” at any price.
*
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return” — this reminds me of an article I read a long time ago which compared the end of WW1 and the punitive reparations imposed on Germany with the end of WW2 and the generosity of The Marshall Plan. Today we realize that the vindictive Treat of Versailles was a disaster — that the attempt at revenge ultimately resulted in a much greater catastrophe.
One historian observed that after WW2 we hanged the leaders but did not attempt to punish the whole nation, and that turned out to be the right thing. WW1 remains an example of a disastrous resolution. Fortunately, that lesson was learned, and the mistake not repeated.
The truth about the destructiveness of revenge has been with us for many centuries. “He who seeks revenge digs two graves,” says an Arab proverb. A Western saying sounds flat, but is absolutely clear: “Revenge doesn't pay.” And more recently Louise Hay, herself a victim of child abuse, came up with the easy to remember motto: “We are the victim of victims.” Spinoza said, “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” If that is psychologically difficult, it's still possible to forgive in part — to forgive even 1%. Because, really, “we must love one another or die.”
And then there is this marvelous, soaring ending:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
It’s what I call a “difficult affirmation.” It doesn’t deny the part of us that is dust, or the despair that we can’t help experiencing, the sole solace being offered to us is that “life is not fair,” or, even more simply “That’s life.” To keep on going despite the despair, and even to be able to sing — that’s the challenge of being human.
Mary: A WARNING AGAINST REVENGE
I am in complete agreement on the Auden poem. What seemed best in it was that warning against revenge, which never achieves "justice," but perpetuates the evils it is attempting to punish, and the stanza on maintaining the illusion of normalcy when we are truly like terrified children lost in the darkest woods. Children who have never been "happy or good," no matter how well they convince themselves there was a golden past they long to return to.
This seems completely relevant to our current situation, the longing for "normalcy," the effort to make things seem normal, the fear that things will only continue worsening until there is a catastrophic collapse. This dark wood we're in is made more terrifying by knowing no one has the answers, to, for one, the pandemic, and further, that our understanding has been short circuited by the deliberate obfuscation of truth...all the claims of "alternate facts," all the lies and denials spun like sticky webs over everything, until we feel nothing can be known for sure, nothing can be trusted.
The last line of that stanza is also important. We must remember there was no idyllic past, we weren't happy there either. And we weren't "good," aren't innocents but at least somewhat responsible for the mess we're in. We may not have actively created the situation, but we let it happen, and may have raised the alarms, begun the resistance, much too late.
And the final stanza is the one note of hope, those small flickers of "affirming flame" in the stuporous dark. For me, however, this seems inadequate, the flames too small, too scattered, too seldom seen, too easily extinguished. I can't trust they will be enough, and the darkness thickens.
Oriana:
Jung said, “The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” A Yiddish proverb is more down to earth: It’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” But I know what you mean — the current darkness is particularly thick.
For me one point of light has been the finding that facial masks are quite effective against the virus, especially when combined with other measures. Even if the mask isn’t professional grade, it dramatically reduces the “viral dose” that the masked person will absorb. A small dose won’t overwhelm the body. That cheered me up. Anything that reduces fear is good (I mean a rational fear, not the paranoia of conspiracy theories)
Joe: IF WE FAIL TO LEARN TO LOVE OTHERS, THE HUMAN SPIRIT DIES
I have a different interpretation of the line in his poem September 1, 1939. Both Auden and the Guardian seem to interpret the line too literally. When I read the poem, it has a spiritual connotation that is hard to ignore.
Looking at the last two lines of each stanza, I see a spiritual theme in which the death of the human spirit is an undesirable possibility. When the poem states we must love one another or die, it means if we don’t learn to love our neighbor, the human soul will become extinct.
The poem title denotes the time as the beginning of WW 2 as well as the beginning of Hitler’s final solution. If we look at the couplet ending each stanza, we see it echoes one of the plagues that God sent to the Pharaoh to influence his decision.
According to some scholars, there were seven original plagues, but Psalm 78 mentions the eight plagues. Some scholars say more were added at a later date to have ten plagues and 10 Commandments. Auden has eight stanzas, and the Exodus created the ninth stanza.
The unmentionable odor of death/ offends the September night. The plague of hail and fire burned buildings, creating an air raid like a stench. This poem is not applying simple answers to a difficult question. It reveals the brutality of the Nazis by alluding to the Exodus.
The lines, those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return, I think of the plague where water is turning to blood, and the life force of man destroys the sustaining power of the earth. To me this poem is using mythology to make us more aware of ourselves.
Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good. One has to think of the plague of Darkness over the land. Of course, some of the last lines coincide with the plagues better than others, but the idea is to allude to the plagues are not specific by intent.
The last couple of lines of the poem, Negation, and despair/show me an affirming flame, is reminiscent of the Pillar of Fire. The pillar is a physical representation of God’s love, compassion and empathy as it leads His people to safety and freedom.
I know he mentions Eros, who represents the physical senses, the animal body. One can’t think of Eros without thinking of Psyche, who represents the human soul. Together they represented peace and separated their fragile peace broke.
Many believed that WW2 was the beginning of the end of the world. More were afraid of dying at a young age and not of natural causes. The best of Auden leads me towards the metaphysical. In the spiritual sense, if we fail to learn to love others, the human spirit dies.
In this poem, death is spiritual and real because if people can’t love each other, their spirit will die. Might this be what Christ’s commandment means: To keep our souls from death, we must love one another as we love ourselves.
When he writes about the beginning of WW 2 and says, “We must love one another or die,” I hear an echo of Christ’s words. If we don’t learn to love one another as we love ourselves, our soul is lost. Looking around at the world today, I see that this poem is still relevant.
Oriana:
Now here’s an unexpected interpretation of Auden’s most famous poem, reaching back to the story of Exodus! But then a tyrant bent on conquest is a tyrant whether we call him Pharaoh or Hitler. And yes, the poem continues to be relevant because the human spirit, the essence of what it means to be human, is in constant danger of being extinguished — though the causes may differ in different times.
Nowadays it’s excessive dealing with computers rather than live human beings that deprives us of the “human touch” that we crave and must have in order to thrive. I saw this with special acuity a year ago when I was hospitalized, and witnessed the dehumanization of medicine, the computer chart having become more important than the patient. The medical staff literally turn their back on the patient in order to interact with the computer.
