willa cather is a better resource for dying than science
I. "Last Words" Assumes Heaven Is Lipless, I Guess
Synchronicity is me finally picking up Death Comes for the Archbishop after half-reading it over Christmas, re-discovering one of my favorite paragraphs about folks treasuring last words in a sacrosanct way, and then coming across an article about actual last words in The Atlantic. First, from the book:
In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene. Among the watchers there was always the hope that the dying man might reveal something of what he alone could see; that his countenance, if not his lips, would speak, and on his features would fall some light or shadow from beyond.
Second, from the article:
“Famous last words” are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death—one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes. “The process of dying is still very profound, but it’s a very different kind of profoundness,” says Bob Parker, the chief compliance officer of the home health agency Intrepid USA. “Last words—it doesn’t happen like the movies. That’s not how patients die.” We are beginning to understand that final interactions, if they happen at all, will look and sound very different.
The article isn't half as good as Willa Cather, and understands people even less, but includes some great anecdotes on people's last words and interactions.
II. Valentine's Day Is Bad, This Article Is Good
The ♥ icon is used all over the world as a pictogram of the human heart, and as shorthand for affection: ♥ = heart = love. It is the most commonly recognised symbol on the planet after the cross and the crescent. But though we see it all the time, and teach its meaning to our children, its associations with the organ of circulation, and indeed love, are neither ancient nor instinctive. [...] The story of how the ♥, the heart, and love came together is a romantic tale. Progress towards union was tortuous and was influenced by, amongst other matters, herbalism, heraldry, phallus, breast, and buttock worship, the philosophers of antiquity, the devotions of the Roman Catholic church, the introduction of the penny post, and fashions in playing cards and confectionary.
III. The Problem with Government Is Other than Size
The below is taken from a wonderful essay, even though the introduction to said essay ignores the fact that conservative criticism of government overreach is almost always allied to government complexity. Herman Cain's "9-9-9" malarkey being perhaps the most famous example. Anyway, we live in a kludgeocracy!
The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.
“Clumsy but temporarily effective” also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response. From the mind-numbing complexity of the health care system (which has only gotten more complicated, if also more just, after the passage of Obamacare), our Byzantine system of funding higher education, and our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from the welfare state to environmental regulation, America has chosen more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than any comparable country.
IV. The Green New Deal Is Something I'm Just Going to Keep Reading About Until I Either Have An Opinion That Is Well-Informed or Until I Have Died from Climate-Change Famine
Please don't [at] me. The best point in this essay is inarguable:
Our carbon emissions are not mainly about the price of gasoline or electricity. They’re about infrastructure. For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants, cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the species. Everything most of us do, we do through it: calling our parents, getting to work, moving for a job, taking the family on vacation, finding food for the evening or staying warm in a polar vortex. Just being human in this artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape.
V. Recommended Reading
As we all circle the maw of the internet, gummed to death by endless and indiscriminate cries for attention, I suggest finding a book or author you can never resist and letting said selection trample on technology with hedonistic glee. I just finished another P.G. Wodehouse farce, and he remains unbeatable. Other possibilities: Connie Willis, Ross Macdonald, Muriel Spark, possibly Helen Oyeyemi, definitely Mikhail Bulgakov--I don't know anyone who's read The Heart of a Dog, but I loved it.
Happy Love Day.