With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2001-11-24 - 1:35 a.m.
My father went to the doctor this morning. The doctor still can't find anything and thinks it would be a waste of time for my father to go to the hospital. He is feeling really bad but there is nothing we can do for the moment. On Thursday he is having a test of his kidney function. My guess is that is where the problem is.
I tried to fix the shower today but all I succeeded in doing was messing up all the sinks. I couldn't find the cold-water shutoff for my shower. I tried every valve I could find and none of the worked. Shutoff valves are made very poorly, once you close them they often break, that is what happened today. Two of the valves wouldn't open again. I turned them open but water isn't flowing. We called the plumber but I didn't hear the door when he came. I called back and the person I called never gave the plumber the message to come back to the house. I hope he can make it tomorrow.
Tonight I had one of my just hanging out in the city evenings. I walked from Penn station down to the Village. I ended up spending most of my time at the Strand , the world's largest used bookstore. Instead of just checking out the dollar books outside like I usually do I went looking for specific books. I'm seeing Frances tomorrow. It was her birthday this week and I thought I'd get her a book. I was going to give her Jurgen in any event. I was down to only one extra copy of Jurgen so I went to see if they had more. I was disappointed to find they didn't have any Cabell books at all. Next I looked at the Science Fiction section to see if I could find anything good. I found a nice trade paperback edition of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy in one volume. I hope she doesn't have it already. Of course this is like bringing coals to Newcastle, Frances works in a bookstore. She is always sending me books though so I want to give her some. I then thought of seeing if they had a book I wanted to read for years South by Ernest Shackleton. It is the amazing true-life adventure of Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 Antarctic expedition. I had read about it years ago and have wanted to read it ever since. It has something of a cult following. I had high hopes of finding it because there has just been an IMAX movie released about it. I plan on seeing it next week; it is playing a few blocks from school. As I was leaving I decided to check out the Modern Library section. It is unorganized so you can't look for anything specific. I was lucky though; I found a copy of Jurgen. The Modern Library edition is so much nicer than the tawdry trade paperback edition I've given almost everyone else. Of course since no one ever actually reads Jurgen I guess it doesn't make that big a difference.
Like me Frances likes to give gifts. She has sent me a number of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and the Autobiography of a One-Year-Old. They are all great. She has sent things to Betsy and Leah who she hardly knows too.
I sometimes question why I like to give gifts. Am I trying to buy people's love? That might be part of it but there is usually much more. There are three types of gifts that I love to give. One is something that I know the other person really wants. It is always great when you find the perfect gift for someone. The second is something that you know the other person will love but they don't know about. That is even better. There are some people that I can find gifts for all the time. I find it very hard to resist buying them. The third type of gift I like giving is something that says lots about me. That is what Jurgen is. I get disappointed when people don't read it because I think the book says so much about me. Cabell's worldview is very close to my own. If I could find copies of Cream of the Jest around I'd give them out instead. I like that even more than Jurgen. It is of course the source of the name Horvendile.
When I'm just walking around the city alone like I did tonight I always do lots of thinking about random subjects. I'm going to try and remember a few of my lines of thought.
One was my relationship with numbers and how we all interpret the universe in our own way. When I think of Barry Bonds' amazing baseball season to me I think of the numbers. They have real meaning to me. He had the highest Slugging Average and one of the highest On-base percentages ever. I can just see some of your eyes glazing over now. To me that tells an entire story.
It is also a filter I look at more importing things with. The disaster of 9/11 is a case in point. I remember when the death toll was around 5,000; I read that it was almost certainly smaller than that as many people were being double counted. The number kept climbing for a while, eventually getting well over 6,000. Now that initial prediction has been born out. It is at most 3,700 and probably under 3,000. Now while most people to understand the events want to hear the individual stories I learn more from the numbers. I hate when they talk to the relatives of the victims and ask them how they feel, that strikes me as pure voyeurism. The death of a loved one is always a tragedy. This is true whether it is one person dying alone or a mass death like at the WTC. I like putting things into context so one thing I did was to guestimate how big a blip it makes on the death rate. I didn't bother to look these numbers up; all I wanted was a rough idea. There are about 16,000,000 in the greater New York area. The average life span is around 75 so that means about 1 in 75 people die every year. That means about 213,000 people die every year in the area. So about 600 die every year. That means the death rate went up by a factor of about 5 on 9/11. That is a huge amount on the local level. On the national level it is not nearly as significant of course. There are about 270,000,000 people in the country, which by the same reasoning means about 10,000 die every day. Nationally more people died then in just New York. Once again the exact numbers don't really matter, lets say it was around 4,000. That is still an excess of 40% very few things stand out so much statistically. On the worldwide level it is another story. There are about 6 billion people in the world. The life expectancy of the world is much less than the US too. My guess is that over a quarter of a million people die each day. On the worldwide level I'm not sure it is even statistically significant. I'm sure there are many other days in the year where more people died. Of course we know this other ways. Not nearly as many people died as die in major battles of wars. Far more died in a short time when there were the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and of course the Holocaust. There have been natural disasters in China that have killed more than 100 times as many people.
I can see people starting to look at me funny now and slowly backing away. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination trying to play down the tragedy. It was horrible, and it was close and I really felt it. It helps though to put it in its proper place in the world. It is not the end of the world. People have survived much worse. We will too.
That took up a lot of room didn't it? I'll just give some brief descriptions about some of my other lines of thought. I noticed the parallels between Harry Potter and Slan by A.E. Van Vogt. It too is about a young boy entering adolescence finally entering the community of people like himself. This led to a little tour of science fiction and alighted for a while on the works of Olaf Stapleton. His books Last and First Men and Starmaker are two of my favorites. They don't really have plots; one is the history of mankind and the other a history of the galaxy. They have real style, something I don't often say about science fiction. The thought popped into my head while thinking about them that Gella would like them. I have no rational basis for this. They aren't like anything I've ever heard she likes but I will stand by that opinion anyway.
I also thought quite a bit about losing friends through the years. At one time or another my best friends were Richard, David, Aubrey, and Lauren. The only ones I ever see now are Aubrey and Lauren and things are not the same as they used to be. They get awkward far to often. This was not a pleasant line of thought. Fortunately it didn't last very long.
The rest of the time I thought about shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. I actually had a pretty good time tonight. I didn't do anything special. I was all alone but I was never lonely.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2001-11-24
