Travel through a mirror

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
--W. B. Yeats

A famous mountain climber, now a recluse living on the family estate -- living, in fact, in an enormous, decaying home, a one-time abbey, surrounded by a deep frozen forest, lying at the bottom of a canyon carved by waters rushing off of Dartmoor.  His obsessions: the death of his wife in an auto accident, and an ancient mirror -- highly-polished obsidian -- updated with modern high-voltage attachments -- a device that permits travel through time.  The obsessions are related.

And the other characters! A scar-faced man from the age of Dickens who claims he was robbed, that he is the mirror's rightful owner and wants it back. A woman from a dark and bleak future, who comes seeking to change the course of time. Jake, an angry student expelled from his exclusive Swiss prep school, who comes to the abbey in search of his missing father -- his father having been the recluse's best friend; Jake suspects murder. Gideon -- a boy apparently Jake's age, but actually born five hundred years earlier -- a human by birth, but raised and kept immortal by the fairy-lore of the Shee.  The Shee themselves, the amoral and self-centered beings who haunt the forest surrounding the abbey.  The abbey's butler, Piers, who just happens to be a genie.

The English have a knack for writing a certain type of fantasy novel.  Tolkien, of course.  And Susan Cooper, more recently, author of The Dark is Rising series.  In a somewhat different way, even Philip Pullman, and the His Dark Materials trilogy.  And now, Catherine Fisher has published the first book of her new trilogy, Obsidian Mirror.

What these fantasy writers have in common -- Pullman to a lesser extent -- is a deep feeling for the history and mythology of England, together with the ability to tell an absorbing good tale of adventure.  I read the New York Times's review of Fisher's new "young adult" book a couple of weeks ago, and was able to download it this week.  I read it virtually overnight. 

Obsidian Mirror is the first fantasy book I've read since Revelation Space, a couple of months ago.  Nothing could be more different.  Alastair Reynold's imaginative series takes place in a distant future among peoples whose problems are not ours and whose memories of our own lives in the early twenty-first century are as faint and cloudy as are our memories of the Middle Ages.   The series' characters live, and have always lived, in deep space.  They are "deracinated" both physically and mentally.

Fisher's novel, by contrast, is cozy, home-centered, and, well, English -- deeply rooted in the folklore and landscapes of Devon.  People drop in and out on their way to and from other eras -- nineteenth century London is vividly depicted in all its filth, poverty and danger -- but the action centers about an ancient Devon country home, an enormous structure closely surrounded by a fairy-infested enchanted forest.  The plot itself is a bit clunky, perhaps -- absorbing enough, but I had the vague sense of having read stories with similar plots in the past.  But Obsidian Mirror is superlative in presenting characters who I cared about and wanted to know better, and even more superlative in painting a sense of place, scenes both beautiful and frightening.

All the characters, including the trilogy's (presumptive) hero, Jake -- the novel is narrated from multiple points of view --  are self-centered and selfish.  Each wants the mirror for his own aims, and is willing to deceive and trick the others to get it.  For the most part, however, none is able to avoid occasional flare-ups of empathy for the others, thereby softening and humanizing each of them in our eyes.  The fact that the novel's point of view changes several times a chapter prevents us from becoming too attached to -- or from cheering on behalf of -- any one of the characters too exclusively. 

Fisher has a marked ability to depict vividly strange and/or beautiful settings.  I mentioned her descriptions of nineteenth century London.  The haunted forest surrounding the abbey -- and the elusive Shee who live and rule within -- also come alive through her descriptive language.

Jake turned.  A tiny shimmer caught his eye.  He stared at it; saw a patch of glossy leaf, a lichened tree trunk.

And it became them.

He breathed in, felt Gideon's warning grip.

They were almost people.

Where they had come from he couldn't tell; they were so much a part of the shadow and the foliage.  Tall and pale, male and female, it was as if they had always been there, and just some adjustment of the light had revealed them to him.  Their faces were narrow and beautiful, their hair silvery-fair.
...
"Who are they?" he whispered.

Gideon was silent.  Then he put his lips to Jake's ear.  "Don't be fooled.  They look like angels, but they're demons.  They're the Shee.

