For no reason discernible to me, I dreamt last night about the right of a parent to choose whether a baby should live or die. In my dream-world, couples frequently traveled to countries where child-euthanasia was legal. This killing was considered merciful--both as a means of population control and for lessening the burden placed on families and society.

As a phrase from a recent film made clear, we are often told to "choose life". Death is not an option, we hear; you must keep fighting, keep growing, keep expanding. Death is stagnation, decay, a burden on the system. But should we choose life at any cost? Our little planet is overrun with people, and feeble attempts at population control can't hope to compete with the deeply felt message that continuous production is the key to happiness. Bigger, better, faster, more... The siren song of progress leads us onwards even as it lulls us to sleep. We are unaware of our own limits; we hide from our own mortality.

More important than life, I believe, is the freedom to choose death. And along with it, the wisdom to allow death when necessary. To be able to let go of the desire for growth, to be at peace with finitude and decline. After all, if we cannot allow others to choose death, what hope can we have for peace with our own inevitable end?

So I've noticed something. All the people who write those popular blogs--you know, the ones that get tons of comments, and whose authors all seem to know each other? They all seem so exceptional. They're the kind of people you'd want to go out weekends with, just hoping some of their appeal might rub off on you. They could make you seem brilliant, because they're never at a loss for words. They could show you all the hip places to be seen, and introduce you to all the right people at those gen-X dinner parties they're always having. But I wonder: where are the people whose lives don't read like trendy fiction? Where are the confused, the awkward, the lost, the ashamed? I've been reading blogs for a long time, and I haven't found anyone like me. Anyone... average.

Even if those voices are out there somewhere, who would know? Just like this little blog, they'll be invisible in the madding crowd of cyberspace. You've gotta be hip to be noticed, and you've gotta be noticed to be hip. Mere mortals like us can't play that game, I'm afraid. Don't get me wrong; I don't begrudge the stars their fame. I genuinely enjoy reading about their glamorous adventures, sharing their inner turmoil as they make their way through extraordinary lives. But still--don't the rest of us have stories too? And don't they deserve to be heard?

Nah. Who wants to listen to someone normal?

This is rather disturbing. I mean, look at the expression on his face.

I've been reading a collection of short stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and former Russian exile.

Whenever I read Russian literature, I always get all weepy-eyed and nostalgic and want to hop on the first plane (or, better, train) to Mother Russia. I don't know how to describe it without sounding trite, but there's just something about the spirit of the nation that touches me. I like these people, I care about them--I want to live that kind of life, have that kind of deep spiritual core combined with astute practicality that seems to make up the Russian soul.

But Solzhenitsyn... wow. Reading a story from him, I can't decide if I feel all warm and fuzzy or like I've been kicked in the stomach. He writes in equal parts elegy and bitter satire--all in the same story. All in the same sentence, for God's sake. It's disturbing.

"The folly of mistaking a paradox
or a discovery, a metaphor for a
proof, a torrent of verbiage for a
spring of capital truths, and
oneself for an oracle, is inborn in
us."
-- Paul Valery, 1895

Heh. Is it folly? Or are we all oracles, proving existence through metaphor
and bringing things to light through paradox?

Anne Carson writes:

[...]

Lots of people including Aristotle think error
an interesting and valuable mental event.
In his discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric
Aristotle says there are 3 kinds of words.
Strange, ordinary and metaphorical.

"Strange words simply puzzle us;
ordinary words convey what we know already;
it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something new & fresh"
(Rhetoric, 1410b10-13).
In what does the freshness of metaphor consist?
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself

in the act of making a mistake.

[...]

From the true mistakes of metaphor a lesson can be learned.

[...]

Metaphors teach the mind

to enjoy error
and to learn
from the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case.

[...]

Here is an example.
It is a fragment of ancient Greek lyric
that contains an error of arithmetic.
The poet does not seem to know
that 2 + 2 = 4.

Alkman fragment 20:
[?] made three seasons, summer
and winter and autumn third
and fourth spring when
there is blooming but to eat enough
is not.

Alkman lived in Sparta in the 7th century b.c.
Now Sparta was a poor country
and it is unlikely
that Alkman led a wealthy or well-fed life there.
This fact forms the background of his remarks
which end in hunger.

Hunger always feels
like a mistake.
Alkman makes us experience this mistake
with him
by an effective use of computational error.

[...]

Alkman breaks the rules of arithmetic
and jeopardizes grammar
and messes up the metrical form of his verse
in order to draw us into this fact.
At the end of the poem the fact remains
and Alkman is probably no less hungry.

[...]

Heh.

The Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois notes that: "Areas of particular focus for us are the humanities, the biological sciences, and interdisciplinary domains."

I think perhaps they've been misled about the meaning of the word "focus".

As a matter of fact, I'm sure of it. If it meant what it normally did, then "particular focus" would be rather redundant, no?

News anchors discussing the World Economic Forum in New York this week no longer sound surprised or outraged while reporting "seige-like conditions" and "thousands of anti-globalization protestors". The presence of wide-spread and active dissent has become ordinary.

Is this a good thing? I'm not sure.