I have a friend who retired after me from the same school where I taught who beat me to TKR surgery. After just a couple weeks it seemed she was struggling a little but she told me recently she’d walked 3 miles around Lake Merritt five weeks removed her surgery. So now I’m getting excited.
First I need to contact a neurologist to get Heidi an MRI but it looks likely she’ll be getting her left hind leg removed. Sad but what are you going to do. Definitely the most athletic dog I’ve ever had but when you see the grace with which she copes how can I complain? Then I’ll copy out that paragraph. At the vet while waiting I found an interesting passage on religion which I think takes a nicely respectful and nuanced approach. I may have more transcription to do there.
Here is the first paragraph of the fifth chapter titled The Origins of Minds from Antonio Damasio’s 2018 book titled The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures.
How does one get from the deceptively simple life of nearly 4 billion years ago to the life of the past 50,000 or so years, the life that harbors human cultural minds? What can we say about the trajectory and about the instruments it used? To say that natural selection and genetics are a key to the transformation is entirely true but not enough. We need to acknowledgethe presence of the homeostatic imperative - put to beneficial use or not - as a factor in the selective pressures. We need to acknowledge the fact that there was neither a single line of evolution nor a simple progression of complexity and efficiency of organisms, that there were ups and downs and even extinctions. We need to note that a partnership of nervous systems and bodies was required to generate human minds and that minds occurred not to isolated organisms but to organisms that were part of a social setting. Last, we need to note the enrichment of minds by feelings and subjectivity, image-based memory, and the ability to enchain images in narratives that probably began as nonverbal, film-like sequences but eventually, after the emergence of verbal languages, combined verbal and nonverbal elements. The enrichment came to include the ability to invent and produce intelligent creations, a process I like to call “creative intelligence” and that is a step up from the smarts that enable numerous living organisms, including humans, to behave efficiently, quickly and winningly in everyday life. Creative intelligence was the means by which mental images and behaviors were intentionally combined to provide novel solutions for the problems that humans diagnosed and to construct new worlds for the opportunities humans envisioned.
I missed that but will find it as soon as this canine neurology vet answers the phone. Hopefully before the jaunty, infinitely repeated jingle drives me out of my mind.
Have you also read Cider House Rules? That is right up there with my favorites as is his World According to Garp, but while the latter is entertaining in a zany way. Cider House Rules is a dead serious look at life in an orphanage, a perfect setting to consider all the ramifications of abortion. Also just a moving story of one the orphan who becomes the doctor’s protege. So glad I found my way to reading it.
I haven’t read any of Irving’s other books. Cider House Rules sounds good. I need to pick it up one day. Maybe after I finish my own novel, assuming I get the time. A Prayer for Owen Meany is more of a meditation on fate. I read it 30 years ago in my late 20s, but I still vividly remember the story, which is rare for me. (I forget most modern novels shortly after putting them down.) The ending was a 2-by-4 between the eyes.
I can’t tell you how reassuring that is to hear you say. In the few years I’ve been retired I’ve read many more novels than I ever have in the entire rest of my life. I’ve metamorphosed from a a stubborn nonfiction adherent to a flaming proponent of the novel. Just now discovering the power of narrative for making feeling fueled sense of life. But I doubt I could remember a fourth of the titles or authors of the books I’ve been reading, or the story line of most of the books i know I’ve read. Though I did have the experience of talking to a young woman newly hired at Cal to teach Irish lit. We frequently talk about the books we’re reading while exercising our dogs in the park next door. But in first semester in that role she taught Crime and Punishment which was one of the view novels that made it past my non-fiction bias long ago. I told her my favorite, most often quoted passage comes from that. I remembered a little, then she remembered some which triggered more from me and finally we produced pretty much the whole thing.
I thought it had elements of being a tragedy. Here the doctors’s interest in furthering the orphan named Homer’s interest in medicine seems to spare him from the emotional blankness or turmoil which seems to afflict all the other orphans. But while the doctor, seeing first hand how neglect has damaged the orphans, very willingly performs abortions on young women in trouble for little or no cost. While assisting the doctor in delivering babies and dealing with medical crises which arise in child birth, Homer does at first also help him with problematic abortions. But he is obviously troubled by doing so. Obviously he himself could have just as easily have been aborted as become an orphan there. What a bind to be put in.
“In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Return of the Prodigal Son
I think that advice applies especially as we have gifts subtracted. Keeping in mind that our fading mobility or memory was always a gift rather than an entitlement can help preserve ones outlook as old age continues to undo what was accomplished in the womb and in childhood.
I’m beginning to think @Jay313 is right about A Prayer for Owen Meany. A few chapters in and I can’t recall when a book has made me laugh harder. But I can see why it would appeal to many of you here at this site. What comes out as he compares the rector and the pastor at the two churches his mother and prospective stepfather are choosing between is quite informative. Wiggins is the rector of the Episcopal church which is where our narrator Johnny has grown up and Merrill is the pastor at the Congregational church. It is easy to see which Johnny favors.