In Obsidion Mirror, there are no "angels," either human or fairy.  Everyone is out for himself.  Everyone is a mixture of selfishness and kindness with the selfishness usually prevailing.  But Gideon -- immortal by adoption and enchantment, the boy the Shee had five centuries earlier lured away from his family home as a toddler, the human who knows the ways of the fairy world, the boy who craves the sort of warmth and friendship that are foreign to the superficial, pleasure-loving Shee who have adopted him -- is perhaps the saddest and most sympathetic of all the characters.

The book ends after much action, many discoveries, many revelations -- but nothing yet resolved.  Gideon returns to the icy forest, his hopes of finding a trustworthy human he could befriend apparently dashed.

"Enjoy it, Jake.  Enjoy it while you can.  The food, the warmth, the people.  Do everything, taste everything.  Enjoy your life because outside is only the cold and the dark."
...
"I won't let you go," Jake said, angry. But even as he said it, Gideon wasn't there; the frail green velvet faded from between his fingers, and he held only air.

I'm definitely hooked. I'm waiting for Book Two!
-------------------------------------
(1-1-15) I've provided a brief review of Book Two, The Slanted Worlds, on Goodreads. Book Three, The Door in the Moon, will be published on March 24, 2015. (2-29-16) This turned out to be a quartet, rather than a trilogy. I commented on the final volume, The Speed of Darkness, on February 17, 2016.

Daily magic

I'm reading a book about time travel, magical mirrors, a mysterious mansion, and fairy peoples.¹  I may or may not post an essay reviewing it one of these days, but that's not my point.  My point is that I'm reading it on my Kindle. 

So I finished a chapter, pressed a button, saw a tiny green light appear, and watched the screen dissolve into an abstract pattern.  Then the thought hit me over the head.  Thirty years ago, holding such a small device in my hand would have caused my heart to pound.  I myself would have been flirting with the occult.

When I was growing up, I was surrounded by modern technology that also seemed wondrous.  As an illustration of the word "magic" found in my dictionary puts it:  "A hundred years ago television would have seemed to be magic."  

But when I was a kid, the "magic" was magic only at first glance.  Television, automobiles, telephones, radio, airplanes -- all seemed wondrous, all seemed magical.  But only to the incurious.  If you wanted to learn about them, each modern wonder could be explained to a teenager of average intelligence. 

As I began writing this essay, I recalled a book from my early teens, a book from which I remember reading a chapter each night in bed, the way some people read the Bible:  The Modern Wonder Book of Knowledge, subtitled "The thrilling stories of twentieth-century industry, science, nature, transportation, communication, and other marvels of the world."   And -- lo and behold -- I discovered that not only do I still own the book, but was able to locate it hiding in one of my more obscure bookcases.  Copyright 1949, affordable in hard cover for $4.95 ($48.41 in today's dollars), thank you.

The book has clear text, written in high school level English, with diagrams, charts and photographs.  The book is not a technical manual.  You won't be able to build a telephone after reading the chapter on telephones.  But you are given a good, practical understanding of how a telephone works (with an excellent photograph of a long row of intent, seated women: "long-distance operators at a modern switchboard").  A telephone wasn't magic; it was an example of modern science.
 
An automobile was every bit as wondrous to me as the telephone, but a large number of boys in my high school could dismantle a car's engine, clean the parts, replace defective parts, and rebuild the engine so that it was better than new. Now an auto engine is one big computer.

But what do I know about a Kindle?  What does a high school kid, the kind of kid who used to take auto shop, know?  What does anyone know, outside the engineers and technical workers who actually design and assemble the product.  The Kindle's a small, thin rectangle.  It obviously contains a rechargeable battery.  It has some sort of memory device -- is it similar to a computer hard drive?  An integrated circuit board?  It downloads books from "the cloud" (well, from Amazon, actually), charges my Visa card for them, and stores several thousand of them inside its slim, elegant frame.  I can return books to "the cloud" for additional storage if I wish.  By touching the screen, I can thumb my way through books, page by page or chapter by chapter.  I can "highlight" passages for future reference.  I can obtain instant dictionary definitions of words I don't understand.

I haven't a clue how it works.  Not a clue!  If anything went wrong -- the way a kid's Ford might have gone wrong in the 1950's -- I couldn't begin to fix it.  I couldn't even open it up to look at its gizzards.  Nor could anyone else in town.  If you went into Radio Shack and told them your Kindle needed repairs -- or a tune-up -- they'd think you were insane.

