Moon and the Leaning Tower of Pisa; Michele Chiroli*
O Trees of Life,
when will your winter come?
. . .
We wither as we blossom,
knowing both states at once.
Somewhere lions roam,
knowing nothing of weakness
in the hour of their majesty.
. . .
Who has not sat frightened
before the heart’s curtain,
watching it rise upon
a scene of farewell?
So well understood:
the familiar garden,
lightly swaying.
Then came the dancer.
No! Not that one!
No matter how lightly he flies,
he is only a costumed actor,
an ordinary man who takes his bow
then hurries homeward, entering
through the kitchen door.
Am I not right to [stay here], Father?
You I ask, whose cup of life
seemed bitter after tasting mine, so
vital with the bouquet of youthful promise
but with a troubling aftertaste.
You often searched the depths
of my unfocused eyes for
signs of my uncanny future.
Am I not right, Father,
who, so often since dying,
has roused yourself from
vast eternal peace to shudder
at my crumb of fate?
You, beloved ancestors, whose faces
faded in my very gaze
to distances in which
I never existed,
am I not right to sit here,
staring at the puppet stage,
if only to gaze so steadily
that an angel must arise,
obedient to balance.
. . .
Only now do the interstellar seasons
correspond to the seasons of the soul.
Above and beyond an angel frolics.
Do only the dying notice how vapid
and pretentious are all of our
accomplishments here, where
nothing is allowed to be
as it is meant to be?
O childhood hours, the shadows of
whose shapes were not yet mere
repetitions of shades past —
when that which gleamed ahead
was not yet the future.
Who can show a child as he really is;
~ Rilke, Fourth Duino Elegy, excerpts; tr. Robert Hunter
Oriana:
I love the opening (O Trees of Life, when will your winter come?) even more than the ending, and also this passage:
Who has not sat frightened
before the heart’s curtain,
watching it rise upon
a scene of farewell?
Rilke is a great poet of partings, endings, leave-taking. Possibly influenced in this by his great love, Lou Salomé, he learned to leave before being left, to be "ahead of all parting." I prefer to have people in my life who I know are not about to leave -- unless by dying. That departure cannot be avoided.
Still, I think I'm cured of fantasies of suicide. I've accepted Tony Hoagland's explanation: "Because you haven't been dismissed." As long as you have something to contribute to others, you haven't been dismissed and must try to make the best of life rather than crumple into despair. I like the advice that it's best to think of all you've contributed. Yes, that does seem to be the best consolation.
Mary:
The Rilke poem that opens the blog is fascinating in the idea that the child holds death like "a sweet apple's inedible core, in his rounded mouth"...an idea strange but true. I said similarly in a poem about my younger brother:
Death is like sin
Original
Particular
A blind date
A gift you can’t refuse
A seed you swallow
With your first breath
Rooted in the flesh
Keeping its own time to fruit
And flowering
When no one is ever ready
Death is always there, at the heart of every cell. And memory is truly identity, as Altzheimer's erases memory it erases the self, until there is nothing much left, a few shreds and tatters. That is what I found so terrible about ECT — your memories, both good and bad, are your self. Losing them you lose something precious and irreplaceable; holes in memory are breaches in the integrity of the self. The waters of Lethe leave noting but grey shadows behind, flimsy and insubstantial.
Oriana:
Not long ago we had Woolf's paragraph on how complete emotion is experienced not in the moment, but only when we resurrect that particular moment in memory. "Here and now" are indeed too fleeting — or can in fact be too overwhelming, too rushed, too confused. The muddy water of the moment needs to settle for a while — then we can play with the memory, looking at the various angles of what happened. I agree with whoever said, "Memory is where we live."
To return to Rilke's poem: at one point in my youth, when having or not having a child was a big dilemma for me (I came from a culture that took it absolutely for granted that every couple wanted at least one child; not wanting one was unimaginable, abnormal), I was wondering if it was ETHICAL to bring into the world another person who will eventually understand that death awaits, and will suffer the the torment of living with the consciousness of mortality.
I can fully understand the argument that life is worth living in spite of ending in death. In fact, to stay sane, I have to go along with that argument. There are the good days and the bad days, and the good days, and the good days make it worthwhile. And yet I also find comfort in the thought that I have not made an innocent being suffer.
And so we go on, with no clear answers, but celebrating whatever joy may be ours.
*
Jeremy: DEATH, THE GREAT IRONY OF LIFE
Death is a startling thought. Fascinating and not just for the morbid. The irony of life is that we throw ourselves all into it knowing we're destined to be thrown out. If your life is going great then you have that much more to lose. If your life isn't going great you have all you've missed out on on this one known chance.
It makes as little sense to leave it to religion and spirituality to be the only ones talking about death as it does to let demagogues be the only ones talking about patriotism.
The elephant in the room wherever we go. We should tame it with some humor. It is the great irony.
Oriana:
Yes, it’s the supreme irony. Once we are old enough to have acquired some wisdom, and think now we finally know how to live and which things are most important, it’s time to leave this beautiful world.
In Greek mythology, the afterlife was hardly anything we’d call life, especially after the shade drank from the River of Lethe, erasing all memories (which makes me think of Alzheimer's as our contemporary River of Lethe). True, there was also the pool of Mnemosyne (Memory), but hardly anyone knows about it, while Lethe is central.
The Pool of Memory was located under a white poplar, but that’s yet another chapter of mythology, which becomes endless when you start going into the details. Let me simply express my preference for memory over forgetting. Even when it comes to painful memories, they let you know you lived, you felt deeply, you survived. It’s amazing how much we can survive — until we don’t.
Mnemosyne (Memory), Mother of the Muses
*
ORWELL ON THE ESSENCE OF TOLSTOY’S QUARREL WITH SHAKESPEARE: UTOPIANISM VERSUS HUMANISM
~ Forty years later, George Orwell responded to Tolstoy’s 1906 attack [on Shakespeare as inartistic and evil] in an essay titled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947). His answer? Tolstoy’s objections “to the raggedness of Shakespeare’s plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language,” are at bottom an objection to Shakespeare’s earthy humanism, his “exuberance.” “Tolstoy,” writes Orwell, “is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share. He is doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes towards life.”
But why, Orwell asks, does Tolstoy pick on Lear, specifically? Because of the character’s strong resemblance to Tolstoy himself. “Lear renounces his throne,” he writes, “but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king.”
~ But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt — a sincere attempt, though it was not successful — to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant.
But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was NOT happy. ~
Orwell draws an even larger point from the philosophical differences Tolstoy has with Shakespeare: “Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic,” he writes, “since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana…. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next.”
On this last point, no doubt, Tolstoy and Orwell would agree. In Orwell’s analysis, Tolstoy’s polemic against Shakespeare’s humanism further “sharpens the contradictions,” we might say, between the two attitudes, and between his own former humanism and the fervent, if unhappy, religiosity of his later years.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/tolstoy-calls-shakespeare-an-insignificant-inartistic-writer.html
Oriana: MACBETH AND RASKOLNIKOV
Ironically, in the end Tolstoy decided there was no personal god after all. Having rejected the Russian Orthodox church, he tried to construct a personal spirituality. He went through the trouble of combining the four gospels into one in an attempt to arrive at a coherent story of Christ, but even his own version failed him in the end. He thought that faith, no matter how irrational, is needed to make suffering and mortality endurable, but was careful not to connect this “faith” to any specific religion.
He still tried to defend a system of utopian social justice, however. Basically he was simply miserable. He became depressed in mid-life, after completing Anna Karenina, and never quite shook off his depression (which no doubt had a lot to do with his ever-worsening marriage). His religious and philosophic quest brought no healing (and no wonder — introspective overthinking was the last thing he needed). In particular, he rejected the epicurean position of enjoying life without asking about ultimate meaning — and Shakespeare stood for life in its richness without much interest in metaphysics.
Orwell is right: Tolstoy managed to retain the life-rejecting religious mentality even if he couldn’t quite swallow the Trinity, creation in six days, the devils and the angels and similar nonsense.
And Tolstoy’s bizarre dismissal of Shakespeare as “inartistic”? The answer is surprisingly easy. To fully appreciate Shakespeare’s genius, you have to read him in the original. Then the poetry is just overwhelming.
Then there are Shakespeare’s characters. Shakespeare’s ability to create powerful, unforgettable characters is also one of the traits of his genius. Not that we have to choose . . . and of course there is no denying the greatness of the best of Tolstoy, but if pressed to the wall and told I could have only one, I’d pick Lady Macbeth over Anna Karenina, Rosalind or Portia over Natasha, or Hamlet or indeed even Lear, poor flawed deluded Lear, or almost any interesting Shakespearean character — even Caliban! — over any of Tolstoy's characters. Not that Tolstoy’s characters are not memorable, but — when it comes to Shakespeare, there is a quantum leap. Lear is timeless. Count Vronsky? Hmmm . . .
Overall, Orwell’s point is right on: the world of Shakespeare’s plays is basically secular, with an occasional religious figure like a friar being completely minor. Shakespeare is not concerned with metaphysics, compared to his interest in the politics of kingship, for instance, and the consequences of evil actions right here on earth. Like Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare is a great psychologist. What happens psychologically to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov is fascinating to watch — just as the unraveling of Macbeth's mind is.
Tolstoy’s great mistake was to seek a one-size-fits-all universal “meaning of life.” Shakespeare might reply that there are no answers; there are only stories. And there is language in which to tell these stories — and language has its own collective wisdom. Add to this the kind of ability to use language that a writer of genius has — and that is quite enough. Life is enough, and humanity is enough. Add to this the beauty of nature, and it would be ungracious to complain.
