Each day is so unique and so unrepeatable, and I would so like each day and night to last and last. Every scene so much like itself. The vegetables from the organic garden are not at all like those from the stores, and do not even resemble the ones from the farmers’ market very closely.
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The funeral Friday, in a small Catholic church. The priest and three other men in robes, standing across the doorway at the top of the steps with a large cross, waiting for the body. The enormous candles. The procession inside and then through the garden after the service, that smelled of warm herbs. Everything would have looked and sounded essentially the same a thousand years ago and this impresses me.
I do think funerals should either take place without the body, or should end with a burial. Alternatively, the crowd could leave before the hearse drives away. I do not like seeing the hearse drive away and this, I note, is for many others also the difficult part.
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A friend commented that it had been a nice service, although it was odd to realize one could sum up someone’s entire life in just a few minutes. It is true on the one hand, but I had actually thought the opposite; it had been an eventful life.
And in Reeducation we were expected all to be the same. We might be better or worse, more or less advanced, but we were all the same; if we did not think so, it was only that we had not learned to see the sameness. I tend to notice the opposite; each one is so different that, scientifically speaking, it would be hard to devise a scale for souls.
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My former student called, delighted because his formerly non functional fingers are now working. This means he can work at his actual profession again. People had been pressuring him to exercise a related profession on the theory that this should be satisfactory to him, and he had insisted on doing something completely different.
He was told he was being “too hard on himself” in his dissatisfaction at the idea of exercising only a simulacrum of his actual profession. For him what would actually be hard, what would be the greatest form of self multilation, was to live in the simulacrum. Doing something else was the most satisfactory course of action.
He is not interested in reducing his profession to a hobby, he is not interested in exercising his hobbies as professions, and he has professional interests in more than one area. I do not find this attitude unreasonable, but it is apparently not the majority position.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 