My point, then, is that a Kindle -- which serves only as one example of a vast number of products we rely on daily -- might as well be "magic":

the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.

The Kindle does not strictly fit the dictionary definition of magic only because I trust the assurance of its manufacturer that its operation rests on well accepted laws of nature -- not incantations -- that they have cannily bent to achieve the "desired effects" of this small and wondrous device.

I've owned my Kindle for a couple of years, now.  It still amazes me, but no more so than I'm amazed by an iPhone, a digital camera, my PC, or most of the other so-called necessities of my daily life.  I know they're all based on natural phenomena, insofar as we've all gotten used now to considering quantum mechanics a "natural phenomenon."

But, let's face it.  They're really magic.
----------------------------
¹Catherine Fisher, Obsidian Mirror (Dial Books 2013).

Lavender

It's spring, and my neighborhood is full of flowers.  I breathe in the smell with a smile as I walk or run down the sidewalk.  Once in a while, rounding a corner, I suddenly catch a faint scent of daphne.

Daphne.  The slightest whiff, and I'm thrown back to the age of 13, possibly 12.  We had moved to a new house.  In the basement was a storage room we called the "fruit room," with a screened vent to the outside.  Outside the vent was a bush of daphne, whose scent filled the basement.  The new house, the novel sweet scent of daphne, the age of 13.  All mixed up in my mind.

I'm 13, it's spring, and my brother's practicing the piano, against his will. He's playing "To a Wild Rose," a tune that ever since has been attached to the smell of daphne.  My brother and I have just met the other kids in the neighborhood.  Some we would know for years; others moved away shortly after we arrived.  But my memory of those first few kids we met is engulfed in the scent of daphne.  About the same time, my mother suggested a book she'd just read, a memoir written by the mother of gifted 13-year-old twins.  Their clever and imaginative  lives fascinated me.  I wouldn't know where to find that book, now.  I have no idea of its title.  But my memory of that book -- or the memory of my reactions to reading it -- also is bathed in daphne.

Scent and memory are powerfully linked. 

[T]he olfactory nerve is located very close to the amygdala, the area of the brain that is connected to the experience of emotion as well as emotional memory. In addition, the olfactory nerve is very close to the hippocampus, which is associated with memory.  

So says an on-line source of unknown authority.

Proust knew all about it.  In his Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu, his protagonist famously experiences vivid flashbacks to childhood from the taste (scent) of a madeleine cake.  Not surprisingly, André Aciman, a well-known author, and a specialist in the works of Proust, has had similar experiences, experiences he describes in his essay "Lavender."

"Lavender" is the opening essay in his collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.  Aciman's madeleine cake is the smell of his father's lavender shaving lotion, remembered from childhood.  As he grew up, he discovered that lavender shaving lotions and colognes, like good whiskeys,  come in many subtle variations.  He searched for the lavender that best exemplified his own personality, the "ur-lavender," as he calls it.

You're right.  He sounds a bit obsessive.  But then so was Proust.

His contemplation of lavender, like all good obsessions, segues eventually into thoughts of love.  And of loves.  And of death.

And even of chemistry.  Aciman arranges scents mentally by analogy with the chemical elements.

As in Mendeleyev's periodic table, one could sort these scents in rows and categories: by herbs, flowers, fruits, spices, woods.  Or by places.  By people.  By loves.  By the hotels where this or that soap managed to cast an unforgettable scent over this or that great city.  By the films or foods or clothes or concerts we've loved.  By perfumes women wore.  Or even by years, so that I could mark the bottles as my grandmother would when she labeled each jar of marmalade with her neat octogenerian's cursive, noting on each the fruit and the year of its make. 

During lonely years teaching college courses, he expanded his fascination of scents to those of tea -- hanging out at a small Harvard Square café, sampling "each tea, from Darjeeling to Formosa oolong to Lapsang souchong and gunpowder green."

I liked the idea of tea more than the flavors themselves, the way I liked the idea of tobacco more than of smoking, of people more than friendship, of home more than my apartment on Craigie Street.