*
I remember reading about a brief exchange between the Count and his wife, toward the end of his life. She asked him, using his affectionate nickname, why he wasn’t writing anymore. He replied that in order to write he needed to be in love. “You could always fall in love with me,” Sonya replied, half-joking. He shook his head sadly: “Too late.”
*
Mary:
I find Orwell's arguments convincing concerning Tolstoy and Shakespeare. The meaning of life is living, and that is both sufficient and more than enough, it is full, rich, more than we can hold or count or know, endlessly generous, challenging, full of interest and possibility...like Shakespeare's characters, and his glorious language. A feast for the ages. It seems like Tolstoy diminished as he aged, moving away from his own art into a resignation that left him a narrow and bitter path. Yes, like Lear's foolish renunciation, but without that transformative agony Lear undergoes in the storm and tumult out on the moor, where everything is called into question, upended, reversed, turned inside out, suffered, until morning, exhaustion, and a kind of peace returns.
I feel a real connection with Lear and his struggle...the refusal to arrive at a pat answer, a dogma, a solution. But feel no such response to Tolstoy's attempts to salvage some form of religious route to happiness and salvation. His is too much a bloodless renunciation to have much appeal, and his results certainly don’t recommend it. I'd rather wear Lear's rags than Tolstoy's hairshirt.
Oriana:
True. And yet I have some respect for Tolstoy's being able to admit that as a rich landowner he enjoyed the comforts of his life largely due to exploiting the labor of the peasants. It was a moral awakening, even if his acting upon it was misguided and even ridiculous. I also admire him for ceasing to work on Anna Karenina in order to organize aid for the victims of famine in the Tula district of Russia. Not that I think writers are obliged to imitate Tolstoy, but at least he showed some effective empathy.
*
ILYA KAMINSKY ON ISAAC BABEL AND ODESSA
~ On January 27th, 1940, it’s said, Isaac Babel was shot in Stalin’s Butyrka prison in Moscow.
Now I am a kind of Jew whose holy books are not found in Synagogue but in a public library: they are Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel and Grace Paley and I.B. Singer and Bernard Malamud, Bialik and Celan and Kafka and Anna Margolin and Edmond Jabès and Kadia Molodowsky and Bruno Shultz among others.
But first of all there was Isaac Babel.
How did that come to be?
As a child I first found Babel’s book on the kitchen table. That was before I wrote poems, or really even read books much, and finding it, I realized that the language my parents spoke, which was different from the language officials at my school spoke, or people on TV spoke, was something that could be in a book.
For me, it was Isaac Babel’s book.
See, when I was growing up, it was said that Odessa’s language was not at all like Russian of Moscow or Leningrad—a mixture of Yiddish-Ukrainian-Greek-Bulgarian-Polish. Yiddish was probably the major influence, simply because the city had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world.
Now, Odessa is a town of tragic history: pogroms and trauma of World War Two, the city was emptied of its Jews—but it is also the town where April 1, the Fool’s Day was celebrated even more than Christmas. Those who still remained--thousands of people--came into the streets on the day of kind laughter, the city was so called “Soviet Union’s Capital of Laughter.” That mix of a tragedy and laughter delivered in not-quite-Russian language, a fabulist mix, embodied in language.
It’s not just narrative, not just stories. The story is there of course, I just told you a story.
There is a force that lives not in what people say, but in *how* they say it. There are shades of tragedy and joy in turns of phrase. When the stories live in pauses between words.
Whether or not he invented (as some claim) that language or merely put it in the mouths of his boisterous, tender and unforgettable characters, Isaac Babel became for us the symbol of that kind of speech.
When I was growing up, in 1970s and 1980s of Brezhnev’s and Andropov’s USSR it wasn’t easy to come across one of Babel’s books—too few copies were allowed in print.
So people memorized his stories by heart—pages and pages and pages of prose. Guests came to drink little glasses of vodka on my father’s balcony--and they recited to each other pages Babel by heart.
There is intimacy of being able to carry the whole thing in your body and tell it to another human.
I am curious about that: not just as, “oh here is a story, my friends,” but what does it do to our speech: a point at which poetry becomes speech that’s liberated from the language.
The project of the empire is to dull the senses. The project of the poet is to wake the senses up, in Odessa we know that much.
When I was growing up, Isaac Babel was an Odessa writer whose books were known for doing that for us. They still do.
His books speak the language that I saw on my parents' lips, when they were alive, when they laughed and cried in our kitchen. I come back to these books when I want to hear my parents.
*
Babel’s last recorded statement:
"I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. . . . I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work."
Isaac Babel, #12 on Stalin's execution list.
***
~ As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Gregory Freidin moved with his family to a rough side of Moscow, to what he described as a neighborhood notorious “for its Jewish thieves, counterfeiters and dealers in stolen goods.” He had entered “the Jewish underworld.” In short, the Soviet kid discovered Isaac Babel's world.
Freidin is now perhaps the world's foremost scholar on Babel, the Russian-Jewish short story writer, playwright and journalist. He is throwing a spotlight on the writer who described the horrors of war and the gangsters of Odessa with trademark irony and acute observation.
Freidin, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, has edited two recently published books, The Enigma of Isaac Babel (Stanford University Press) and Isaac Babel's Selected Writings (Norton). Freidin is currently working on the first biography of Babel, A Jew on Horseback, to be published by Stanford University Press.
Freidin ran across the "Odessa Stories" by Babel – the author who was born in 1894 and disappeared during the Stalin years – about the same time Freidin's family changed neighborhoods in Moscow. He immediately recognized the familiar milieu "of Jews who did not shrink from violence.”
"He created archetypal stories about modern Jewish childhood, about intellectuals and violence, the violence that accompanied Russia's transition to modernity and the revolution in which Russia's Jews were both uplifted and victimized," said Freidin.
Initially, Babel's very different take on Russian Jews impressed the Moscow teenager – "a verbal image of a pugnacious gangster with style." The image was at odds with the professional milieu of Freidin's family. In postwar Russia, when the state incited anti-Semitism and imposed quotas, Jews tended to be quiet and preferred to be unnoticed. Not so in Freidin's noisy neighborhood, nor in Babel’s.
The writer Cynthia Ozick wrote, "The breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. He befriended whores, cabdrivers, jockeys; he knew what it was like to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track.”
Freidin noted that Babel was an "embedded correspondent" before the term was coined. He joined the Red Army, turning the horrors of the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 into literature with his signature collection of stories, Red Cavalry. He earned the enmity of some of the most powerful men in Soviet Russia, who tried to drive him into exile and threatened violence against him.
Babel went into the Red Cavalry, but “didn't load the gun,” said Freidin, “and we must keep this in mind. He was an adherent of Tolstoy's teaching of not resisting evil with violence.”
He welcomed the fall of the old regime in 1917, but his acceptance of the Bolshevik Revolution was a more complicated affair." He was also fascinated that, for the first time, intellectuals – "the men with glasses" – were moving from the world of ideas to commanding armies and spilling blood. Power inevitably trumped ideals, and grand notions led to the world's most massive concentration camps.
Babel, a devotee of Maupassant and Flaubert who began writing in French, was sent abroad to represent the human face of Stalinism during the "Soviet charm offensive" in 1935.
Someone once said friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. It seemed to be the case with Babel. He had been the poster boy of the revolution, a civilized front for Stalin, but he was abandoned when that Stalin made a 180-degree turn in 1939.
What had he done to anger the regime? No more, no less than millions who perished in the gulag. That is the point of mass terror, said Freidin: "It is applied randomly and on a colossal scale; the whole idea is that nobody knows who is going to 'get it' next.”
Babel's mentor, the acclaimed author Maxim Gorky, who had protected his protégé, died in mysterious circumstances in 1936, probably eliminated by the NKVD. Babel lived through the Great Terror, seeing his friends disappear one by one until he was arrested in 1939.
The Soviet government sent out agents who pretended to have seen him in the subsequent decade – they even met with his family abroad. "Even after his death, Babel was used as a foreign policy asset," said Freidin. Confirmation of his arrest, torture and death in 1940 did not occur until 1954. ~
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february15/freidin-babel-biography-021610.html
Babel with his younger daughter, by his common-law wife, AntoninaOriana:
One way the Soviet government tried to conceal Babel’s execution was by changing the date of his death to 1941, the year of the Nazi invasion of USSR. This vaguely implied that Babel may have been a war victim.
*
“WE ARE ALL JEWS HERE”
~ Here is America's only soldier to ever receive Israel’s highest honor conferred on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. 77 years ago, facing the threat of immediate execution, he and his men displayed an act of courage and character that exemplifies what it means to take a stand against evil.
US Army Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, 422nd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, the “Golden Lions”, was captured by German forces at the onset of the Battle of the Bulge. A native of Knoxville, TN, Edmonds was 25 years old. He had only been on the front line for five days when his unit was overrun.
Edmonds' captors marched him east where he was transferred to Stalag IX-A, a camp for enlisted personnel just east of Bonn, Germany. As the senior noncommissioned officer at the camp, Edmonds found himself responsible for 1,275 American POWs.
On January 27, 1945, the Camp Commandant ordered Edmonds to assemble all the Jewish-American soldiers so they could be separated from the other prisoners.
Defiantly, Edmonds assembled all 1,275 American POWs.
Furious, the German commandant walked quickly up to Edmonds, placed a pistol against Edmonds' forehead, and demanded that he identify the Jewish soldiers within the ranks.
