Sunday, February 11, 2024
In bed at 9 and up at 5. Let Lilly out. 26°, high of 37°, partly cloudy. Wind is NW at 7 mph, 3-8/14. Sunrise at 6:55, sust at 5:17, 10+21.
Treadmill; pain. I woke with a lot of shoulder and wrist pain, and now having difficulty lifting my laptop, and uncomfortable typing on it. I did not apply diclofenac yesterday because the wrist seemed acceptable and applying the cream to the shoulder is a problem because of the need to keep it uncovered by clothing after application. The lifting pain means no undershirt. I need to wear a zipped hoodie or stay in my robe during the day. The wrist pain definitely involves the hand, thumb, and lower forearm. I'm also feeling some pain in my right elbow. A rough start to the day.😟 Hard to pull out a Kleenex, to blow my nose, to take care of personal hygiene.
I'm grateful for the use I still have of my hands and arms (and other working parts) despite their limitations from age and pain. I think of those who have no hands or arms, legs or feet, having had them ripped from their bodies by a bomb, a rocket, a land mine, or an artillery shell. I think of those whose limbs have been crushed by collapsing buildings, buildings they had relied on for protection. I think of children in Gaza, in the Spring of their lives, losing limbs to amputation on hospital floors, surrounded by other mutilés de guerre. I think of those who drop the bombs and those who fire the rockets and artillery shells and of those, like me, who played supporting roles in wars' contests of death and destruction. How do they feel about what they have done, what do they think, while the war endures and long after? What did I think of working in the TACC? Heroes, patriots, banal order-followers like Eichman, or do they feel or think about it at all?
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson. I read a review in the current The Atlantic online by Judith Shulevitz of Robinson's latest book. I read her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and got about halfway through the sequel Jack before I gave up on it. I enjoyed the first three novels and looked forward to the sequel about the prodigal son, but I found its long dialogue in the cemetery pretty dismal. Shulevitz points out that "Robinson is one of the greatest living Christian novelists, by which I don’t just mean that she’s a Christian—though she is an active one—but that her great novels (five so far) and her versatile, morally stringent essays (four collections and a book of lectures, on subjects including Darwinism and the Puritans as well as her own childhood) reflect a deep knowledge and love of Christianity." Her Faith, like that of Flannery O'Connor, is a mystery to me. O'Conoor's was rooted in Roman Catholicism, Robinson's in the teaching of John Calvin, but it surely wasn't the Church's Catechism, Aquinas' Summa or Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion that generated that Faith. If a Hindu or Buddhist were to read any of them, would they be converted to Catholicism or Calvinism? If O'Connor or Robinson were to read the Bhagavad Gita, would they become Hindus? Isn't religious faith really mostly based on the indoctrination and inculcation to which we are subjected to in our childhood? "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless". Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. How many of us, raised in the bosom of the Irish Catholic Church, or in a fundamentalist Protestant religion, carry a latent fear of going to Hell after death even if we say we don't believe in Hell?
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