He finally discovered a lavender perfume, a very expensive lavender, that exceeded his every expectation of lavender, a perfume that evoked "the women in furs who smoked Balkans aboard a yacht while watching the Hellespont drift in the distance."  A scent that reminded him of past experiences and present hopes for his future, all tangled together in what I suppose was the amygdala of his brain.  A tempered joy, bitter regret, and a muddling of past, present and future bring him to ponder:

Perhaps fragrance is the ultimate mask, the mask between me and the world, between me and me, the other me, the shadow I trail and get hints of but cannot know, sensing all along that talk of another me is itself the most insidious mask of all.  But then perhaps fragrance is nothing more than a metaphor for the "no" I brought to everything I saw when I could so easily have said "yes" -- to myself, to my father, to life -- perhaps because I never loved any of the things of the world well enough and hoped to hide this fact from myself by thinking I could do better by looking elsewhere, or because I loved and wanted each fragrance and couldn't determine which to settle for, and therefore stored the very best till a second life rolled in.

Aciman is a fine writer. He combines, painfully, an appreciation of the potential for joy in one's life and a tragic fear of having somehow missed the boat.  Or, rather, perhaps, a sense of there being too many boats, each with a fascinating destination, and the ability to book passage on only one.

I really have no interest in being 13 again, but I love the scent of daphne, because -- like a home movie -- it evokes my past so strongly.  Not just my past experiences, but my emotional reaction as an adolescent to those past experiences.  Why those emotions seem so important and worth recapturing isn't clear to me, but Aciman understands my puzzlement, a perplexity

within each one of us that nothing, not even love or friendship, can unburden, the life we think of each day, and the life not lived, and the life half lived, and the life we wish we'd learn to live while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if  only we could, and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better than we have....

Well written, as always, and well felt.  I 've read one of his novels and his memoir (Out of Egypt), and am now reading his essays.  I enjoy his writing.

Boston

As terrorist outrages go, nowadays, it wasn't all that impressive.  Three people dead, one a child; about 140 injured to varying degrees, some losing limbs.  Compared with the airplane attacks of nine-eleven, the carnage was slight.

As always, it is the motivation that intrigues and puzzles.  I'm assuming, without knowing, that it was a terrorist attack.  At least two bombs were detonated, coordinated to go off at roughly the same time.  Sufficient evidence of technical sophistication apparently exists to suggest that more than one person was responsible.  The attack may still turn out to be another act by a crazy adolescent, or by some guy driven insane after having been fired from his job, but at present that seems less likely.

Let's assume it was a terrorist act by some organization.  What was the motive?  Traditionally, terrorist acts against non-military targets are attributed to one or more of three motives.  The first is the desire to call the attention of an uninterested world to injustices that need to be righted.  Second is an attempt to force a governing authority to realize that it has more to lose than to gain by continuing its present policies; terrorism to win national independence is one example.  And third is the tactical plan of terrorists to elicit a violent and disproportionate response from the government that will gain the terrorists sympathy and new adherents.

None of these motivations make sense unless the terrorists make public their group's identity, or at least the nature of the cause that their actions were designed to favor.  But no one has claimed "credit" for today's attack.  I suspect no one will.

These three motives are "rational" motives: they are designed to help win a battle. I can also think of two "non-traditional," "irrational" motivations, somewhat related to each other, for engaging in terrorist activities against innocent civilians.  Attacks based on these motives have probably always occurred throughout history, but in recent decades they have become increasingly common and threatening. 

One is a sense, possessed by some cultural groups including Arabs, of "collective responsibility."  When a member of a neighboring tribe hurts a member of my own tribe, I hold the entire tribe responsible.  Either the other tribe comes up with acceptable economic compensation for my injury, or I seek primitive compensation -- an eye for an eye -- against one or more members of the other tribe.  When the "tribes" are modern nations, and the perceived injury seems unlimited in its scope and humiliation -- beyond the power of money or cattle to compensate -- it seems only fair to seek unlimited retribution against that nation's citizens.

The other possible motive, less based on cultural beliefs, is simple revenge.  Revenge may be the most obvious motive for terrorism in today's world, the most difficult to deter rationally, and the most frightening.  When a people -- like certain factions of the Arab world, for example, but certainly not limited to them -- feel that they have suffered for decades or more at the hands of the West, that their suffering has included humiliation and disrespect for their own culture and religion, that attempts to improve their lot by either negotiation or intimidation seem fruitless, their response may be to seek revenge.