Edmonds, a keen and dedicated Baptist, responded sternly, "We are all Jews here.”
Edmonds then warned the commandant that if he wanted to shoot the Jews, he'd have to shoot everyone, and that if he harmed any of Edmonds' men, the commandant would be prosecuted for war crimes when Germany lost. Edmonds then recited that the Geneva Conventions required POWs to give only their name, rank, and serial number, not their religion.
The commandant backed down.
Edmonds' actions are credited with saving 200 Jewish-American soldiers from being murdered. He survived 100 days of captivity, and returned home after the war, but kept the event at the POW camp to himself. He never told anyone. Edmonds later served in Korea.
It was only after Edmonds’ death in 1985 and the review of his diaries by his son that his story came to light. Jewish-American POWs, including Sonny Fox who after the war became an executive with NBC. He verified the story as did other POWs who were glad to share. The State of Israel declared Edmonds “Righteous Among the Nations” in 2015.
SHOULD WE RESTORE SOME POSITIVE WORDS FROM EARLIER ENGLISH?
~ Lexicographer and TV personality Susie Dent recently embarked on a curious, self-appointed mission. She is determined to bring the word “respair”, last used around 1525, back into common usage.
“Respair”, Dent explains, means “fresh hope; a recovery from despair”. To her mind, the English language has something of a pessimistic bent. It tends to retain the negativity of various words, but not their more positive counterparts. For instance, we say “unkempt”, but have forgotten that “kempt” was once an adjective too.
Words fall out of use for all sorts of reasons. Some are ousted by words with similar meanings. We no longer use the Old English verb niman but have instead adopted the Viking equivalent, “take”.
Others represent a concept, an object or a stylistic trend that has lost its relevance. “Butter” and its variant, “butteris”, were used to refer to a tool for trimming the hooves of a horse before shoeing, which is not something many people do anymore.
There is a direct relationship between a language and the society that uses it. Our needs, beliefs and history are fundamental principles that shape language. Lexicographers have shown that the pandemic has led to an explosion of new words and phrases, including “Blursday” and “covidiot”.
Given the uncertainty and stresses COVID-19 continues to inflict, we might take Dent’s lead and seek out further words to bring back in order to lift people’s spirits. Here are five terms recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary which are connected, in different ways, with the importance of appreciating and loving oneself, one another and life in general.
ADAMATE: TO LOVE VERY MUCH
This verb is formed on the root of the Latin verb amare, which means “to love”. There is evidence of its use by dramatists in the 17th century.
Amare is also represented by the French word amant, which means “lover” and is now mainly used in English in connection with adulterous relationships. While it is difficult to establish exactly why “adamate” did not become popular, the more negative associations of the French loan might have played a role.
AUTOMETRY: SELF-MEASUREMENT, SELF ESTIMATION
Although still used in mathematics, in connection with measuring the dimensions of something, I am interested here in a single use of “autometry” by the poet Robert Southey. In his 1829 book, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, which details imaginary conversations between the author and the social philosopher Thomas More. Southey uses “autometry” to refer to the significance of one’s own judgement: “You judge of others by yourselves,” he writes, “and therefore measure them by an erroneous standard whenever your autometry is false.”
Southey might have actually coined the word himself. He apparently used it about 50 years earlier than anyone else, and in keeping with his belief in the importance of the individual and, hence, of justice and equality. At a time when we are all so worried about how we are perceived by others, often through our social media accounts, we’d do well to practise autometry in Southey’s sense more often.
BIOPHILIA: LOVE OF LIFE
This word is probably best known as the title of Icelandic singer Björk’s seventh studio album. “Biophilia” and its counterpart “necrophilia” were coined in the 19th century as technical terms in psychology. The popularity of the term “necrophilia” and its increasing association with deviant sexual practices have been boosted by a number of high-profile criminal cases.
“Biophilia”, by contrast, has remained fairly restricted to technical discussions in psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, its literal meaning – the love of life – suggests a broader human need or desire to connect with nature and living things.
COLLACHRYMATE: TO WEEP TOGETHER
COVID has of course seen physical proximity severely restricted. In this context, this verb, which represents a physical expression of sympathy, is particularly resonant.
“Adamate” and “collachrymate” are two examples of words borrowed directly from Latin (respectively, adamare and collacrimari) or coined on the basis of Latin roots during the 16th and 17th centuries in an attempt to increase the expressiveness and beauty of English.
While some of these terms are still in use today (“abdominal”, “abrupt”, “accurate”), most had a very limited lifespan. To a large extent this was because enriching the language in this way was not to everyone’s taste. Others thought that these terms hindered understanding and that English could rely on its own words to express similar meanings. Why say latrate (the Latin word which describes the sound a dog makes) when you could just say bark?
MESOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS
This noun has been in use in scientific texts since the end of the 19th century. It probably comes from the French word, mésologie, which refers to the study of the relationship between an organism and its environment.
However, we also find the term earlier, around 1830, in the writings of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in what might well be an instance of an ad hoc coinage. He defines “mesology” as the scientific enquiry or branch of logic that deals with the means of attaining happiness.
Bentham was particularly interested in establishing how social institutions could help as many people as possible to achieve happiness. Although some of his suggestions are as problematic as they are unworkable (for example, how can you calculate amounts of happiness?), imagining mesology in today’s school curriculum alongside biology is an intriguing proposition.
The words we use can help us establish how we think about and understand our emotions. The expressions “letting off steam” or “my blood is boiling”, suggest, for example, that we associate anger with heat and, in particular, a boiling liquid. But words can trigger emotions too. So breathing new life into hope-giving words might help to cultivate happiness and a sense of wellbeing. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/five-life-affirming-words-we-should-bring-back-into-use?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
No sane person would find “adamate” better than saying, “I love you very much.” Biophilia, on the other hand, has some potential.
Personally I like “collacrymate” — but I know this comes from my quirkiness, my playful longing to share this treasure with someone who shares my love of eccentric words.
As for mesology, I think that “messology” would be more useful. We hold on to too many things, which leads to a life-long struggle against mess and downright chaos of layers of stuff (including writing) going back years and years (years and tears, was my first impulse, since my past begs for collachrymation) — half a lifetime sometimes. Messology could either stand for the struggle against mess, or the science of how to dispose of 90% of our possessions and organize the rest. Marie Kondo, a best-selling messologist, suggested dumping everything on the floor, then picking up each item and asking, “Does it spark joy?”
Not that I am against adding mesology to the school curriculum. But that means the whole society would have to agree on the most important elements of contented living. This is practically impossible in a country where very vocal extremist groups, whether Woke or the religious right, would insist on their agenda.
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“At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” ~ Virginia Woolf (1/25/1882)
Oriana:
I wonder if the emotion is more quickly formed and prominent in the present when something bad is happening. But perhaps this is where the distinction between feeling and emotion becomes important. Feelings are immediate; emotions have a cognitive element, an evaluation (X is disgusting; Y is a careless person; Z is sweetheart). Emotions, being complex, take a bit longer to fully form. But because we evolved to pay more attention to the negative (for survival reasons), I suspect negative emotions form more quickly, sometimes at first sight. Just speculating, of course.
And there is also the phenomenon of idealizing one's past, or the past in general -- and likewise the phenomenon of demonizing or at least denigrating one's past. I don't speak of truly traumatic past, e.g. a history of child abuse, or surviving bombing raids. But when the past was bitter-sweet (and isn't any childhood mostly that?), one may see those who tend to either idealize or demonize. Idealization prevails because we'd rather be happy than make ourselves unhappy by recalling bad things.
Finally, seeing humor in whatever happened seems to moderate the extremes. Laughter is a victory over the diabolical difficulties that life can throw at us.
Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, playing cricket
*
THE RETURN OF A JAPANESE WAR SURVIVOR RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT NATIONALISM
~ Fifty years ago this month, one of the last Japanese soldiers from World War II finally came in from the cold. Two local hunters on the Pacific island of Guam stumbled across a hunched-over man in filthy clothing late one January afternoon as he was setting handmade shrimp traps in a remote jungle stream. The two men had lived through the brutal Japanese occupation of Guam during the war and knew exactly what they had found. Before the wild-eyed man could escape, they grabbed him, tied his hands behind his back, and marched him at gunpoint to the island authorities, who could scarcely believe the story he had to tell.
The hunters had bagged Lance Cpl. Shoichi Yokoi of the Imperial Japanese Army. He was the last survivor of a 20,000-man Japanese garrison that U.S. forces had obliterated when retaking the American territory in 1944. He had been on the run in Guam’s rugged interior for nearly 28 years, first as part of a small band of stragglers and later completely on his own. He hid by day in a dank, smoky tunnel he had dug himself with a fragment of an artillery shell. By night he foraged for coconuts, cane toads, and the occasional stray cow. He was 56 years old and weighed less than 90 pounds.
Yokoi’s discovery in 1972 stunned the Japanese public, who had long assumed the last of the emperor’s imperial troops were dead or accounted for. More than 5,000 flag-waving men, women, and schoolchildren turned out on an overcast winter afternoon to cheer him when he finally returned to Tokyo. Seventy million more, the equivalent in percentage terms to 200 million Americans today, watched on live television as he shuffled to a microphone set up on the airport tarmac and delivered another shocker.
He told his countrymen he was ashamed to have come home alive.