Eros is not really the physical body. Eros means “yearning.” The word is more often translated as “desire,” but I find “yearning” to be more expressive. Let’s not forget that it was the only winged male deity. When the winged one is not present, the relationship does not nourish the soul and might as well be pronounced as dead as the dust under the bed.
When Auden says we are composed of Eros and of dust, I see it as being composed of yearning (or “love” understood in the broadest sense) and the body which returns to dust (“from dust to dust”).
But let’s return to the poem. Above all, it it indeed a reiteration of the commandment to love one another — the very meaning of being human, a part of that greater whole, or humanity. War is the greatest, most brutal breach of that commandment.
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When I see the date 1939, I can't help but wince a bit — because of what happened on September 1, 1939. About those Poles who died in 1939, but before September 1, it was said, “S/he died at the right time.” What luck, being spared that kind of massive trauma . . . But before then, and even after, but in other countries, it was life as usual, art as usual . . . Dali: Design for set curtains to Bacchanale, 1939
*
~ The anarchist Emma Goldman relates the conflict in her movement between those who wanted to fight for an eight hour work day and those wanting to maintain the status quo, arguing that with better working conditions the workers would be less moved to revolt and make a revolution. The Left never changes, never unites. Welcome to the fascist revolution, they know how to do it. ~ Frederic Tuten
Oriana:
That was the reason Marx opposed the trade unions — if workers were less oppressed, they’d not want a revolution.
“The worse, the better.” ~ V. I. Lenin
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” These people [extreme Left] don't want to win. They want to be in a 'movement' forever. (from comments)
Oriana:
That’s a good insight. If you win, you have to start implementing your principles, which may not withstand the test of messy, complex reality. Now it will take a ruthless psychopath like Stalin or Mao to impose new rules and build a new empire — but all empires fall. It’s so much easier to be in the opposition, marching and singing, enjoying the camaraderie.
Emma Goldman*
AN EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGIST FACES DYING
IRVIN YALOM: ~ “If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven’t done, if we’ve lived an unfulfilled life,” he says, “when death comes along, it’s a lot worse. I think it’s true for all of us.”
Becoming Myself is clearly the memoir of a psychiatrist. “I awake from my dream at 3 a.m., weeping into my pillow,” reads the opening line. Yalom’s nightmare involves a childhood incident in which he insulted a girl. Much of the book is about the influence that his youth—particularly his relationship with his mother—has had on his life. He writes, quoting Charles Dickens, “For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.”
Yalom first gained fame among psychotherapists for The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. The book, published in 1970, argues that the dynamic in group therapy is a microcosm of everyday life, and that addressing relationships within a therapy group could have profound therapeutic benefits outside of it. “I’ll do the sixth revision next year,” he told me, as nurses came in and out of the room. He was sitting in a chair by the window, fidgeting. Without his signature panama hat, his sideburns, which skate away from his ears, looked especially long.
Although he gave up teaching years ago, Yalom says that until he is no longer capable, he’ll continue seeing patients in the cottage in his backyard. It is a shrink’s version of a man cave, lined with books by Friedrich Nietzsche and the Stoic philosophers. The garden outside features Japanese bonsai trees; deer, rabbits, and foxes make occasional appearances nearby. “When I feel restless, I step outside and putter over the bonsai, pruning, watering, and admiring their graceful shapes,” he writes in Becoming Myself.
Yalom sees each problem encountered in therapy as something of a puzzle, one he and his patient must work together to solve. He described this dynamic in Love’s Executioner, which consists of 10 stories of patients undergoing therapy—true tales from Yalom’s work, with names changed but few other details altered. The stories concentrate not only on Yalom’s suffering patients but also on his own feelings and thoughts as a therapist. “I wanted to rehumanize therapy, to show the therapist as a real person,” he told me.
That might not sound like the stuff of potboilers, but the book, which came out in 1989, was a commercial hit, and continues to sell briskly today. In 2003, the critic Laura Miller credited it with inaugurating a new genre. Love’s Executioner, she wrote in The New York Times, had shown “that the psychological case study could give readers what the short fiction of the time increasingly refused to deliver: the pursuit of secrets, intrigue, big emotions, plot.”
Today, the people around the world who email Yalom know him mostly from his writing, which has been translated into dozens of languages. Like David Hasselhoff, he may well be more of a star outside the United States than at home. This likely reflects American readers’ religiosity and insistence on happy endings. Mondays with Yalom are not Tuesdays With Morrie. Yalom can be morbid, and he doesn’t believe in an afterlife; he says his anxiety about death is soothed somewhat by the belief that what follows life will be the same as what preceded it. Not surprisingly, he told me, highly religious readers don’t tend to gravitate toward his books.
Yalom is candid, both in his memoir and in person, about the difficulties of aging. When two of his close friends died recently, he realized that his cherished memory of their friendship is all that remains. “It dawned on me that that reality doesn’t exist anymore,” he said sadly. “When I die, it will be gone.” The thought of leaving Marilyn behind is agonizing. But he also dreads further physical deterioration. He now uses a walker with tennis balls on the bottoms of the legs, and he has recently lost weight. He coughed frequently during our meeting; when I emailed him a month later, he was feeling better, but said of his health scare, “I consider those few weeks as among the very worst of my life.” He can no longer play tennis or go scuba diving, and he fears he might have to stop bicycling. “Getting old,” he writes in Becoming Myself, “is giving up one damn thing after another.”
In his books, Yalom emphasizes that love can reduce death anxiety, both by providing a space for people to share their fears and by contributing to a well-lived life. Marilyn, an accomplished feminist literary scholar with whom he has a close intellectual partnership, inspires him to keep living every bit as much as she makes the idea of dying excruciating. “My wife matches me book for book,” he told me at one point. But although Yalom’s email account has a folder titled “Ideas for Writing,” he said he may finally be out of book ideas. Meanwhile, Marilyn told me that she had recently helped a friend, a Stanford professor’s wife, write an obituary for her own husband. “This is the reality of where we are in life,” she said.
Early in Yalom’s existential-psychotherapy practice, he was struck by how much comfort people derived from exploring their existential fears. “Dying,” he wrote in Staring at the Sun, “is lonely, the loneliest event of life.” Yet empathy and connectedness can go a long way toward reducing our anxieties about mortality. When, in the 1970s, Yalom began working with patients diagnosed with untreatable cancer, he found they were sometimes heartened by the idea that, by dying with dignity, they could be an example to others.