…Whereas Pastor Merrill spoke an educated language - he’d been an English major at Princeton; he’d heard Niebuhr and Tillich lecture at Union Theological - Rector Wiggins spoke in ex-pilot homilies, he was a pulpit-thumper who had no doubt.
What made Mr. Merrill infinitely more attractive was that he was full of doubt; he expressed our doubt in the most eloquent and sympathetic ways. In his completely lucid and convincing view, the Bible is a book with a troubliing plot, but a plot that can be understood: God creates us out of love, but we don’t want God, or we don’t believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us - at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reasuuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.
Although he knew all the best -or, at least, the least boring - stories in the Bible, Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite. By comparison, whatever the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had seen to make him believe in God, he had seen absolutely - possibly by flying an airplane too close to the sun. The rector was not gifted with language, and he was blind to doubt or worry in any form: perhaps the problem with his “eyesight” that had forced his early retirement from the airlines was really a euphemism for the blinding power of his total religious conversion - because Mr. Wiggin was fearless to an extent that would have made him an unsafe pilot, and to an extent that made him a madman as a preacher.
Edited to clarify that this passage is merely insightful in a witty way. There are also many other passages which are almost slapstick funny, the kind of funny that seems necessary to make painful passages palatable.
Yep. That is my sense of humor too. Laughter through the tears. Give us a review when you’ve finished. You can almost draw a straight line from the first sentence through this passage to the ending.
Wow, thanks for that. I can think of a lot of pastors who fit both caricatures. And not to criticize the other kind, but I gravitate toward the one who empathizes with doubt as an act of faith… I have felt the pull toward the faith that looks for certainty–and after, as Greg Boyd puts it, many houses of cards falling–I’m much more comfortable with the tension of doubt and hoping that God, if he’s just (and like my parents) will actually encourage and delight in honest questions.
When my parents’ church hosted candidates for a pastor a couple decades ago, my father and I listened with delight to a quiet pastor who humorously interpreted the story of Job, calling his 3 comforters–Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar–“Elibophar”–and giving a helpful interpretation of the difficult story, acknowledging uncertainty of the questions that surround it… We hoped fervently that the church would take him. To our surprise, no one shared our appreciation of his style and personality, and they chose someone who, while a good man, ratcheted up his voice volume to deliver rather repetitive, simple sermons, with certainty a given. That’s sometimes a very helpful style, especially for those who really struggle. So, it’s very important–even intermittently, we probably all need that. However, it illustrates to me that faith experience is very different across the population. I’ll have to listen to that book again. Thanks.
What is interesting to me this far is that Owen Meany seems eyes-open smart and more often makes useful inferences others do not. Yet following that passage he had something dismissive to say about Merrill’s doubtfulness to the effect that if he had that much doubt perhaps he was in the wrong profession. He is such an interesting character but there are many others as well. Well, I’m taking a sleeping pill tonight so I’ll be well rested to receive my new knee tomorrow. I don’t want to wolf down too much more of APFOM today as it is the last novel I have checked out for my extra down time but I do have several good nonfiction books at hand as well.
I put the book on my Christmas list. Best wishes on your surgery tomorrow, and prayers for quick recovery. My wife is having endoscopy tomorrow for some stomach issues, so I guess I am the only one eating breakfast of the three of us. Hope to hear of a successful result soon!
That meshes well with the fact that the most frequent mandate in the Bible is “Don’t be afraid” or one of its several variations – “Be anxious for nothing”, “Fret not”, …
But surely we are still to tie up our camel and use prudence generally for our own well being and that of those who count on us. I’ll bet the Bible doesn’t say “walk into machine gun fire whistling a happy tune for the lord is with you”. Aren’t we encouraged to be self reliant and remain vigilant? If so, then our faith doesn’t release us from the need to exercise judgement when and to what degree we can leave our well being to God, does it? It seems as natural to me for the Christian faithful to worry over those questions as it does for anyone else. Unless one is entirely indifferent whether your earthly existence ends now or some years from now, your lot and mine must exercise that much vaunted free will to take care of our own business. Even if we despise this life and are eager to get on to the next, there will be others sorry to face your loss sooner than need be. We all have reason to exercise reasonable diligence on our own behalf in this life. I think there is a big difference having faith and being reckless, but I don’t mean that as any slight on yourself Dale. Just trying to draw a line here.
A Prayer for Owen Meany is more of a meditation on fate. I read it 30 years ago in my late 20s, but I still vividly remember the story, which is rare for me. (I forget most modern novels shortly after putting them down.) The ending was a 2-by-4 between the eyes.
You forget that when I had kidney cancer, I did indeed proceed with the nephrectomy. Cheerfully.