I first came across Yokoi’s story while working as a reporter on Guam in the mid-1970s. At first, it was the details of his survival that floored me: His escape from the massive Allied invasion that killed 90 percent of the Japanese defenders. The deadly game of cat-and-mouse he led for literally half his life as U.S. troops and vengeful islanders hunted down survivors. His sheer will to carry on, even after the last of his companions had died.
But in recent years I have grown more interested in the broader questions his ordeal raises. What was he so ashamed about? What did the Japanese of 1972, whose new constitution forbade the use of force in resolving international disputes, whose emperor was no longer considered a god, and whose economy had become the world’s third largest, think about this time traveler from a very different past? And perhaps most important, at a moment when we Americans are consumed by questions about character, purpose, and resurgent nationalism, what kind of country produces a man who would choose to spend decades in a hot, stinking hole rather than simply give himself up?
Even 50 years later, the answers are complicated.
Shoichi Yokoi was born poor in the rural outskirts of the gritty industrial city of Nagoya in 1915, and grew up during one of the country’s deepest recessions. His mother walked out on her alcoholic husband when he was just 3 months old, and struggled to support her only child. Yokoi was passed from one reluctant relative to another until he was 15, when he apprenticed himself to a master tailor in Toyohashi, 40 miles southeast of Nagoya. The work was so long and the food rations so short that when Yokoi was called to his first draft physical in 1935, he flunked. For a man who would set a record of sorts for human endurance, he was off to a weak start.
Learning how to cuff pants or handle a tape measure might not seem like the best training for a life on the run. But Yokoi used what he knew. After his army uniform rotted away in Guam’s tropical heat and humidity, he figured out how to tease fibers from tree bark, spin it into thread, and weave that thread into a burlap-type cloth. This he tailored into surprisingly well-fitting shirts and pants, complete with pockets, belt loops, and properly sewn buttonholes. The garments protected him from the tropical sun and clouds of mosquitoes. The process of making them, which took several months for each set, protected his sanity. “It might actually have been good for my mental condition to keep myself thoroughly occupied with day-to-day business,” he later wrote. “I derived simple delight and satisfaction from every moment of these activities.”
His survival innovations did not stop there. Not only did he learn how to dig tunnels with primitive tools and keep them from flooding or caving in, he devised a coconut-husk filter to reduce the telltale smoke from his underground cooking fires. He also learned how to excise the poison glands of the cane toads that provided him badly needed protein, and later began to raise the giant amphibians in his tunnel, for cockroach control and companionship. He built traps for river shrimp, eels, and field mice and disguised the entrance to his tunnel with a bamboo mat that was strong enough to support a man, yet invisible to the untrained eye. He also discovered the hard way that trying to start a fire by rubbing two pieces of bamboo together could be exhausting, unless he added a small dose of gunpowder from one of his remaining bullets at just the right moment. For a less-than-robust soldier from an unpromising background, he proved a survival genius.
When Yokoi first returned to Japan in 1972, his survival toolkit sparked such intense interest that tens of thousands of Tokyo residents lined up for hours to see it exhibited in a downtown department store. (The website of the Nagoya City Museum has a page where you can see the toolkit online.) But as the immensity of his ordeal sank in, the public’s focus gradually shifted from the contents of his toolkit to the forces that had made it necessary.
Yokoi grew up in a Japan that had a chip on its shoulder. Despite its victory over Russia in 1905 (the first time an Asian nation had defeated a Western power) and its alliance with the victors in World War I (it was the only Asian power invited to the Versailles peace talks), the country’s leaders felt disrespected. They chafed under limits the U.S. and U.K. imposed on their naval fleet and resented the racism Japanese emigrants faced in the United States, where hysteria over the “yellow peril” led to a 1924 ban on Japanese immigration. As Americans today well know, a sense of grievance can be a powerful motivator. Beginning in 1930, a shocking series of assassinations and attempted coups linked to ultranationalist elements in the Japanese military undermined the democratic institutions that had bloomed in the 1920s. An increasingly authoritarian regime promoted unquestioning devotion to an allegedly divine emperor and a Japan-first mentality that justified naked imperialism. In 1931, a group of right-wing Japanese army officers staged an attack on a Japanese-owned rail line in Manchuria that they then blamed on the Chinese. The incident served as a pretext to annex the entire province.
By 1938, mounting casualties in Japan’s continuing war in China forced the Imperial Army to lower its physical standards far enough to snare Yokoi. Given his less-than-robust physique, he was assigned to a behind-the-lines logistical unit and sent first to China and later to Guam, where he joined in a last-ditch defense of Japan’s crumbling Pacific empire. When the Marines crushed his ill-trained unit on Guam’s beaches in 1944, he retreated with a small number of other survivors into the hilly, forested southern half of the island.
The Japanese had overrun Guam within days of Pearl Harbor, making it the first U.S. soil to fall under enemy control since the War of 1812. They ran it like a concentration camp. When the surviving islanders like the two hunters discovered stragglers like Yokoi in the postwar period, they often killed them. Finding life on the surface increasingly risky, Yokoi and his steadily dwindling band moved underground beginning in the 1950s. In 1964, Yokoi’s last two companions, with whom he had had a falling-out, died under mysterious circumstances. The Guam medical examiner would later rule they had been poisoned, probably through the ingestion of ill-prepared cycad nuts, which contain a toxin Yokoi and his companions all knew was deadly.
Yokoi carried on alone for the next eight years, working his shrimp traps, herding his cane toads, and watching strange planes he would later learn were called jets rumble above his tunnel entrance. He couldn’t help but notice none of them had Japanese markings. In his early years in the jungle, he had heard loudspeakers that claimed the war with Japan was over. But in the militaristic and ultranationalistic country that had shaped him, members of the Imperial Japanese Army were expected to fight to the death. Surrender, he was told in no uncertain terms during his early years in the army, dishonored not just the soldiers, but their families back home.
In battle, this draconian edict had led to appalling casualties. Of the roughly 20,000 Japanese defenders estimated to be on Guam when the Marines boarded their landing craft the morning of July 21, 1944, U.S. forces would later count 18,382 dead. Many had died in suicidal “banzai” attacks that served no practical purpose. Fewer than 1,600 were taken alive. Another 150 or so fled into the bush, caught between their desire to live and their refusal to surrender. Yokoi was the last to come out alive. He hadn’t surrendered, but he hadn’t saved his last bullet for himself either.
From the moment of his discovery, the American and Japanese press reveled in the Rip Van Winkle elements of Yokoi’s story. He had never watched television, didn’t know men had walked on the moon, and had never heard of the atomic bomb. He didn’t know what to do with the small paper packets he found on his breakfast tray in Guam Memorial Hospital—they were salt and pepper. He delighted reporters at his first press conference after his capture by asking if Franklin Roosevelt was still the U.S. president. Roosevelt had been dead more than 26 years.
Yokoi was also in remarkably good shape. True, he was abnormally thin, and his underground existence had left him with a pronounced stoop it would take months to straighten out. He was also missing seven teeth, suffered from mild beriberi, and showed signs of a crushed vertebra in his lower back from a tunnel cave-in that had nearly killed him. His low caloric intake had also erased any interest in sex—it would be months before he experienced an erection. He hadn’t tasted salt in more than a quarter-century and rarely ate red meat. While his blood protein levels were low, she
was not malnourished. By necessity, he engaged in regular exercise to
gather food and firewood. And he had fastidiously boiled his drinking
water and bathed nightly in his go-to fishing stream. All of which meant
his heart was healthy and his body parasite-free. He was also
surprisingly articulate for someone who had only talked to cane toads
for the previous eight years.
If the Japanese people were fascinated by his survival story, they were divided over what it meant. Many of his countrymen saw him as a victim of the fearsome prewar educational system that had made war seem acceptable and free thinking subversive. Neo-nationalists branded him a simple deserter. One detractor sent him a letter containing a razor blade and the suggestion he apply it to his wrists. Younger Japanese—by 1972, half the country’s population had been born since the end of the war—admired his grit, but found his sacrifice incomprehensible.
Yokoi himself provided no easy answers. Despite all that he had been through, he remained stubbornly loyal to Emperor Hirohito, the man who had sent him to die on Guam, then surrendered to the Allies, and was still on his throne when he returned. Yokoi remained vague on when he had finally realized the war was over, and what exactly had happened to his last two jungle companions. Although he rejected any suggestions he was a hero, and had grown weary of the attention he attracted—tour bus companies had added stops at his home in Nagoya to satisfy the demand—he launched a low-budget parliamentary campaign in 1974 on a platform that rejected the consumerism, short skirts, and pollution of modern Japan. He lost. Badly.
Yet this conflicted and wrinkled survivor again surprised everyone, including himself, by finding love at age 57. His family had decided he needed a wife, and hired a professional matchmaker to find one. A 44-year-old woman from Kyoto, Mihoko Hatashin, was the third candidate. Sparks flew. They married in November 1972 and honeymooned, as unlikely as it seems, on Guam. They spent the next 25 years together until Yokoi’s death in 1997. Officially, he died of a heart attack. But he had been in a long period of decline, due to a form of Parkinson’s disease that doctors linked to his long jungle ordeal, and had stopped eating. Some believe he starved himself to death to avoid becoming a greater burden on Mihoko. He was 82.
Yokoi was not the last of the emperor’s soldiers to come in from the cold. Two more would eventually emerge, one a swashbuckling Japanese officer who surrendered his sword in a melodramatic ceremony in the Philippines two years after Yokoi’s discovery, and the other an ethnic Taiwanese who had been drafted into the Japanese army and was found farming in Indonesia in late 1974. But Yokoi was the first straggler to emerge after a 12-year lull, a period when Japan had largely succeeded in putting World War II behind it, becoming a vibrant democracy. He brought the war, with all its violence and mindless devotion to extreme ideologies, back with surprising and often painful force.