Death terror can occur in anyone at any time, and can have life-changing effects, both negative and positive. “Even for those with a deeply ingrained block against openness—those who have always avoided deep friendships—the idea of death may be an awakening experience, catalyzing an enormous shift in their desire for intimacy,” Yalom has written. Those who haven’t yet lived the life they wanted to can still shift their priorities late in life. “The same thing was true with Ebenezer Scrooge,” he told me, as a nurse brought him three pills.
For all the morbidity of existential psychotherapy, it is deeply life-affirming. Change is always possible. Intimacy can be freeing. Existence is precious. “I hate the idea of leaving this world, this wonderful life,” Yalom said, praising a metaphor devised by the scientist Richard Dawkins to illustrate the fleeting nature of existence. Imagine that the present moment is a spotlight moving its way across a ruler that shows the billions of years the universe has been around. Everything to the left of the area lit by the spotlight is over; to the right is the uncertain future. The chances of us being in the spotlight at this particular moment—of being alive—are minuscule. And yet here we are.
Yalom’s apprehension about death is allayed by his sense that he has lived well. “As I look back at my life, I have been an overachiever, and I have few regrets,” he said quietly. Still, he continued, people have “an inbuilt impulse to want to survive, to live.” He paused. “I hate to see life go.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/how-to-die/537906/?fbclid=IwAR3Y9AT7ReiAv3_sHgKvX7mMochFZ_e-hQzPYrEiqISGWoqy8NzohD5pQXg
Oriana:
He is now 89. His wife Marylin died in November 2019.
I think Yalom is right: if we feel grateful for the life we've had, this can diminish our terror — because it's been such a privilege to have been alive at all.
Gratitude as the dominant emotion can give us peace.
And connections with others, certainly. Knowing that we've been useful and touched the lives of others in a beneficial way.
Mary:
A thought on the question of fearing death. Yalom says he thinks of death as being the same as what came before life, the non-existence of the self, and finds some comfort, or lessening of fear, in that thought. I once had a month long series of ECT treatments. Days after it was over I suddenly "came to"..came back into consciousness, sitting in a chair watching TV in the ward lounge. And that is exactly what it felt like, coming into being after complete nothingness. No memories of the past weeks at all. Now this wasn't truly terrifying, but certainly was disturbing, and those lost weeks, that unconsciousness, like the disappearance of the self under anesthesia, the non existence of the self before birth, is anything but comforting. It is hard to reconcile ourselves, even to imagine, our own nonexistence.
Two more striking ideas this week:
Death is normal.
Nature doesn't care.
We have so separated death from ordinary life in our culture that it has become unfamiliar, and even to seem "optional," something that can be postponed almost indefinitely by the technology of modern medicine. Thus we have families insisting on those torturous measures that can prolong the dying of a loved one far beyond hope of even minimal recovery. And nature doesn't care..not for us any more than the least bacterium, the smallest sparrow. Tragedy exists only in our minds, not outside them. The mountains are indifferent both to those who fall and those who make it to the summit. Meaning is what we make, not what we find.
Oriana:
Death as no consciousness is actually something we get a taste of during dreamless sleep. Anesthesia is a more dramatic manifestation, and it so happens that both of us have experienced the nothingness of anesthesia much more than the average person. And it seems that’s how it will be: permanent anesthesia.
The positive side is “no pain.” We will in no way be disturbed by being dead. What disturbs us is the approach of death, the waning of all that we love about living. You are right — it’s basically impossible for the human psyche to imagine non-being. And yet toward the end of life many express a yearning for death because they are so tired of being sick, merely vegetating rather than living. When life no longer makes sense, death does.
And while in the larger sense nature certainly doesn’t care, I'm grateful that peaceful dying has evolved in some mysterious way. Terminal brain function usually changes toward tranquility.
I also think there is something unexpectedly positive about “being old enough to die” — as long as there is no dementia. Your priorities change: now “being in the now” takes no effort. If we are to trust Milosz and Oliver Sacks, the appreciation of beauty becomes more keen than ever. And even if you have some deep regrets — and who doesn’t — studies found that the very old focus on positive memories, on moments of love and grace, and are able to feel grateful and fulfilled.
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BEWARE OF DROUGHT IN THE HEART LOVE THE WELLSPRING OF MORNING
John Ruskin fell pathetically in love with Rose de la Touche, who was nine when they met; Ruskin was nearly forty. A devout Evangelical Christian, after trying to convert Ruskin, and a bout of mental illness, Rose died at the age of 25. Ruskin commented:
“I wonder mightily what sort of creature I should have turned out, if instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of sympathy and praise. It seems to me such things are not allowed in the world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are always tossed on fiery waves by it.”
I don’t think it ever dawned on Ruskin that pedophilia is not the kind of love that should be returned. But never mind Ruskin’s attraction to nymphets. Unrequited love is a universal human dilemma, and a great source of inspiration, at least for poets. “Depression strokes the feathers of the Muse,” a friend of mine remarked when I lamented that giving up melancholy seemed to have dried up my poetic side.
At a younger age, I went through years and years of asking myself various “what if” questions: what if I’d stayed in Poland; what if I’d had a happy marriage and a beautiful Polish daughter (she’d be a goddess in my eyes); what if a brilliant professor had “discovered” me; what if I had had a mentor . . . Then a friend answered, “We don’t write because we have a mentor. We write because we are compulsive.”
Instantly I knew she was right.
I also happened to read Sheldon Kopp’s “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” The back cover said: “A grown-up can be no man’s disciple.” And inside: “There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.”
And I found these lines by Zbigniew Herbert (from the cycle Mr Cogito; my translation):
Beware of drought in the heart love the wellspring of morning
love the bird whose name you don’t know and the winter oak
the light on the wall and the splendor of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath they exist to tell you
no one will console you
“No one” doesn’t mean “nothing.” There is the miraculous birth of the morning and splendor of the sky, there is the nameless bird and the bare winter oak. As Larry Levis admonished his (young and self-centered) students: gaze at the world.
At some point, though, it becomes possible to look within in a balanced way: here is my wealth, here my poverty. Here is what I do best; here is where I barely manage (but it doesn’t matter; we really can’t be anything we choose; instead of being “the little engine that could,” let’s repeat the mantra: “There are some things I can’t do, and that OK because it lets me focus on things I can do.” If there is even one thing we can do at the level of excellence, that is enough. ~ Oriana
Photo: John Guzlowski *
Anyone who keeps learning stays young. ~ Henry Ford
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Love is an elastic concept that stretches from heaven to hell. ~ C.G. Jung
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WHY FAITH IS THE BIGGER GAMBLE THAN DISBELIEF
~ I once had a conversation about death with a friend who worked in hospice care during a transitional time in her life. Like many of us who deconverted from religious faith to atheism, she wondered how the change of thinking would affect her outlook on death and the brevity of life. Working around death for a living seemed like it should be a traumatic thing to do as a recent deconvert, and yet she explained that she found that wasn’t the case at all.
