6/282026

 Sunday, June 28, 2026

1914 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie by Bosnian-Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo

1934 Jimmy Aquavia was born

In bed at 9, up at 5:15; 0530 124/74/66 108 203.4; 60/73/60, partly sunny morning, cloudy afternoon. 

Morning meds at 6 a.m., and Eliquis at     a.m. and 7 p.m.  I skipped the morning dose because of last night's double dose.

Overdose of Eliquis.  My forgetfulness has become dangerous.  Yesterday I took a double dose of the blood thinner prescribed by Dr. Singh for one month to ward off a stroke or pulmonary embolism after the catheter ablation. 

Free will & determinism.  This issue has been on my mind for months now, since reading Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say.  I got to thinking about it again as I read this passage in chapter 67 of Lonesome Dove:

One little shot during a card game in Arkansas had started things happening -- things he couldn't see the end of.  The shot had ended up killing more than a dentist. Sean O'Brien, Bill Spettle, and the three who were traveling with July Johnson had lost their lives so far, and Montana nowhere in sight.

"He ought to have taken his hanging," Augustus said out loud.

Actually, Jake couldn't be blamed for any of the deaths, but he could be blamed for Lorena's troubles, . . . "Who ought?", Lorena saked.  "Jake," he said.  "Look at all the bad that's happened since he showed up." 

Some quotes from Robert Sapolsky's tome Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will:

“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

 “Depression is often framed as a sufferer having a cognitively distorted sense of “learned helplessness,” where the reality of some loss in the past becomes mistakenly perceived as an inevitable future. In this study, though, it was not that depressed individuals were cognitively distorted, underestimating their actual control. Instead they were accurate compared with everyone else’s overestimates. Findings like these support the view that in some circumstances, depressed individuals are not distortive but are “sadder but wiser.” As such, depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality. And thus, perhaps, “we’re better off believing in it anyway.” Truth doesn’t always set you free; truth, mental health, and well-being have a complex relationship, something explored in an extensive literature on the psychology of stress.”

“In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.  It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:

Where I Rest 

Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. 

Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear.

Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. 

For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. 

Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. 

But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. 

But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. 

Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here. 

It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.”

The great poet William Blake put it more simply, more directly, more clearly in his Auguries of Innocence:

Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.

How much did "free will" play a role in the character formation of any of the characters in Lonesome Dove?  Consider especially the women, especially the whores,  and most especially Lorena Wood.  She was orphaned around age 12, and then sexually abused and trafficked by a succession of older men, before ending up in Lonesome Dove as the only prostitute in town.  She fell for the weak gambler Jake Spoon, who left her on their trek north, where she was captured by the evil Blue Duck, who sold her to a group of Indians who subjected her to terrible sexual abuse before she was finally rescued by Gus McCrae.  By how much were Lorena's choices in life after her parent died the result of her "free will"?  

I'm impressed by the character studies in the novel, especially those of the women characters, including Lorena, Elmira Johnson, and Clara Allen.   I'm also struck by the deep wickedness of the "bad men," Blue Duck and the Suggs brothers; and the weakness of characters like Jake Spoon, July Johnson, and Roscoe Brown; and the description of the lovesickness of Dish Boggett, Gus McCrae, Newt Dobbs, Elmira Johnson, and Big Zwey; and the resourcefulness of the minority characters, Joshua Deets and Po Campo. 

I ended my day's reading at page 610 of 862.