Fifty years later, the shock waves of what came to be known as the Yokoi boom still echo around Japan. The Japanese public broadcasting network NHK aired a 30-minute documentary about him in November 2021, based on a recently discovered trove of tape recordings he made shortly after his return. The reporters also tracked down Mihoko, who is now 93, and played the tapes for her.
I met with Mihoko in 2019 in Nagoya, sitting in the house she and Shoichi built in 1973 with unsolicited donations that had poured in from all over Japan. Mihoko told me her husband avoided talking about the war or his experience on Guam, although he did volunteer to cook up a panful of field mice shortly after they married. She told him she would do all the cooking from then on.
Mihoko is shown in the documentary listening as Yokoi revealed his bitterness toward the officers he felt had abandoned him and his companions on Guam, his horror at the atrocities they committed there, and his frustration in trying to explain to his countrymen what had happened to their sons, brothers, and husbands on the distant island, and why they should still care.
“Japan isn’t the place he thought it was,” Mihoko says after a pause. “I think it’s a place that no longer needs to hear his story.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/shoichi-yokoi-japan-guam-survival-reappearance.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Shoichi Yokoi, 1972STONEHENGE WITHOUT DRUIDS: NEW DISCOVERIES
~ “Why are there so many doors?” the writer John Fowles once heard a schoolboy ask. As the Stonehenge show will illuminate, those doors open up the time and space beyond the monument in multiple different ways.
One of those framings is a reminder that the building of Stonehenge was not a single event but a series of interventions in the site, beginning in 3000BC with the first earthworks and spanning 1,500 years – or 90 truncated human generations (each one marked with a painstakingly made axehead on one wall of the forthcoming British Museum show).
Far from being a nativist emblem, the exhibition argues, the stones are best understood in the context of successive waves of immigration. First from the earliest hunter-gatherer tribes who migrated north across Doggerland, the “sea bridge” to the Kent coast – two extraordinary ancient stag-skull headdresses, about 11,000 years old, one from North Yorkshire, one from Germany, cement this connection. The DNA record shows how these tribes were supplanted in Britain by the first farmers, about 6,000 years ago, who came across the Channel, bringing with them seeds of cereal crops and domesticated cattle and sheep (and building the first stone circles). And then that gene pool is completely disrupted again 1,500 years later, when Beaker people, named for their distinctive pottery, arrived from central Europe, bringing metal to Britain for the first time, entirely supplanting the people who built Stonehenge.
The show will also demonstrate how, like the mobile populations who have congregated at it for millennia, Stonehenge has never carried a settled meaning. In 1967, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes wrote that “every age has the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires”. If the dominant postwar association was with druidic hedonism, our own times tend to emphasize the environmental symbolism of the site (English Heritage live-streams the dark night skies above the stones direct to your laptop). Scientific advance has also changed Stonehenge. One new certainty is that Celtic druids, who appeared about 2,000 years after the stones were erected, played no part in the genesis of the monument whatsoever.
The largest stones weigh 30 tonnes and stand 7m tall – the new research argues that most were transported from a site 20 miles north of Stonehenge and probably moved not on rollers as was previously believed, but on enormous sledges across logs laid as rails. To shape and dress the stones would itself have been a labor of hundreds of thousands of man hours.
A closer understanding of the lives of the people who built the henges, and who moved these great stones, suggests a high level of commonality and shared purpose. The skeletons found in the burial sites near the Wiltshire monument show comparatively little evidence of violence. Wilkin suggests that “the act of building was perhaps as important as the building itself”. Not far from Stonehenge is Silbury Hill, the largest manmade structure in Europe in 2400BC, and of similar height and volume to the roughly contemporary pyramids in Egypt. Excavation shows no tomb beneath the great mound, however. The latest theories suggest that its construction, over several generations, was a community endeavor, perhaps a collective rite of passage, a great monument to pastoral co-operation. The sarsen uprights of Stonehenge, and the long avenue that approached them, appear to have been constructed as this kind of society, with its deification of stone, was first beginning to come under threat.
. . . In the centuries that followed, individual graves became more common, in contrast to the collective burial sites of the earlier period. The appearance of metal objects, including gold, in these graves seems to coincide, the exhibition suggests, with new social networks and trading routes related to the ever-increasing demand for metal. The implication of single-occupancy graves was mirrored above ground where farmland becomes enclosed. Stonehenge continued in this period as a significant and perhaps sacred site, with burial mounds constructed all around it, but the implications of the new detailed DNA and dating advances are that the collective agrarian spirit that enabled it gave way to a more modern sense of individuality and selfhood and ownership. (The idea of Stonehenge as “property” persisted – it was bought as recently as 1915 by a locally born barrister, Cecil Chubb, for £6,600, as a present for his wife. Three years later, he handed it back to the nation in exchange for a baronetcy.)
“We talk about connectivity a lot,” Wilkin says, “but I think what’s different about it here is that we’re using those connections to explain some of the real fundamental changes that happened in this period of European history: the rise of individualism, the introduction of farming, the settlement of the lands and enclosure in the middle bronze age which eventually seems to have led to greater conflict and warfare.”
In between these times there is a long period of competing traditions in which marvelous metal objects were made to celebrate and explain the movement of sun and stars as the great stones had once perhaps done. The earliest such object in the world, the Nebra Sky Disc, an exceptional loan to the British Museum from the Halle State Museum of Prehistory in Germany, probably dates from about 1550BC. Its gold relief against a dark night sky background is the first-known metallic depiction of the cosmos. More than that, though, its genesis reflects a Europe of constantly shifting and mixing populations: it is made of Cornish tin and gold and incorporates astronomical knowledge from Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and Egypt. Ideas that were once set in stone are now free to travel. ~
Oriana:
Incredible, the huge amount of labor, across generations, that was put into constructing this structure.
I find it the epitome of being human: this willingness to put in massive collective effort into a project that may not have an obvious practical application.
The article claims that there is no single meaning of Stonehenge; each successive new culture saw it differently. That, too, is so very human; meaning, like memory, changes over time. The present shapes the past.
Providing that humanity survives, who knows how the future generations may puzzle over our own huge collective projects: landing on the Moon, or putting probes and vehicles on Mars — especially in view of the impending climate catastrophe. But that too is so eminently human: ignoring the practical (e.g. how to decarbonize the atmosphere on a massive scale) while the best minds are working on what might be called idealistic projects.
Still, humans crave beauty, and this is reflected in the Nebra Sky Disk. Or in this outrageous, hand-painted Pakistani truck:
*
“THE LOST DAUGHTER”: AMBIVALENT FEELINGS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD
~ In “The Lost Daughter,” a new film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, the main character, Leda, calls herself an “unnatural mother.” Is an unnatural mother a woman without maternal instincts, one whose “true” nature lies outside of motherhood?
I was never drawn to having children and imagine I’d be an unnatural mother too. I understand Leda’s tumultuousness. To regret having had children, to have done it because it was expected, by one’s partner, or family or society sounds terrible. But it’s just as terrible, if not more so, to be the child damaged by that kind of regret. Leda’s daughters, Bianca and Marta, must be damaged by her.
It’s rare to see a film or read a novel that depicts ambivalence around motherhood, even rarer one that rejects that life completely, which I deeply appreciate about “The Lost Daughter.” I’m hungry for these stories. It’s important to make visible, in an honest way, a fuller spectrum of women’s experiences — of everyone’s experiences; trans men can and do give birth to children too — and to break any taboo that exists in talking about them.
There are plenty of people who’ve never desired children, or who have had such desires — but are forgoing it because of climate change and now the pandemic. Birthrates are down, especially among younger generations. Still, among my circles it sometimes feels the exception to be without a child. My young nephews have asked me with genuine surprise and confusion if I have a child, even though it’s clear my husband and I do not. There’s no missing cousin. They want to know why.
Sometimes I have what could be seen as “unnatural feelings” when my close friends tell me they’re having a baby. Unless I already know they’ve been trying to conceive, my first reaction has usually been shock. I’ve dutifully uttered my congratulations, which rings false because it doesn’t completely match how I feel in that moment. Though it’s the “correct” way to respond, it’s a cliché. I can’t say I completely understand the shock, since I want my friends to feel fulfilled.
In “The Lost Daughter,” Leda, a literature professor, abandons her daughters when they’re young, living apart from them for three years. My surprise at the news of a friend’s pregnancy is usually followed by a feeling of abandonment, as selfish as this might sound. It’s not in any way the same as being abandoned by a parent, but if I’m honest, I’m afraid that when a friend has a baby we’ll drift away. These feelings dissipate, but the truth is that some of these friendships do change a little. One good friend and I did grow apart, though now that her child is a little older, we’ve regained much of our closeness.
How could these friendships not be altered? Those who are mothers, or parents, often talk about how different they feel after having children, and about what a profound experience it is for them. Profound experiences remake us, and sometimes they affect the nature of our existing relationships. In addition to what is gained, there can be a kind of loss of who we once were. We don’t often acknowledge these losses and the ways in which a new reality can create a gap between people that can be hard to cross.
Until reading Sheila Heti’s novel “Motherhood,” I’d never heard anyone express these feelings. Heti describes being on an ice floe with all your friends that breaks apart bit by bit as they set off alone with their babies, leaving you on your own piece of ice. Of new parents, she writes: “Certainly I am happy for them, but I am miserable for the rest of us — for that absolute kick in the teeth, that relieved and joyful desertion. When a person has a child, they are turned towards their child. The rest of us are left in the cold.”