Working around the dying helped her come to terms with the regularity of it, the inevitability of it, and dare I say the normalcy of it? Being around death helped to normalize it for her so that it no longer looked like a spooky, scary thing that should keep you up nights, worrying. It’s just a part of life. Things and people don’t last forever, and since the only two certain things in life are death and taxes, it only seems logical that we should come to grips with this reality because there aren’t any ways around it.
And yet some religions bank everything on the claim that death can be avoided. Or if it cannot be avoided, perhaps it can be overturned through a promise of resurrection someday when everything changes and those two most reliable elements of life suddenly disappear (I’m not aware of any afterlives with taxes, but if you know of one please let me know).
It’s a really big gamble to bank your whole life on something that isn’t supposed to be revealed until the moment after you die. The immense pressure of an entire lifetime of expectation really does a number on you.
I think Christians fear death a whole lot more than people who don’t believe in life after death.
This assertion is far from a scientific one, and I don’t have any studies for this because I’m mostly thinking out loud here. I am making an observation based on my own deconversion as well as on my experience with both kinds of people (believers and skeptics), and it seems obvious to me that people who believe in life after death seem to fear it even more than those who have already decided there isn’t going to be anything afterwards.
Facing Death Squarely
It makes sense if you think about it. Once you decide that this life is the only one you are going to get, you get busy making the most of it and you come to grips with the brevity of it. So ultimately non-theists just learn to face death head-on. They harbor no illusions or expectations that it’s only temporary, or that there is a get-out-of-jail free card available for those who subscribe to the right theology. Instead they spend the precious time they have left getting used to the limited nature of it, making the most of it before their time is up.
Of course nobody really wants to die who isn’t utterly miserable in the life they currently lead. Leaving those folks aside for a second, the fact is that everybody else wants to survive. They want to prolong their lives. That’s not really saying much. It’s not a revolutionary assertion.
But shouldn’t people want to leave this life if they really believe there’s a far better one awaiting them after the first one is through? My observation is that those who say they believe eternal bliss awaits those who believe the right things don’t really seem to draw as much comfort from that belief as it seems they should. On the contrary, I see believers fighting death even harder than those who don’t think they get a second life.
Consider the issue of assisted suicide. Having left the world of religion (and yet never leaving, because Mississippi), I’ve noticed that atheists view assisted suicide far more positively than do most Christians I know. I find this fascinating. When a person is diagnosed with a degenerative disease for which we have no promising treatments, it seems a majority of atheists hold that the person should be free to choose his or her method of death proactively. Some call it “dying with dignity.”
If you believe a person’s life belongs to him or her alone, then it’s ultimately nobody’s business but their own what he or she does with it. The people who object the strongest to this tend to believe that we do not belong to ourselves—personal agency isn’t a thing for them—and that we belong to someone else.
The same goes for keeping people on life support. I’ve watched with bewilderment as Christians have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars prolonging the suffering of people who should just be allowed to pass in peace. I’ve wondered aloud if they really even believe the stuff they say about life after death because the intensity with which they fight the inevitable makes it look like they don’t really believe the stuff they say they believe.
Would the Real Skeptics Please Stand Up?
The Christian message is now and has always been situated within a promise of life after death. I would argue that the very heart of its appeal comes from this promise. If you doubt me, just try pushing a version of Christian that rules out an afterlife, focusing on the here and now. Only the most liberal of Christians would allow such a redesign of their framework. Even those who have given up on hell still cling to a promise of heaven for those who deserve it, or for everyone, or whatever.
If you doubt the Christian faith draws the bulk of its emotional capital from people’s fear of death, just attend a funeral and watch how compulsively people feel they must use it a platform for pushing their message no matter who the audience happens to be. Come to think of it, watch how quickly the subject of death comes up once you tell a loved one you no longer believe. It never takes long, which shows how fundamentally rooted their system is in the fear of death.
For Christians, every ethical decision they make is weighed against the value of that decision in light of their belief in trillions and trillions of years to be spent in a heavenly kingdom they have yet to see. As a Christian, I was taught to evaluate everything in terms of its relevance to that reality rather than this one. As the apostle Paul said, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” He used a similar formula for adjusting people’s estimations of the sufferings they endure in life:
For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
With that kind of outlook, shouldn’t death be welcomed as an eagerly sought passage into a better life? Why is it that Christians put up a greater resistance to things like living wills and assisted suicides for the terminally ill? With the promise of a far better afterlife ahead of them, why aren’t they more eager to leave this life as quickly as possible?
Accepting the World As It Is
Bodies don’t last forever, and they don’t come back. That’s a harsh reality, yes, but it’s the truth. We seem to be okay with saying that to our children when their pets die; but when it’s about people, we just can’t bring ourselves to do it.
But that’s inconsistent. Why do we think that one kind of body just decomposes but another kind will magically come back in a new form? Is it because we think there’s a ghost in ours but there’s not one in little Fido or Mittens? Is it because a very old book tells memorable stories? That may have been okay for me when I was seven, but I’m not a kid anymore.
Grown-ups need to be shown why they can trust what you say. They don’t need more stories.
Death is only confounding for people who have been led to expect something else. Sure, we don’t want to die. But I don’t see any point in refusing to accept the finality of it. You could get on with living the one life that you know you actually get. You’d be surprised how much mental and emotional energy it frees up to devote to other things the moment you finally quit banking everything on a reboot. Life isn’t a video game that you get to start over again.
It’s the people who gamble their whole lives on a future they can’t prove exists who dread its arrival the most. They spend their entire lives rolling the dice, hoping that in the end they won’t have spent 70+ years evaluating every decision in light of a story they were told at their grandmother’s knee only to find out it was just a story.
Are you sure you’re prepared to take that chance? Do your actions belie your own disbelief?
