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That's right, I am now a published writer! You have received the first edition of my first publication. I was encouraged to publish my own newsletter by an article about improving your writing via the Internet. I will let Jerry Pournelle and Alex Pournelle speak for themselves:
Set up a little mailing list to your friends, with personal material, observations on life, or just silly bits of trivia...'Publish' it on a regular schedule, like every week or so, to give yourself a deadline. "The habit of self-expression leads one to the desire for something meaningful to express."
I managed to make the deadline this week, I'm awfully proud of myself, and you should be too. I don't know how my formatting will hold up over email, so you'll have to let me know how it looked over your various email programs.
I just finished reading a book called Loving And Leaving The Good Life by Helen Nearing. I won't go into detail about the lives of Helen and Scott Nearing, although it makes for a remarkable story. In this book however, the most remarkable thing is Scott's death. This man did a lot of great things in his life: championing social causes, living frugally, working incessantly. But this great life was capped and summarized by his great death.
Scott was as healthy as could be right up to his death (that's what an active outdoor life and true vegetarianism will do for you). In fact he lived to be a hundred years old without any help from a doctor. And as he had lived, so he died. He did not want to consult doctors in his death that he had never needed in his life. Not because he was stubborn, but because he was dignified. He wanted to face death not in struggle, but in acceptance. Wouldn't it be wrong to live life so naturally, and then run and hide from death, which is such a vital part of life?
This all makes sense to me, but it's one thing to think a thing, and to believe it. It is altogether different to do it. Scott Nearing seemed to have none of our fear of death, as he worked out the proper way to die. He wanted to watch it happen, to experience it rather than leave in a drugged bliss. And so he did. One day weeks before his 100th birthday he decided to stop eating. He could tell that his time was coming, and so he accepted it. From that day till six weeks later when he died, he ate nothing, occasionally drinking water or fruit juice. When he died he was awake, aware, and with Helen.
I certainly am awed by, and idolize this man. But could I ever have the strength to accept my death? I don't know. Maybe if I had lived to be 100. But what if my death was coming at 59? How easy would acceptance come then, even for Scott Nearing?
EPILOGUE: I don't know what to make of Helen's death. After writing about Scott's death in Loving And Leaving The Good Life, she writes that she is eager to go as he did. Witnessing such a dignified death allowed her fear to dissipate as well. But just this fall Helen Nearing died in a car accident, in her nineties. What to make of that? Maybe if they had gone to a further extreme and shunned all modern technology she could of avoided such a fate. What a strange way for her to die. In Scott's case, a dignified death, in hers a stupid accident. Two remarkable lives. That's our world for ya.
Ever notice that whenever people make an improvement in efficiency, they just find more things to do until they are giving as much effort as they used to? We got a new computer a few months ago; it was top of the line then (don't ask about now). And it is six times faster than our old one. Wow! you'd say, that thing must really fly! No. It crawls. Because I've loaded it down with even bigger and more complex programs that our old computer could never run. I've managed to weigh it down until it's performance speed is about the same as the old one. If it's going too fast I'll run two or three programs at the same time; that usually slows it down.
Efficiency should be an excuse to take it easy, not to cram it in. What if we went back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and discovered the wants and needs of the people living then. We could bring them back with us, and fulfill them using the amazing abilities of our modern human race. What a wonderful, easy life we might lead.
Ever wonder what an animal thinks? I know they think, I know there's more than instincts ruling those brains of theirs. Because instincts can't be defined for every event of an animal's life. When a dog walks out of it's doghouse, what makes it choose between going left or right? There's no instinct guiding that. There is something in an animal's brain that makes that choice, just as our brain chooses where our bodies will go. When my dog Alice comes upstairs and takes a toy out of her bed, what makes her choose the sock over the ring? And why does she choose the ring the next night? Obviously animals have some semblance of free will. My question is, what does it look like? What goes on in the dog's head when it's making those decisions? Does it think about it? What's it like to think without language? Maybe it's just randomness that decides it, some fundamental uncertainty vibrating through the animal's body, generated by the electron's themselves. If so, of course the next question is how many of our actions are random in nature. How much of our 'logic' is explaining after the fact? If that frightens you, you should be even more frightened by the fact that we already know that our cerebrum, the Thinking Man's part of the brain, is the last to receive our nerve impulses. Only after being relayed through the instincts do we get a chance to think about them.
For a visual demonstration of this phenomenon, you will have to pay close attention for a couple of weeks. One day perhaps you will be walking down the street. A car will honk, and you'll flinch. But if you pay close attention to yourself you'll notice that you flinch BEFORE you hear the sound. Or more accurately, before you realize you've heard the sound. It's eerie, and I hope you notice it too, because I certainly do. (But we can take heart in the fact that kids that play that 'two for flinching' game can keep themselves from flinching by an act of the cerebrum. There may still be a chance for the human race to rise above the dogs! We must follow the children!).
All Done
Quote of the Week (or maybe it's permanent, we'll see): "You must live as you think, or sooner or later you will think as you live."