I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
2002-04-09 - 10:57 a.m.
Yesterday I went back to teaching. The class disappointed me. I told them about my father and not one student said any condolences. They just went back to talking, laughing, and being annoying. The student that always asks, "will this be on the test?" wore headphones all class. I didn't have the energy to fight him over it. The class went OK though. I ended up giving one of my impassioned speeches. We started integration and I showed how you can derive the equation of motion of an object thrown in the air by simply integrating and solving for the constants of integration. This was the starting point for the work of Newton was the first one to really give a comprehensive explanation of the world in scientific terms. It was the beginning of the modern era. It isn't a coincidence that the world has changed far more in the 300 years since Newton than in the 3000 years before him. It all comes from applying calculus to the world.
I came home after class and spent time with Sue, Mike, and my mother. No one came to visit yesterday and we were all happy about that. The sympathy cards started coming in. my sister came up with the idea of attaching the return address to each card. We decided that we aren't going to send thanks for each card though. I know I've said that I don't want people thanking me when I send one. It shouldn't put an added obligation on the mourner. They have enough to do.
I should have done grading last night but I still couldn't get myself to do it. Instead I had my usual Monday night talk to Carey and then watched the second half of Shackleton on A&E. That was a disappointment. It was a 4-hour movie on one of my heroes, starring one of my favorite actors and it just wasn't that great. The Nova about him was better. It took way to long for the story to start; there was too much background. Then I don't think it really captured the hardships involved.
Sue took care of so much yesterday. She got all the financial papers together. Today I have to bring them up to the accountant. My mother called my father's doctor and told him that my father died. We figured that he didn't know because he hadn't called us. We were right. He was upset that neither the hospital nor the nursing home informed him. LIJ is a great hospital but people don't realize how important communications are.
I know what I wanted to write the rest of this entry about but didn't know if I should write it. Carey gave me the green light so here it is.
Than-a-tol'-o-gy, >
n. the study of death, especially the medical, psychological, and social problems associated with dying.
Thanatology has been the subject of most of my entries recently and I want to sum up my thoughts about it. My sisters and my mother wanted to see my father's body. I didn't feel the need at all. To me it was an object, my father's body, not my father. My father was the spirit that motivated the body. Kissing the body would have been like typing on the keyboard of a computer whose bios had been removed and the hard drive had been wiped clean.
I don't believe in the immortality of the soul. To continue the computer analogy, the person's soul is all the programs in the computer. When the hardware is gone the software doesn't work any more. I think that the only people believe in an afterlife is because they find it more comforting. It's a tale to comfort the child in all of us.
There is a sense that we do continue after our deaths though. It is in the way we affect those around us. We leave something of ourselves in every person whose life we touch. We leave a big piece in those that are close to us and smaller pieces in everyone we meet. I don't know if that came through but it was what I was trying to get at in the eulogy. I was talking about the pieces my father left in me. In time these pieces spread through the world and never totally disappear. The second law of thermodynamics always wins in the end though. Eventually it just gets so spread out you can't identify the pieces any more. There are not many people that we know of as individuals 100 years after their deaths. After 1000 it's a handful. Eventually we all blend together.
In the eulogy I said that Ode to a Nightingale was the first poem I thought of. It wasn't; it was the first appropriate poem I thought of. When I think of death I think of Poe's The Conqueror Worm
LO! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to seeA play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.
That motley drama-oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude:
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes-it writhes!-with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And over each quivering form
In human gore imbued.
Out-out are the lights-out all!
And over each quivering formThe curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm
There is one more quote that has been in my head. It's from Tolkien's The Silmarillion.
Then Fëanor, ran from the Ring of doom, and fled into the night; for his father was dearer to him than the Light of Valinor or the peerless works of his hands; and who among sons, of Elves or of Men, have held their fathers of greater worth?
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
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Horvendile 2002-04-09
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