Who are the real skeptics, anyway?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2015/09/22/the-christians-wager/?fbclid=IwAR0YHAs89PYvuDZ5uuUC1NP4f7wt-ntAXZzeIxWQVqWzO1qSKHuL1xg_DNE
ALEX HONNOLD, NO-ROPE CLIMBER: “WHEN IT’S OVER, IT’S OVER”
~ Movie theaters would have been wise to include Dramamine along with tickets purchased for Free Solo. Nausea-inducing in the most spectacular way, the documentary chronicles rock climber Alex Honnold’s rope-less ascent in 2017 of Yosemite’s El Capitan, a vertical cliff face twice the height of the Empire State Building.
The notion of God is absent from Free Solo. With a movie like this, the audience might expect a scene where everyone is praying for your safety. But you’re not into that?
Alex: No, I’m very anti-religion. I think it’s all just medieval superstition. Religion relies on some desire for a spiritual connection and I do get that from just being out in Yosemite. I get that feeling of grandeur and awe in the world sitting on a cliff at sunset, watching the mountains glow pink, that a lot of people get through religious faith.
Do you think that your being an atheist is linked to your attitude about death?
Alex: I’ve certainly thought about my mortality more than most. I think some people turn to faith as a crutch, to avoid thinking about mortality — you know, “Well, I’ll carry on forever in some eternal kingdom.” But the harder thing is to stare into the abyss and understand that when it’s over, it’s over.
What does it feels like to stare into that abyss?
Alex: Being on big granite walls is a constant reminder that nature just does not care. You’re just another animal that slipped off something. I’ve seen animals fall off cliffs. I saw a mountain goat bite it in Mexico, which was crazy because you think of them as being so majestic and sure-footed. He survived, actually, and just got back up. I saw a squirrel fall off a cliff once. I was like, “Holy shit, even squirrels!” That’s nature, you know. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/climber-alex-honnold-on-filming-free-solo-facing-death-and-rejecting-religion?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Alex Honnold on top of El Capitan*
~ The Hebrew people did not exist before Canaan. They gradually and peacefully emerged as a subset of Canaanite culture somewhere around the 1200s B.C.E.,which is roughly the time we were told they invaded the land. Before that time they simply didn’t. exist.
The violent conquest of Canaan never actually happened. We know this for certain. We’ve gone to the places that was supposed to have happened and we dug our way down to the bottom. Didn’t happen.
The wandering in the wilderness for forty years? Also never happened. That story was made up. We know this for certain. We canvassed that entire region a hundred times now and not so much as a coin or a piece of pottery or anything at all that would signify they were ever there.
The dramatic exodus of millions of Hebrews from Egyptian captivity? We know for a fact that never happened. It’s not even a debate anymore, not among scholars, historians, or archaeologists. The story was undeniably made up. That means that the Passover never happened. Nothing even remotely like it.
There wasn’t even a group of Hebrews in Egypt in the first place. There never was. That whole bit about 400+ years in captivity, with a dozen tribes growing into a large but enslaved nation? Made up out of thin air. We know this for a fact now.
Think about what this means for a second. It means there was no Moses. No Aaron. There was no Abraham, no Isaac, and no Jacob. There was no Sarah, no Rachel, no Leah, no Rebekah, etc. All fascinating stories, yes. And could there have been real life analogues many centuries later that got cobbled together into an origin story for the nation of Israel? That’s certainly possible.
But basically every story and every person which appears prior to Israel’s presence in Canaan around the 12th century B.C.E. is a product of pure fiction. After that, much smaller versions of the stories appear to have happened in real life: for example there probably was a King David, only his “kingdom” was more like a small insular group of technologically challenged herdsmen. But never anything like the geopolitical giant the Bible paints him, or them, to be.
Everything that happened in the first five books of the Bible is pure fiction. And the next few books don’t get much better. They are stories made up to teach lessons and to provide some kind of political basis for competing factions of ancient Israel, quarrels which no longer mean anything to us today but leave us with the mistaken impression that this people group existed many centuries before it actually did.
The Dirt Doesn’t Lie
Back before World War II, biblical historians had a more limited number of resources to draw from in order to ascertain fact from fiction. They had to rummage through the annals of Egyptian and Sumerian and Babylonian historical accounts to see if this divinely favored nation ever got mentioned, but they kept coming up empty handed.
Sometimes they would come across something that sounded enough like a Bible name that they would count that as confirmation and move on. For most of them the standard of verification was very, very low. Quite frankly, in retrospect, they were wearing their desperation on their sleeves.
But instead of finding evidence of a mighty kingdom spreading across a large geographical region governed by legendary kings with hundreds of wives and concubines, all anyone could turn up was an occasional reference to a small confederation of tribal heads inhabiting negligible territories sandwiched between much more powerful kingdoms which were constantly taking them over. And nothing at all prior to their supposedly forceful conquest of the Promised Land.
Biblical Archaeology was a relatively young science at the time, but considering how difficult it was to move around in most of the territories that historians wanted to explore, there wasn’t much we could do. But then the first and second World Wars happened and, after the region underwent a whole lot of forceful territorial reassigning, the “Holy Land” once again became open for business.
Over the next couple of decades, archaeologists carried their students and volunteers on hundreds of excavation trips to every biblical place you could imagine, digging down as far as they could go in order, quite literally, to get to the bottom of what happened. What they discovered was disappointing to say the least.
There were no Hebrews prior to their gradual and peaceful emergence within Canaanite culture in the 1200s B.C.E. None of that stuff in the Bible prior to Canaan appears to have ever happened. And even when they did begin to slowly emerge as a people group, they looked and acted almost exactly like their surrounding neighbors, but with a couple of notable quirks: they left behind no pig bones, and they seemed disproportionately fond of one particular member of the Canaanite pantheon, Yahweh, the god of war.
At first, Yahweh (aka “Elohim,” which also may have referred to a whole group of gods) appears to have had a wife named Asherah. We know that the worship of the goddess still continued for centuries into Israel’s history despite many leaders’ attempts to cleanse the land of her memory (like ISIS style, physically destroying monuments and disposing of her corresponding cultus). But subsequent versions of the Israelite religion became increasingly monotheistic, vehemently disavowing all of its polytheistic precursors. Occasionally you will still find remnants of this culture war preserved for us in the biblical texts.