Perhaps there’s a self-centeredness in these feelings. It’s possible, however, they’re not as unnatural as I think. Heti is being playful in this passage, but she’s also being honest, and as I grow older, I crave honesty, realness. Have others felt this sense of isolation? I wonder if these unnatural feelings simply aren’t talked about, especially between friends who’ve had children and those who haven’t, because there’s a societal taboo around not only not wanting to be a mother, or being an unnatural mother or an ambivalent one, but even having a conversation about it in the first place.
I’ve never brought up these feelings with friends who are parents. Parents, especially new ones, especially now during the pandemic, are often overwhelmed. I haven’t wanted to add to that. And, though women who don’t have children are often seen as lacking “value” societally, so too have mothers been historically undervalued. Yet they’re held up as an ideal. I don’t want to devalue their experiences either. Still, I long to talk about the remaking of our friendships, not to dwell on it or live in the past, but to acknowledge the change. Maybe if we talked about this metamorphosis, we’d find communion instead of distance.
Some mothers, to my surprise, have liked or related to “The Lost Daughter” as much as I have. One friend, with a son, explained that she appreciates the resistance to and rejection of female passivity as well as the female rage she found in Ferrante’s novel. Another mother told me that she plans to watch the film with her daughter.
My imagination has been too small. Whether or not we have children, we are subject to the same types of societal expectations, the same stream of history that tries to imprint on us what it is to be a woman, what it is to be a person. And what it is to be natural or unnatural. ~
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-23/lost-daughter-elena-ferrante-motherhood?fbclid=IwAR0zM88iiGD9d6z1Vxviq2nWuywPvMIUPfxw-M9D3OpGUD41ItI0cf23uGQ
Oriana:
At least now there is a lot more tolerance for couples who remain childless by choice. On the whole, though, we recognize that society “needs birth,” as one of my male professor put it, back when I was at peak fertility. Of course a woman can contribute to society in ways other than having children — but because only women can have children, they rarely escape the pressure, sometimes subtle and sometimes only too blatant, to do their share of reproduction.
I am glad that I’ve experienced marriage, rather than keep wondering for decades what it might feel like to be married. But when you marry, it’s with the knowledge that if things don’t work out, you can get a divorce. Call me a coward, but if divorce didn’t exist, I don’t think I’d have the courage to get married. And I knew that there was no divorce from motherhood. My friend Una, mother of five, told me that no, having a child was not just a twenty-year commitment — “it never ends.” And when another friend told me about a woman who said, “If I could do it over again, I wouldn’t have had kids,” somehow I completely understood it.
At the same time, I also realize that I’m not typical: I need a lot of quiet solitude. But at least somewhat I understand the joy and fulfillment that parents can feel, along with the inescapable anxieties. “Motherhood is the most terrifying job in the world,” one of my poet friends told me. Another said, “It’s the hardest work in the world, but ultimately it’s also the most fulfilling.”
*
from another source:
~ Young Leda is an unequivocally wonderful mother when she focuses on it; passionate, adoring, and unable to put anything above her girls. And that, we learn—spoilers ahead—is precisely why she ends up abandoning her family; there is no room inside it for who she wants to be. The Leda we meet decades later, played by the electric Olivia Colman, is the product of that choice; watchful, wary, fierce, and a little unhinged. Asked what it was like to leave her girls, she replies: “It felt amazing. It felt like I’d been trying not to explode and then I exploded.”
Vladimir’s narrator describes herself as “the most selfish human being I know,” and the older Leda describes herself as “an unnatural mother,” but I can’t help thinking these reductive self-descriptions are coded ways to offer solutions to the state of being in which nearly every family woman I know currently exists. By claiming their failures, these women are able to release themselves from what the world expects of them. It is breathtaking, to imagine walking out the door with no intention of coming back. When I say that, I mean it literally takes my breath away, as though the lungs have been cut out of me. But it is a choice I can’t help but understand for any mother who might make it, especially after these past two years—self-liberation.
(Before Young Leda leaves her family in The Lost Daughter, we find her huddled at a desk in the corner of her bedroom, headphones in, mumbling in Italian, trying to get in the time with her mind that she desperately needs, while her children weep in the background, unattended by their father, who has more pressing work. I nodded. I cried.)
At one point Leda tells an expectant mother that, “children are a crushing responsibility.” Would I have chosen this if I’d known how this era would crush me? Certainly, I tell myself. And yet my mind is held back, always. It is ever ravenous. I wonder what I, and all the mothers, will choose to devour when we can finally feast again. ~
https://lithub.com/on-the-lost-daughter-vladimir-and-what-happens-when-women-have-had-enough/?fbclid=IwAR0oreomD-GoL8-nsNsW7DMtgKIgKMkfNl1w-kgewol2beISYvEAfb-k6aI
Oriana:
I chose this excerpt because it singles out two interesting phenomena. The first is the power of total focus: “Young Leda is an unequivocally wonderful mother when she focuses on it; passionate, adoring, and unable to put anything above her girls.” Totally giving yourself to anything, even if it seems like a boring task, would be classified by Buddhists as meditation. It invites bliss.
The second point is that such total focus on one thing means you are sacrificing other things. Children nourish Leda’s heart, but her mind is starved. She enjoys reading children’s books with her girls, but only for a while. Eventually the longing to read books meant for educated adults can no longer be denied. And reading an intellectually challenging book with total focus is also a form of meditation, and can feel blissful, especially after a period of intellectual deprivation.
And if “bliss” is too strong a word, contentment is also wonderful and will do.
*
On a related but different track: Two questions in an article on whether or not to have a child/children helped me make up my mind. The first question was, “Does your work require a lot of solitude and quiet?” Yes. Then, “If you were unable to have a biological child, would you be willing to adopt?” Without a moment’s hesitation I replied, “No, never.” That “never” was so visceral that I understood there was no kidding myself: I had zero interest in raising a child. My intellectual interests came first, and second, and third.
At the same time, I’ve had some experiences in life that showed me a child’s affection can be very endearing, and a quiet, intelligent child is a joy just to watch. And once I even asked my late friend Una, mother of five, “But wouldn’t my child be quiet and intelligent?” “There’s absolutely no guarantee of that,” she replied, and that was the end of that fantasy. I say it with some sense of mourning — but then every important choice involves an important sacrifice. That’s the law of life: we sacrifice one thing to gain something else. No one said it would be easy.
*
THE REDEMPTION OF THE BAD MOTHER
~ The moments I felt most viscerally in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, an intermittently dreamy and menacing exploration of maternal ambivalence, weren’t when Leda (played by Olivia Colman) confesses, weeping, that as a young mother she abandoned her children, or when a worm wriggles out of the mouth of the doll that Leda has stolen, as if to literalize the movie’s themes of love and caretaking corrupted. Rather, two other scenes felt jarring to me: one when Leda is sitting in blissful solitude on a beach, and another when she’s at a cinema watching The Last Time I Saw Paris. In both, Leda’s contented absorption is rudely interrupted by loud, thoughtless groups who commandeer her space and disrupt her peace.
This is, it has to be said, a fairly brutal re-creation of the experience of having children. In motherhood, there is no space anymore; there are no idle stretches of time within which to ruminate or look at the sky or simply let your mind do nothing at all. There is no more catering only to yourself. Time, while precious, can be bought; space, that mental state of unfettered carelessness, cannot. “When I leave her,” Rachel Cusk wrote of her baby in her 2001 book, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, “the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do. A visit to the cinema is no longer that: It is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.”
Space is selfish, and the bargain you make when you decide to be a “good” mother is that there is no self anymore—all happiness and gratification now comes from the happiness and gratification of your children. “You have to recognize the difference between what you want and what she wants,” a social worker tells Frida, the central character in Jessamine Chan’s lightly dystopian new novel, The School for Good Mothers. Her implication is that what Frida wants no longer applies. “A mother is always patient,” instructors tell Frida when she’s institutionalized after making the catastrophic decision to briefly leave her toddler alone. “A mother is the buffer between her child and the cruel world. Absorb it,” they tell her. “Take it. Take it.” Left unacknowledged is the truth that human beings can only stretch so far before they break.
The question is what that breaking looks like. I had hit what felt like 20 breaking points at this time last year, when I had two six-month-olds who were supposed to be starting at a day care that was closed because of a COVID outbreak and a brain that was too exhausted and anxious to be able to find words to write. I hit one this week when I finally managed to finish a paragraph but then got a phone call asking me to pick up a child who was coughing and crying inconsolably. I have broken over and over in these past 18 months and nothing has come of it, because, truthfully, breaking isn’t an option. I do—almost all mothers do—care more about my children’s happiness and safety than my own. But I’m grateful for a spate of new works, The Lost Daughter and The School for Good Mothers among them, that are confronting the idea that being a “good” mother means totally suppressing all your own needs and desires and instincts. They challenge the long-standing pact of American motherhood: We give mothers nothing and expect everything in return.
Let me return to this idea of space, because it’s the opposite of children, of days ritualistically carved into mealtimes and nap times and playtimes and bath times and No and Please mama mama mama pleeeease. Space is what compels Leda to leave her daughters, what induces Frida, after sleeping only six and a half hours across four nights, to stow her toddler in an ExerSaucer and leave the house without her. Frida feels “mounting frustration and angst, the selfish desire for a moment of peace.” Most days, she thinks, “she can talk herself down from that cliff.” But one day, she can’t. She gets in the car to pick up some papers she needs for work, but can't make herself go home. The pleasure of being gone is too potent, “the pleasure of forgetting her body, her life.” When she returns about two and a half hours later, a neighbor has called the police and her daughter is in state custody.