After suffering for years from a sense of cultural humiliation,  I no longer hope to change the oppressor's policies.  I'm no longer interested in "converting" him.   I'm no longer interested in extorting concessions from him.  I realize that my military and technological weakness relative to him will continue indefinitely, and that nothing I can do will improve my lot.  The only arrow left in my quiver is revenge.  I can make some of his citizens miserable -- his children killed, his friends' bodies dismembered, lives ruined, the relative happiness of people totally uninterested in politics or international relations destroyed in a couple of seconds.

My misery and humiliation will remain, but my chill will be slightly warmed by having spread a bit of misery to my enemy's people as well.  That the people suffering the misery are not those directly responsible for my own is no more a deterrent than is "collateral damage" to innocent bystanders a deterrent to the West's own military efforts.  The terrorists simply realize that their own misery enjoys company.

The acts of revenge may be enjoyed even by those who only stand by and cheer.  Thus we have Mohammad al-Chalabi, a Jordanian Muslim extremist, commenting on today's attack in Boston:

Let the Americans feel the pain we endured by their armies occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and killing our people there.

As modern technology makes the vast differences between haves and have-nots become readily apparent to the have-nots, and as American foreign policy increasingly is viewed as hostile to and contemptuous of the beliefs and aspirations of various religious and cultural groups, and as fast and easy transportation makes national borders increasingly porous, we will find it increasingly difficult to defuse and prevent such attacks of terrorists within our nation.

Lights out!

After watching it sprinkle off and on all afternoon, my spirits were momentarily lifted by what we in the Northwest Corner like to call a "sun break."  I dashed out of the house and onto the wet sidewalks for an enjoyable four-mile run.  But as I rounded the turn into the home stretch, I was startled by a flash of lightning (unusual around these parts), followed by a crash of thunder.  Several more rumbles seemed to chase me down the street before I reached the safety of home.

The donner und blitzen continued for maybe a half hour once I arrived home.  After an ominous pause, the heavens then opened and we were deluged by hail, hail that piled up on the streets, the sidewalks and the lawns as though it were snow blizzarding in January.  And then, to punctuate Mother Nature's displeasure at only-she-knows-what, at promptly 6 p.m., the lights went out.

I was on the computer when the screen went black, the room darkened, the radio fell silent, and the furnace stopped running.  My reaction was first surprise, then annoyance, and then -- I sensed it gradually creeping up on me -- a shiver of existential dread.

No heat.  No light, once darkness fell upon us, aside from my one workable flashlight.  No cooking.  No entertainment.  And, most awesome realization of all, no internet, no Facebook -- no connection with the outside world.

The outage lasted only twenty minutes, a trivial inconvenience compared with the days without power the poor souls in the Northeast experienced last fall in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.  But when the power goes, you have no idea how long it will be gone.  My thoughts immediately turned to the harrowing logistics of staying alive for days without all the essentials of life.  Even if the power returned by morning, I realized, I was confronting an unpleasant evening and night.

All because we had no electricity, a luxury that many Americans -- and certainly many inhabitants of other countries -- did not have until after the Great Depression.  Even after electrification was widespread, our grandfathers possessed a collective memory of how one lived without power.   If the power failed, they might grumble, but they probably had some old kerosene lanterns lying around the garage, or certainly plenty of candles in the cupboard.  They built a fire in the fireplace.  If they needed hot food or water, they balanced pots and pans on the hot coals.  They threw blankets around themselves and their kids.  They went to bed when it got dark, and got up when it became dawn.

Today, we lack the childhood memories that would help us survive.  Our roots in a pre-electrical past have been severed.  Contemplating loss of power for more than 24 hours creates in us not merely annoyance, but a rush of panic. 

At 6:20, the power came back on.  The house came to life, glowing and humming and rumbling.  The crisis had passed.  The cats -- who had disappeared into the outdoors at the first rumble of thunder -- eventually returned, dripping wet, and allowed themselves to be fondled and dried.    Die out tympani, fade in violins and woodwinds.  All was well. 

But the anxiety remains.  If we lost power for weeks -- perhaps when a giant earthquake, "The Big One," hits Seattle -- we would have to fend for ourselves without the quiet assistance of our electrical servants, servants we've come to rely upon to the point of utter dependence.  We would find ourselves back in the Little House on the Prairie with none of the experience of living in a log cabin that the pioneers themselves were able to fall back on.

My cats -- despite all my silly fears for their health and psyches -- would do just fine.  They can rely on their instincts.  But without elaborate preparations for such a disaster, preparations that most of us think about but never undertake, I'm afraid our cats would survive with greater aplomb than would their nominal masters.