A Valiant Attempt, Thwarted
No one walked through this eye-opening discovery more directly than William Dever, a post-war biblical archaeologist with a Disciples of Christ education who later studied at Harvard and led hundreds of students on dozens of excavations all over Israel. After a lifetime of study and first-hand exploration of the biblical lands, Dever reports:
~ After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible “historical figures.” Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20 years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History. And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness. ~
Remember the story of the wall of Jericho? Didn’t happen. Archaeologists like Dever inform us there wasn’t even a wall in existence during the time the Israelites were supposed to have taken the city. And the city, which by the way was likely abandoned before these invaders were supposed to have gotten there, was in its heyday no larger than the size of a couple of baseball fields side-by-side, occupied by no more than maybe 600 people. Can you imagine a nation of over a million adults marching around such a place, waiting for something miraculous to deliver this small town into their hands? They could have just walked right in and eaten their lunch.
There is not so much as a Late Bronze II potsherd of that period on the entire site…Nor is there any other possible candidate for biblical Jericho anywhere nearby in the sparsely settled lower Jordan Valley. Simply put, archaeology tells us that the biblical story of the fall of Jericho cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources. It seems invented out of whole cloth.
Try for a moment to imagine millions of Israelites. According to the Bible, there were 600,000 men who left Egypt on the night of Passover. Given that most adult men counted as heads of households would have been married, and given that the Bible stories show each family punching out at least half a dozen children a piece, we are being told that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million people exited a nation of only about 6 million in one single evening, leaving not a single trace of their presence in that country.
So we are to believe that those 3-4 million people spent 40 years in a deserted wasteland (getting their water from a rock, by the way, with their food just falling from the sky every morning) and yet somehow left not a single trace of their presence anywhere. No evidence of their existing in Egypt, no evidence of their dramatic departure, no evidence of their presence in the wilderness for decades, and zero evidence of their forceful takeover of any territories prior to their gradual emergence among the Canaanites several hundred years after the time they were supposed to have first come to be.
I found the above citations in my own very conservative seminary’s library, but you’ll never hear any graduates of that institution telling their congregations what those books contain, if they ever even read them.
Instead, devout people will keep sharing links touting older articles repurposed for a younger audience (or are they older?) claiming that irrefutable proof has been found that the Bible stories are absolutely true. A forklift operator from Keynsham, England, who moonlights as a biblical treasure hunter swears he saw a chariot wheel on the bottom of the Red Sea (just one? Where did you put it?) and still a decade later, religious news sources are resharing the story as if anyone ever should have believed it in the first place.
But then no one can top the shenanigans of the late Ron Wyatt, a sort of self-styled Indiana Jones of lost biblical treasures. Before his death, this nurse anesthetist from Tennessee swore that he personally found Noah’s Ark, sulfur balls from Sodom and Gomorrah, the site of the parting of the Red Sea and the giving of the Ten Commandments, the actual Ark of the Covenant, and the exact location of the crucifixion, under which he found a sample of the dried blood of Jesus (preserved for 2,000 years, no less!)
What grabs my attention the most in all this isn’t the fact that the Bible got something so important so incredibly wrong. I got over that a long time ago, even if I continue to be impressed with just how much of this book was made up over time. What fascinates me most is the rationalization process that kicks in the moment a true believer is confronted with these realities. The mental contortions are impressive, and I can’t help but recall as I watch them happen how I myself once walked through these steps as well. I’m trying to remember what it was like to be so imprisoned by predetermined conclusions in my search for truth. ~
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/02/18/none-really-happened/#eFlKUdQrIcrjuzxT.99
Lilith:
Thanks for sharing Abraham never existed. Exodus never happened.
The article rearranged my intellectual furniture. I’d always half believed the Old Testament characters and stories had some historic basis. How silly of me. The archeology doesn’t lie.
Oriana:
No need to blame yourself. The childhood indoctrination is so powerful. And then, unless you stumble on the right information online, and begins to search for more, you don't know any better. For instance, the "census" which supposedly required everyone to return to his birthplace (thus Joseph's trip to Bethlehem) never took place! Not to mention that no census is ever done that way. Or the releasing of Barabbas, "according to a Jewish custom." There was no such Jewish custom! In fact it would be offensive to the stern Judaic sense of justice, not to mention a violation of the Roman law. Likewise, there was no "slaughter of the innocents" . . . and on and on.
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ATHENS AND JERUSALEM MUST BE RECONCILED OR JERUSALEM WILL FALL OFF THE MAP. ~ Robert Wright
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed truth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos'” ~ Robert Wright, The Evolution of God
(Of course here "Jerusalem" stands for religion, not the city as such. The city will exist as long as humanity exists.)
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~ The stresses of everyday life may start taking a toll on the brain in relatively early middle age, research shows. The study of more than 2,000 people, most of them in their 40s, found those with the highest levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol performed worse on tests of memory, organization, visual perception and attention.
Higher cortisol levels, measured in subjects’ blood, were also found to be associated with physical changes in the brain that are often seen as precursors to Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, according to the study published in October 2018 in Neurology.
The link between high cortisol levels and low performance was particularly strong for women, the study found. But it remains unclear whether women in midlife are under more stress than men or simply more likely to have their stress manifested in higher cortisol levels, says lead researcher Sudha Seshadri. A professor of neurology, she splits her time between Boston University and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where she is the founding director of the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's & Neurodegenerative Diseases.
Working on the study “made me more stressed about not being less stressed,” Seshadri says, laughing. But, she adds, the bottom line is serious: “An important message to myself and others is that when challenges come our way, getting frustrated is very counterproductive—not just to achieving our aims but perhaps to our capacity to be productive.”
The study is the largest of its kind to look at these factors and tightens the link between cortisol, midlife stress and brain changes, says Pierre Fayad, medical director of the Nebraska Stroke Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who was not involved in the new research. “It confirms some of the previous suspicions,” he says. “Because of its quality, it gives a lot more credibility.”
The new research included volunteers from the Framingham Heart Study, a 70-year-old study of residents from a Boston suburb. Researchers are now studying the grandchildren of the original participants, most of whom were white, middle class and suburban, Seshadri says. Although the scientists did not ask participants what kinds of specific stresses they were under on the day their blood was drawn, she says the volunteers were able to come in for a three-to-four-hour examination—so “you would say they were at a reasonably stable point in their life.”
Yet even these relatively young and apparently well-off people showed signs of brain changes, both in brain scans and in their performance. “This is the range of stress that a group of average Americans would experience,” Seshadri says. The highest cortisol levels were associated with changes that could be seen on an MRI scan of the brain, the study found.