Chan is clear-eyed in describing Frida’s crime. While she’s gone, her daughter, Harriet, cries so much that her voice is hoarse by the time Frida sees her at the police station. The ExerSaucer is soiled, visible proof of Harriet’s distress. The point of the scene is not to doubt that Frida has done a terrible thing, but to consider why she did it, and to experience her punishment alongside her. Chan’s novel is dystopic but grounded in emotional realism: After a judge determines that Frida abandoned her daughter, she’s obliged to spend a year in an institution charged with rehabilitating bad mothers, a new initiative seemingly funded by tech money and likely implemented by a referendum in a local election. Housed in a former liberal-arts college (a dark joke), the center puts its inmates through ordeals meant to replicate the tests of motherhood, each more awful than the last. If the bad mothers succeed in “learning to be good,” they have a chance of getting their children back.
The School for Good Mothers is crafted like a sinkhole, all the more nightmarish for how plausibly it pulls Frida in and entraps her. The book’s futuristic twists—at the school, robots simulate toddlers—jazz up its defiantly simple premise: This is a novel that portrays what it’s like to make a terrible mistake that costs you your child. We are party to Frida’s doubt and exhaustion and panic. The weight of her guilt is suffocating. The institution is less brutal, in some ways, than her own internal monologue—all the voices in her head telling Frida how she’s failing. On Thanksgiving she imagines in detail, over several pages, all the awful things her family members are saying about her and why she’s absent. The state can scrutinize Frida as ruthlessly as it likes, but it’ll never manage to best all the ways she critiques herself.
Chan states in the book’s notes that she was inspired, in part, by two stories in The New Yorker: one about a mother who, like Frida, left her child at home unsupervised, and another about efforts in Providence, Rhode Island, to train low-income parents to talk more with their children, in part by recording those mothers throughout the day. Some of the power of Chan’s narrative comes from being shocked that the kind of mother who’s typically protected by the state—an educated, upper-middle-class woman who screws up—is suddenly as vulnerable to it as a mother without those kinds of privileges. “Torture is not a word to use lightly,” an instructor tells Frida after a particularly monstrous round of assessments. “We’re putting you in high-pressure scenarios so we can see what kind of mother you are.” It’s an accidentally frank acknowledgment that the “kind” of mother one person is might depend less on her than on circumstance.
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The Lost Daughter has a different, starker viewpoint. “I’m an unnatural mother,” Leda tells Nina (Dakota Johnson), a younger woman whose depression and reluctance to engage with her child reminds Leda of herself. Gyllenhaal, who both directed the movie and wrote the screenplay, which is based on an Elena Ferrante novel, makes no attempt to ground Leda’s behavior in mitigating circumstances. Rather, Gyllenhaal makes her joyful disconnection, her freedom on a vacation in midlife, the film’s core argument. In one of the movie’s opening scenes, Leda drives to her apartment on the fictional Greek island of Kyopeli, light and loose in the sunlight, letting her arm dance in the currents out the window. The next day, she wakes and walks down to the water, letting herself float in the sea, unburdened. It seems almost unfair, two years into a pandemic that has squeezed and enraged parents like never before, to present this alternative reality: sun, sea, solitude, Paul Mescal cheerfully proffering a Cornetto.
Ultimately, though, Leda can’t escape her children. The arrival of Nina’s family, a boisterous clan from Queens, floods Leda with memories of holidays with her daughters, screaming fights, all the days she wanted room to work but couldn’t have it. In the movie, Leda’s lover quotes the philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Looking back, Leda has little of either for her children. (We rarely remember the times we did everything right.)
“What did it feel like without them?” Nina asks when Leda confesses her sins. “It felt amazing,” Leda replies. “It felt like I’d been trying not to explode and then I exploded.” In flashback, her husband feels not only abandoned by her actions but also unmanned: “Do you need me to cut my balls off?” he asks her. The moment reminded me of the narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, who declares that she leaves her child because she wants “to behave like a man, a slightly bad one,” her choice of adverb its own explanatory footnote. Leaving your children is only a mortal sin, apparently, when women do it.
To condemn Leda is easy; like Frida, she condemns herself. (“I went back because I missed them,” she explains, adding, “I’m a very selfish person.”) One of the reasons I appreciated thinking about The School for Good Mothers alongside The Lost Daughter was that one portrays, in agonizing detail, the load of motherhood, and the other its absence. In an interview with my colleague Shirley Li, Gyllenhaal pointed to Leda’s “unnatural mother” line as presenting its own inverted question: “What’s a natural mother?” I’d argue that, however you define the answer, it is not the same thing as being a “good” one. ~
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briefly from another article:
~ The Lost Daughter’s copious flashbacks demonstrate how Leda responded to her children’s thoughtlessness. If her behavior is cruel, Ferrante’s book and Gyllenhaal’s film suggest, it’s because children are cruel. Much more pernicious is the lack of forgiveness we extend to young mothers, whom we expect to mature naturally and completely through the experience of being isolated with tiny humans. ~
https://lithub.com/is-the-lost-daughter-a-horror-film/?fbclid=IwAR0XNMAarRGg2ejG2zrNMJfmH1hCCuizkMlbKP2z7Nrr1yW5cpxPR5Gu6tI
Oriana:
My answer to the perpetual rage of mothers who feel they’ve been erased, deprived of the life they might otherwise enjoy, has been the same for decades: let’s provide quality, affordable childcare. It’s insane to burden the mother with doing it all by herself. “It takes a village” doesn’t work for me because very few of us live in villages and have the kind of neighbors with whom we could drop off the kids at a moment’s notice (it’s been noted that communes are really great for children — plenty of adults to help with childcare). So instead of “It takes a village” (much less “It takes a commune”) I suggest: It takes good, affordable childcare centers.
Not that they would completely lift the burden. Motherhood has long been described as the most difficult job in the world. But good childcare centers could significantly lighten it.
(A shameless digression: For a writer, there can never be enough quiet solitude. I used to have a recurrent nightmare of walking through a large house, finding a “hidden” room, and feeling the absolute bliss of just being myself, alone. But then a noisy group of people barge into the room, while I scream in impotent rage, then wake, my heart racing.)
(Another digression: over time, the roles practically reverse themselves. The daughter begins to play mother to her aged, ailing mother. In the movie, too, Leda’s daughters call to ask if she’s all right — they are ready to drop their lives and, if needed, come to her rescue. She enigmatically replies, “I’m dead, but I am fine.”)
Mary:
Motherhood. I knew early that I didn't want it because I didn’t want my mother's life. The oldest of seven in a household of 10.. . Life was crowded all the time. I became a genius at finding time and space for solitude, even if it took reading under a dim light on the cellar steps. The other side of all that was that there were more people to share the work. My sisters and I were the three oldest, and learned early to cook, clean and care for the younger ones. Yet mother at best had a few hours in the evening to herself, and she would use them to read.
Ironically I never lived in a household without children until I got married, all my living situations before that involved at least one child...but I was not the one primarily responsible for that child. In all those situations it was easy to both enjoy that child and provide care past what the parent (mother, usually) was fully responsible for. I never felt it was desirable as a full time job, or my obligation as a woman. Children were not, after all, scarce. I never felt this was a selfish choice, even when some seemed to think it was...either selfish or unnatural. It was natural for me.
Oriana:
I see the point of one of my Los Angeles friends who was also a mother of two. Her view was that if one wanted children, it should be done early in life, when there is a lot of energy. Living with a small child had no appeal to her once she was past thirty; it simply took too much out of you.
Alas, our society is not organized in a way that would make it feasible for really young women, at the peak of their fertility, health, and energy, to have children and then be done with the most intensive phase of parenthood while they are still relatively young and able to enjoy a life of their own.
And, as I keep repeating and repeating, there should be plenty of quality, affordable childcare.
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HALF OF THE WOMEN IN ENGLAND AND WALES DID NOT HAVE CHILDREN BY AGE THIRTY IN 2020
~ Record numbers of women are reaching the age of 30 child-free, new official figures have shown.
More than half (50.1%) of women in England and Wales born in 1990 were without a child when they turned 30 in 2020, the first generation to do so, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
That is almost three times higher than the lowest number of women ever to be child-free at 30 – 17.9% of those born in 1941.
At the same time the average number of children women have by the time they reach 30 has fallen to its lowest-ever level (0.96).
The latest ONS data on childbirth also show that, while two-child families remain the norm, growing numbers of women are never becoming mothers or having only one baby.
The statistics confirm the major shift towards older motherhood that has taken place over recent years, that experts have linked to advances by women in the workplace, the cost of rearing children and people taking longer than before to establish significant relationships.
“We continue to see a delay in childbearing, with women born in 1990 becoming the first cohort where half of the women remain childless by their 30th birthday”, said Amanda Sharfman of the ONS’s centre for aging and demography.
“Levels of childlessness by age 30 have been steadily rising since a low of 18% for women born in 1941. Lower levels of fertility in those currently in their 20s indicate that this trend is likely to continue,” she added.
Among women who turned 45 last year almost one in five – 18% – were without children, a big rise compared with the 13% of their mothers’ generation who did not become a parent.
The number of women having only one child has also risen sharply in that age group, from 13% among their mothers’ generation to 17% last year.