Blood and gore

Tarantino's movie Django Unchained was shut down on its opening day in China, yesterday.  The reason is not yet clear.  Some blame a brief scene of nudity.  Others blame Tarantino's signature blood and violence.

The New York Times notes that American movies opening in China are usually altered to tone down the violence.  Django Unchained's violence had already been altered, reportedly, "including altering the color of fake blood in violent scenes and limiting how far the blood spattered."

As an official for Sony Pictures commented:

What we call bloodshed and violence is just a means of serving the purpose of the film, and these slight adjustments will not affect the basic quality of the film -- such as turning the blood to a darker color or lowering the height of the splatter of blood.

News reports have focused on the issue of film censorship within China.  Censorship is indeed an issue.  To me, however, the more interesting question is how the quantity and velocity of blood splatter acts in "serving the purpose of the film."

To my memory, I've never seen a Tarantino film, and have no plans to see Django Unchained.  Tarantino is, of course, a serious and respected director.  Django Unchained received a respectable 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes "Tomatometer."   Dissenting reviews, however, question the increasing repetitiveness of Tarantino's movie formulas.  "Tarantino's incoherent three-hour bloodbath" was the headline attached to a serious, in-depth, on-line review in Salon.

What's the objective of a serious movie, I like to ask myself, and how does each scene help realize that objective?  Violence, like sex, is "gratuitous" if it is unnecessary to the objective of the film.  I'm sure some people see a film primarily in the hope of seeing gratuitous sex and/or violence.  I don't.  Both distract attention from the movie as a serious experience.  And, to me, filmed violence, gratuitous or not, is simply an unpleasant viewing experience.

The Sony spokesman suggests that movies can be (and are) made less offensively bloody and violent for Chinese audiences.  I suggest that producers and directors consider releasing their less offensive versions in American theaters, as well.

A less violent Django Unchained still wouldn't suck me into my local theater, but there have been other films I would have been more inclined to attend if I hadn't realized that I'd have to spend an evening in the equivalent of the Roman Colosseum in order to view them.

Cat and mouse

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
--Charles Darwin (letter, May 2, 1860)

I woke up last night to the sound of feline scuffling.  After lying awake for some time, I decided I might as well read.  Shortly after I turned on the light and opened my book, one of my cats came prancing into the room with a small mouse in his mouth, the tail hanging off to one side.  The mouse appeared alive, its eyes wide open in somewhat understandable alarm.

The cat, having proved his prowess, trotted back out of the room.  I didn't discovered a small corpse this morning, so he may have let the mouse loose for further recreation at a later time.  There have been unnerving noises of tiny feet scampering about the house the last week or so.  The mouse's days, however, are clearly numbered.

In a letter, from which an excerpt is quoted above, Darwin clarified that he wasn't an atheist.  (He stated in other places that he considered himself an agnostic.)  He simply was baffled at the mysteries of the universe.  Other naturalists have been equally unsettled.  One, whose identity I can't recall, recoiled in horror at watching a predator eat a gazelle in Africa while the animal was still alive and conscious.  Even if God chose to use natural selection as his means for guiding evolution, he wrote, surely natural selection could have been accomplished with far less pain to the creatures being selected against.

I lay awake at 3 o'clock in the morning, thinking initially about life from the perspective of the mouse.  I then considered the incredible amount of horrific pain and suffering that creatures about the world are undergoing at any given moment.  As a species, we shield ourselves from suffering and death to an amazing degree relative to other creatures.  Even death from cancer -- although still accompanied by both physical and mental pain -- has been eased by modern medicine.  Millions of other species are far less lucky.

I've read arguments that other animals do not suffer as man does.  The pain may be great, but it lasts a finite time.  The animal is not aware of time, does not consider that his present suffering will continue for hours or days to come until he dies.  Or animals' nervous systems are not developed to experience pain in the same way humans do.

I certainly agree that a paramecium does not "suffer" as it dies.  Even insects, birds and the simpler mammals may lack both the neurological and the psychological ability to experience pain as we do.  Pain is a tool devised by evolution to teach animals of a certain intelligence to avoid future exposure to life-threatening experiences that they have once survived.  "Once burned, twice shy."