Cortisol does not distinguish between physical and mental stress, so some of the people with high levels might have had physical illnesses such as diabetes that drove up their cortisol levels, Seshadri says. It is also possible levels of the hormone might spike in people’s blood if they are already undergoing brain changes—that is, the elevated cortisol could be the result of the changes rather than their cause—she says. But she thinks this is unlikely because the trial participants were so young. Each subject’s cortisol level was measured only once (in the morning), so the measurements do not reflect changes over time or variations throughout the day, she notes.
The volunteers were given tasks such as copying a shape they were shown, or being asked to repeat a story they had been told 20 minutes earlier. The differences in performance were subtle, Seshadri says. She could not immediately tell whether subjects had higher or lower cortisol levels based on how well they carried out the tasks. “It was more that in terms of group averages there was a real difference,” she explains.
Earlier research has shown weaker-than-average performances on tests like these are associated with a higher risk of dementia decades later, and Seshadri says high stress levels in midlife might be one of many factors that contribute to dementia. Understanding that link might offer a potential opportunity to reduce risk—but she cautions research has not yet shown conclusively that lowering cortisol levels will reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.
Other research has shown cortisol levels can be reduced with adequate sleep, exercise, socializing and relaxing mental activities such as meditation. “There are a number of intriguing, fairly simple things that have been shown to change these levels,” Seshadri says. “But whether they will in turn translate into better preservation of the brain is something that can only be determined in a clinical trial.”
Rockefeller University’s McEwen says other research suggests it is never too late to adopt a healthier lifestyle by taking steps like reducing stress, exercising regularly, eating a healthy diet, getting enough good-quality sleep and finding meaning in one’s life. “The life course is a one-way street,” he says. But “the brain does have the capacity for repairing.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/stress-hormone-cortisol-linked-to-early-toll-on-thinking-ability?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
A related finding: hypertension in middle age is related to a higher risk of dementia.
Spending time near trees has been found to lower stress levels. Below: an oak in Krakow.
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HYDROCORTISONE IS ANOTHER STEROID THAT CAN SAVE THE LIVES OF COVID PATIENTS
~ Studies around the world have confirmed that steroids can save lives in the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to new recommendations from the World Heath Organization that doctors should give them to severely ill patients.
In June, the Recovery trial run in most NHS hospitals and led by Oxford University found that the lives of one in eight people sick enough from Covid-19 to need a ventilator could be saved by a steroid called dexamethasone.
Now, combined results from that trial and six others have confirmed those findings and established that at least one other equally cheap and widely available steroid, hydrocortisone, also saves lives.
The drugs reduce the risk of death in these seriously ill patients by 20%, according to a meta-analysis of the results of the seven trials covering a total of 1,703 patients, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Three of the trials have also been published separately in the journal.
“Steroids are a cheap and readily available medication, and our analysis has confirmed that they are effective in reducing deaths amongst the people most severely affected by Covid-19,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Bristol University and the lead author of the meta-analysis.
“The results were consistent across the trials and show benefit regardless of age or sex.”
The pooled results add weight to the Recovery trial findings because they are from a diverse group of patients in several countries, including Brazil and France. “We’ve got a consistent message from all these trials, and the effect of hydrocortisone appears consistent with the effect of dexamethasone,” he said.
Martin Landray, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University and deputy chief investigator of the Recovery trial, said the time for doctors to use steroids was the moment they reach for the oxygen cylinder for a patient who needs help with breathing, without waiting for the move to a ventilator.
The drugs are already being widely used. In May, about 7-8% of Covid hospital patients were getting dexamethasone, and by the end of June it was about 55%, said Landray. “This is not a drug that costs $3,000 to reduce a hospital stay by a few days. This is not anywhere near the sorts of costs in many, many other areas of acute and preventive medicine. So this is a widely available, widely useful strategy. I mean, treating people with dexamethasone is, give or take, 60 quid.”
The hydrocortisone trials were led in the UK by Prof Anthony Gordon, of Imperial College London, an intensive care specialist. Patients were enrolled in 88 hospitals. They began to look at hydrocortisone because it is an anti-inflammatory drug. In severe cases of Covid-19, the immune system can go into overdrive, attacking the body’s own tissues and causing inflammation.
“In intensive care we often use steroids to treat inflammatory conditions and severe infections,” he said. “But we know they can also suppress the immune system, and with a new virus that none of us were immune to, that could make things worse.”
The NHS and other healthcare providers around the world are likely to adopt the use of either dexamethasone or hydrocortisone for severely ill Covid patients, depending on which drug is more available and familiar to doctors. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/02/two-types-of-steroid-found-to-save-lives-of-some-covid-19-patients
Oriana:
The advantage of hydrocortisone, aside from its low cost, is that it’s a natural steroid which our body can easily convert to cortisol. I once had a maverick doctor who was a hydrocortisone enthusiast, especially in situations such as the common cold. I discovered that taking oral hydrocortisone while “under the weather” indeed quickly made me feel better: the symptoms of inflammation were gone, replaced by a nice wave of energy. But of course there is also the price — that’s why it’s not common medical practice to prescribe steroids except for cases of severe inflammation.
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GERTRUDE ELION, THE WOMAN WHO GAVE US THE FIRST ANTIVIRAL DRUGS
~ Only a few decades ago, most scientists doubted such a thing was even possible—that a tiny, parasitic particle wholly reliant on a host cell to reproduce could be inhibited without harm to the cell itself.
Now, antivirals are used to treat herpes, hepatitis, HIV, Ebola, and more. And arguably, none would exist today were it not for Gertrude “Trudy” Elion.
Born in 1918 in Manhattan, Elion overcame early financial hardship and outright sexism to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, becoming only the fifth woman to do so. She shared the award with her longtime collaborator George Hitchings, who hired her in 1944 to join his biochemistry lab at the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline).
It was only after Hitchings’ retirement from active research in 1967 that Elion embarked on what she would later describe as her “antiviral odyssey.” By then, Elion “had had enough already of being junior” and seized the opportunity, at last, “to show what I could do on my own,” she told writer Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, author of the 2001 book Nobel Prize Women in Science.
Rational approach
Elion was just 19 years old when she graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in 1937 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Her parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, were bankrupted by the Great Depression. They couldn’t pay for their daughter’s graduate education, and none of the programs to which she’d applied would offer her financial aid.
Worse, it seemed no matter how well she’d done in school, research laboratories wouldn’t hire a woman. As she recalled years later, on more than one occasion she was told that, though she was qualified for the position, she would be “a distracting influence” on the laboratory staff.