Mothers who turned 45 last year – the ONS deems childbearing age to end the day before a women reaches 46 – had on average 1.92 children. That was the same number as those born a year earlier but was less than the 2.08 offspring that their mothers had.
The most common age at which women born in 1975 gave birth was 31, nine years later than their mothers did at the age of 22.
Average family size has fallen. While the commonest family unit remains those with two children, their number is falling. Among women in that age group 37% gave birth twice compared with the 44% of their mothers’ generation – women born in 1949 – who did so.
Just over a quarter (27%) had three or more children while 17% had just one son or daughter.
“The average number of children born to a woman has been below two for women born since the late 1950s,” added Sharfman. The lowest average was 1.89 children among women born in 1972 and 1973.
The ONS believes that the average number of children is likely to stay at or above 1.92, based on current levels of cumulative fertility seen in women born in the mid-to-late 1970s.
Dr Jo Mountfield, a consultant obstetrician and vice-president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: “Over the last few decades, there has been a general trend of women choosing to have babies later than women a generation ago, and a growing trend of women having fewer or no children. This is due to a range of social, professional and financial reasons.
“Choosing when to have children is a personal decision that should be fully respected and supported, as should the decision to have no children. With the advances of technology and medicine, including access to contraception, fertility treatments and egg freezing, women have more control and options on how and when to have children.”
However, young people should bear in mind that natural fertility starts to decline from the age of 35 and later pregnancy involves an increased risk of complications, including it taking longer to get pregnant, fertility problems and a higher risk of miscarriage, she added. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-child-free-30-ons?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR23cWyA-46kccRNd11L8aSP8mggAarDTdjB_9yF312LG2J6biQgBNKhmKc#Echobox=1643315373
~ We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 1.5 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tonnes of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make.
Such claims have been questioned. After all, does a parent really bear the burden of their child’s emissions? Won’t our individual emissions fall as technologies and lifestyles change? Isn’t measuring our individual carbon footprint – a concept popularized by oil and gas multinational BP – giving a free pass to the handful of corporate powers responsible for almost all carbon emissions? The only thing that isn’t up for debate is that we all know that we are living in ways that can’t continue.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/25/why-a-generation-is-choosing-to-be-child-free
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Note the disembarking ostriches, and the beautifully criss-crossed giraffes
Oriana: A GLOBAL FLOOD IS IMPOSSIBLE
No doubt a great flood happened once in a while, in different places. A great flood is mentioned in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, and is a likely source of the biblical flood story. But no flood has ever been global. There simply isn’t enough water in the earth’s atmosphere to produce a global flood.
Needless to say, most of the faithful aren’t interested in facts. The minority who are eventually either leave their religion, or else stay with it for the sake of the family, merely going through the motions. As I became more acquainted with both science and mythology, I saw no way to keep forcing myself to accept the ancient myths as facts.
Once I decided that it’s all just another mythology, it actually became fascinating. It’s been often observed that many atheists know more about religion than the churchgoers (I prefer to use that term, since we don’t know how many of the churchgoers take those beliefs literally).
Speaking of those who only go through the motions, I became aware of that phenomenon already in childhood, and now and then pondered the question of how many of the people who went to church actually believed the things they were supposed to believe, under the penalty of eternal damnation. I was particularly interested in what percentage of nuns and priests didn’t really believe. I realized I’d never know for sure, but I kept thinking about it — one of the semi-Orwellian features of my childhood.
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THE POWER OF COVID-VAX BOOSTERS
Once you get a booster, your risk of getting severely ill from Covid is tiny. It is quite small even if you are older or have health problems.
The average weekly chance that a boosted person died of Covid was about one in a million during October and November (the most recent available C.D.C. data). Since then, the chances have no doubt been higher, because of the Omicron surge. But they will probably be even lower in coming weeks, because the surge is receding and Omicron is milder than earlier versions of the virus. For now, one in a million per week seems like a reasonable estimate.
That risk is not zero, but it is not far from it. The chance that an average American will die in a car crash this week is significantly higher — about 2.4 per million. So is the average weekly death rate from influenza and pneumonia — about three per million.
With a booster shot, Covid resembles other respiratory illnesses that have been around for years. It can still be nasty. For the elderly and immunocompromised, it can be debilitating, even fatal — much as the flu can be. The Omicron surge has been so terrible because it effectively subjected tens of millions of Americans to a flu all at once.
[Meanwhile] lack of vaccination is killing people. “It’s cost the lives of people I know, including just last week a friend of 35 years, a person I met on one of the first weekends of my freshman year of college,” David French, a conservative writer who lives in Tennessee, wrote in The Atlantic. “I can’t tell you how heartbreaking it is to see person after person fall to a virus when a safe and effective shot would have almost certainly not just saved their life but also likely saved them from even having a serious case of the disease.”
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine, estimates that in the second half of last year, 200,000 Americans needlessly lost their lives because they refused Covid vaccines. “Three doses of either Pfizer or Moderna will save your life,” Hotez told me. “It’s the only way you can be reasonably assured that you will survive a Covid-19 infection.” (Young children, who are not yet eligible for the vaccines, are also highly unlikely to get very sick.)
The vaccines don’t prevent only death. Local data shows the risks of hospitalization are extremely low, too. Vaccination also reduces the risk of long Covid to very low levels.
(~ New York Times email newsletter, 1-31-22)
Oriana:
Unfortunately we have selection bias here: those who choose to be vaccinated tend to be wealthier and better educated than vaccine deniers. We know that higher income and more education correlate with better health and higher life expectancy.
I also wonder about the difficulties getting a Covid vaccine can entail. At Costco, hardly an elite place, you have to make an appointment on-line and fill out a complex health questionnaire. You can't just walk in and answer a few essential questions that a pharmacy employee asks you. I wonder: what if we made getting vaccinated easier? I know that's only a partial solution, but it just might be significant.
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INTERMITTENT FASTING MAY PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S
~ You may have heard of intermittent fasting as a weight loss diet. Either by fasting one or two days a week or reducing the hours of the day in which you eat, these diets can alter your metabolism and lead to weight loss over time, even if during your "eating window" you eat anything you want. But you may not have heard about intermittent fasting as a possible way to improve learning and memory.
Animal studies of intermittent fasting have consistently demonstrated disease modifying benefits on a wide range of chronic disorders including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurodegenerative diseases. Studies in animals show that intermittent fasting enhances cognition in multiple areas of memory and learning.
Animal studies of intermittent fasting have consistently demonstrated disease modifying benefits on a wide range of chronic disorders including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurodegenerative diseases. Studies in animals show that intermittent fasting enhances cognition in multiple areas of memory and learning.
Intermittent fasting in animal studies has also been shown to reduce brain inflammation. There is strong evidence that forms of intermittent fasting can delay the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease in animal models. Researchers are now exploring opportunities to study intermittent fasting in humans -- particularly the effect this might have on neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease.
“In animal studies, intermittent fasting has been shown to increase longevity, improve cognitive function and reduce brain plaque as compared with animals fed a regular diet,” said Allan Anderson, MD, Director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Tucson. “One hypothesis is that intermittent fasting enables cells to remove damaged proteins. It has been shown to delay the onset and progression of disease in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s.”
Leading experts in this field of study have been researching intermittent fasting for years. Our bodies predominantly use glucose produced by the food we eat for fuel. But when we fast, the body turns to alternate energy sources including fat. Fat metabolism leads to the production of ketone bodies which have been linked to improved thinking, learning and memory in animal studies.
In a review of intermittent fasting research in the December 2019 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the technique showed promise in animal models for a wide range of chronic disorders. The authors’ conclusion was that calorie restriction in animals increases life span, improves cognition and can even reverse the effects of obesity, diabetes and brain inflammation.
The most widely studied intermittent fasting regimens were alternate-day fasting, 5:2 fasting (fasting 2 days per week) and daily time-restricted eating. The latter has recently become a diet craze where people reduce the window of time during which they eat in a day.
“The animal research is stunning,” concluded Dr. Anderson. “But we don’t know yet if this will have similar benefits in humans.” There are no substantial human trials of intermittent fasting related to brain function. Some studies of caloric restrictions in humans have shown improvement in memory function and overall thinking ability, but these studies included small numbers of patients. Many scientists believe a large, well-conducted study of intermittent fasting in humans to determine brain benefits is warranted at this time. ~
https://www.endalznow.org/news/research-shows-intermittent-fasting-may-prevent-alzheimers-disease
Oriana:
The interesting thing is that fasting need not be prolonged to produce significant benefits. Just little fasting may do it. It can be as easy as skipping breakfast — or, if fasting doesn’t make you utterly miserable, fasting just one day a week.
Most people who practice intermittent fasting go for the 16-hr fasting period, skipping breakfast and sometimes also delaying lunch. What a change from the not-so-long-ago when we were told that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day," and frequent snacking was encouraged. Now snacking is anathema.
You may wonder if this is just a trend that is doomed to fade in a couple of years. What's different this time is massive scientific backing -- going back to the 1930s and the sensational discoveries by Clive McCay, an American biochemist who first studied the effects of calorie restriction. Photos such as this classic, showing two rats, both 964 days old, one eating standard diet and the other a calorie-restricted diet, did not fail to have an impact.
The life-extending benefit of calorie restriction was found in many species. This photo is perhaps even more dramatic. Please remember that these two animals are the same age, but the one on the right is on a calorie-restricted diet.
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ending on beauty:
. . .
The complete consort dancing together.
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them....
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~ T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
"Midwinter spring is its own season"; a view of Little Gidding
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