But to deny that the higher mammals -- primates, horses, dogs, cats, even (I would argue) mice -- experience pain in the same way as humans do, or that they suffer from fear (even without consciousness of impending death) while being tortured, suggests either that the person in denial has never spent much time around animals, or that he is blinded by an ideology that requires him to consider all beings except humans as automatons.  In either case, I would feel nervous in having such people as my neighbors.

The existence of suffering, both human and in nature,  has always posed problems to the religious believer.  The suffering of animals does not weaken my own faith, but it once again makes me conscious that the Universe and its Creator are mysterious beyond comprehension, and their nature not susceptible to glib expression in the stilted language of a catechism.   "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saieth the Lord."   (Isaiah 55:8.)

That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?  And it compels great humility when one is contemplating the overall plan of Creation.  But, even while accepting the world we've been given, we should, as we go about our lives, nevertheless be sensitive to -- and consider ourselves obligated to minimize -- the sufferings of all creatures. Of all "sentient beings," as the Buddhists phrase it.

Even the tiny mouse who comes into your house to get out of the rain. 

Better living through chemistry

I have claimed on a number of occasions, only half jokingly, that had I gone to school in today's environment, the school system would have had me on Ritalin from K to 12.  There's no place in today's school system for the Class Clown, apparently.  Actually, there never was, but back in the day they didn't know what to do about it.  Now they do.

The New York Times reported Sunday that nearly 20 percent of all American high school boys have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).   Two thirds of those are being medicated with either Ritalin or Adderall.  We're looking today at an impressively high percentage of our youth who are diagnosed with a pathology requiring prescription drugs.

In a moving essay yesterday, entitled Diagnosis: Human, Ted Gup writes of his son who was diagnosed with ADHD in first grade, began receiving medication, and ended up dead of an alcohol and drug overdose at age 21, while a senior in college.  Gup admits that his boy had problems unrelated to ADHD, but he feels that his lifelong experience with Ritalin and Adderall made his transition into the drug culture all too easy.

But Gup's more interesting point is something different.  Many "normal" kids are now getting their hands on these drugs, because anti-ADHD drugs also provide an easy, pharmaceutical way for a non-ADHD student to focus on his studies and avoid distractions.  Just as an athlete uses steroids to improve physical performance, just as grieving survivors of deceased loved ones are using anti-depressants to restore daily functioning, many of today's most ambitious kids are using Ritalin and Adderall to heighten academic performance.  Any weakness in personality or performance is being diagnosed and medicated out of existence. Seemingly. Gup notes that the psychological profession, in the latest edition of its diagnostic manual, is now about to define some forms of what we consider "normal grief" to be a diagnosable pathology.

I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition. It’s as if we are trying to contain grief, and the absolute pain of a loss like mine. We have become increasingly disassociated and estranged from the patterns of life and death, uncomfortable with the messiness of our own humanity, aging and, ultimately, mortality.

I agree.  But I wonder if, in agreeing, I'm not really fighting against "progress," attempting to sweep back the tides of human history.

A few posts back, I discussed the science fiction novel, Revelation Space.   In that novel -- its events set five hundred years in the future -- electronic chips were routinely implanted in people's brains to add funds of specialized knowledge or to permit them to function at higher cognitive levels than would be possible by the unassisted normal brain.  These implants were considered normal, and were routinely used by anyone whose jobs required anything more than the most routine activities.

Is that where we're going?  Are what we are seeing now merely the earliest, most primitive attempts to raise our human capabilities by our use of drugs?  Drugs to perform physically like superhumans?  Drugs to master difficult academic work through superior powers of concentration?  Drugs permitting us to ignore the human emotions resulting from loss and tragedy, and thus continue in an uninterrupted fashion as productive members of society?

Maybe, but Gup warns us that we thereby risk losing those qualities that make us recognizably human, rather than well-oiled machines.  And in so doing, permitting ourselves to go through life living in an illusory world:

Instead of enhancing our coping skills, we undermine them and seek shortcuts where there are none, eroding the resilience upon which each of us, at some point in our lives, must rely. Diagnosing grief as a part of depression runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another.

The D.S.M. [official psychological diagnostic manual] would do well to recognize that a broken heart is not a medical condition, and that medication is ill-suited to repair some tears. Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.

Gup's words are moving and philosophical, but they may well fall on deaf ears.  His concerns do not seem to reflect the direction our society is moving.