Nevertheless, Elion persisted, taking temporary jobs and living at home to save up money. She worked as a food analyst for a grocery chain, answered phones at a doctor’s office, and taught chemistry in New York City high schools while pursuing her master’s degree at New York University on nights and weekends.
Finally, thanks to labor shortages created by World War II, real opportunities started coming her way, first with Johnson & Johnson and then with Burroughs Wellcome.
Up until the 1970s, most new drugs were found by trial-and-error or stumbled upon serendipitously. Take Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin, which revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections. Or the chance observation by a French army surgeon, Henri Laborit, that an anesthetic called chlorpromazine had a calming effect on patients with schizophrenia, the first in of a series of breakthroughs in psychiatric medication.
Hitchings proposed another way forward—a rational, scientific approach to drug discovery based on knowledge of a biological target. He hypothesized that scientists could inhibit pathogen cells from replicating by making defective copies of their genetic building blocks. Once these copies were integrated into the germ’s metabolic pathways, they would jam up the cellular machinery, interfering with the reactions necessary for DNA synthesis.
Shortly after hiring Elion, Hitchings assigned her to work on purines. These ring-like nitrogen molecules were known to be a type of nucleoside, the broad term for the structural bases of DNA. Elion didn’t know what purines were, but after months of poring over the literature, she began making compounds “that had never been described before” and “felt the excitement of the inventor who creates a 'new composition of matter.'”
“Trudy was making nucleosides before we even knew what the structure of DNA was,” says Marty St. Clair, a virologist who came to work for Elion in 1976. “That’s how well she understood the chemistry.”
Together, Elion and Hitchings pioneered the use of rational drug design, and they were phenomenally successfully. Over a 20-year period, the pair invented new medicines for a long list of serious conditions: leukemia, malaria, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, organ rejection, bacterial infection, and more.
Their first drug, 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), came about in 1951 through a collaboration with researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Still a mainstay in combination therapy for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), 6-MP made possible one of the great success stories in cancer treatment, helping to increase the cure rate of ALL in children from 10 percent in the 1950s to more than 80 percent today.
Several years later, Elion and Hitchings developed the anti-malarial agent pyrimethamine, which is now used primarily to treat a potentially fatal foodborne illness called toxoplasmosis. (Better known by its brand name Daraprim, the drug made headlines with its 2015 purchase and price hike by the disgraced former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli.) And with the development of trimethoprim—still commonly prescribed as part of the combination treatment for urinary tract infections—they added to the growing arsenal of medicines made during what became known as the golden age of antibiotic discovery.
By contrast, the quest for drugs to treat viruses lagged far behind.
The final jewel
The first approved antivirals didn’t arrive on the market until the early 1960s, and all fell far short of expectations. As one history of antivirals observed, the early versions of these drugs were “somewhere between cancer chemotherapeutic principles and folk medicine.” Highly toxic and minimally effective, they merely confirmed what most scientists had long assumed: Because virus and cell are so inextricably intertwined, viral diseases simply couldn’t be treated.
At one time, Elion might well have agreed. Back in 1948, she had noticed that a compound she’d synthesized for the treatment of cancer—2,6-diaminopurine—had shown impressive antiviral activity. She was intrigued but became discouraged by the drug’s toxicity, and ultimately shelved it to focus on other work.
In 1968, shortly after Hitchings had left the lab to become vice president of research, Elion came across a report that something similar to 2,6-diaminopurine had recently shown antiviral activity. The news “rang a bell,” she later said, prompting her and her team of “diligent and devoted scientists” to pick up where she’d left off two decades prior.
Over the next four years, they secretly studied a remarkable new compound they called acyclovir, working to unravel the mysteries of its activity and metabolism without alerting the competition to what they’d found.
Presented in 1978 at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia, acyclovir was unlike anything the world had ever seen. A potent inhibitor of herpes viruses with remarkably low toxicity, it shattered the conventional wisdom. Much like penicillin half a century before, it heralded the advent of a new therapeutic era.
“Acyclovir was the drug that changed everything in the effort to develop effective antivirals,” says Keith Jerome, director of the molecular virology laboratory at the University of Washington medical school. “It proved it was possible to develop highly specific drugs that targeted viruses without causing unwanted side effects.”
Elion called acyclovir her “final jewel,” and indeed, it was the last drug she would develop during her official tenure at Burroughs Wellcome. She retired in 1983, but those working in her lab almost didn’t realize. “She still came in every day,” recalls St. Clair, who was instrumental in discerning acyclovir’s mechanism of action.
In 1991, Elion was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science by then-President George Bush, who said she exemplified how one person’s work can help “banish suffering and prolong life for many millions of people.” Elion died in 1999 at age 81.
St. Clair said she and colleagues “used many of the same procedures that we did for acyclovir to look for a drug for HIV.” They soon found it in another nucleoside analogue selected from a handful of the company’s most promising compounds. “That wouldn’t have happened without Trudy,” St. Clair says. “We did what she trained us to do, and we ended up with AZT,” or azidothymidine, the first drug approved for the treatment of HIV.
Though only moderately effective, AZT paved the way for later generations of life-saving antiretroviral therapy. The NIAID’s Fauci has said he believes remdesivir can do the same, opening the door to the discovery and development of new, more effective drugs for COVID-19.
“Trudy showed us we could do this,” St. Clair says. “That things that people thought were impossible are not impossible.” ~
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/gertrude-elion-antivirals-coronavirus-remdesivir/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=History_20200831&rid=E18AE510841C77329A0E2626CC03D351
Oriana:
I love the penultimate paragraph:
“Though only moderately effective, AZT paved the way for later generations of life-saving antiretroviral therapy. The NIAID’s Fauci has said he believes remdesivir can do the same, opening the door to the discovery and development of new, more effective drugs for COVID-19.”
We badly need antiviral drugs for ordinary flu, and — why not? — for the common cold. Even though not lethal, those afflictions can make the cool season miserable. But even if effective anti-virals are eventually developed, it might be a good idea to hang on to our masks and practice social distancing simply to prevent the flu and common cold. No need for a lockdown — but let’s just keep on wearing masks.
ending on beauty:
We come from a deep forest of years
into a valley of an unknown country
called loneliness. Without horse or dog,
the heavens bottomless overhead.
We are like Marco Polo who came back
with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.
~ Jack Gilbert, The Garden
(Below: Kublai Khan meeting Marco Polo)
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