Episteme

When I last went home I picked up a couple of old books at my dad's house, and one of them was the collected short works of Jack London. I started with "The Call of the Wild," and if I thought that I didn't like blood and violence, well, I was wrong. Actually one of the criticisms of London's work when it came out was that it was too base, to focused on violence and the lower levels of human and animal consciousness. But as a reader I found myself admiring the dog, Buck, wanting to be like him, wanting to have friends like him. He's stronger, nobler, and later, badder and meaner, than any human or canine I've ever met, and he adapts to the situations he is thrown into with logic and bravery. Thrown from owner to owner, he meets their cruelty with viciousness and their kindness with loyalty, mirroring the range of human nature until he is drawn to the life of the wild, from which his ancestors were plucked. In "The Call of the Wild" we meet the best and the worst of ourselves, as well as a canine protagonist who finds a way to survive it all.

In "To Build a Fire," we see the fragility of the human body and mind as we follow a doomed man's losing battle for survival, revisiting the ancient search for this source of warmth and sustenance that we now take for granted. The boiler clicks on, the furnace pumps through our home with a comforting hum, the blue flame licks obediently out of the stove top, and we have warm water, air and food. We stay alive on a daily basis because we have mastered the dangerous but life-giving phenomenon of combustion.

And what if you didn't have it?
Well, we aren't all gold-rushers trying to survive alone outside when it's 70 below, our bodies slowly freezing as we resist steadily approaching death, starting with the disconcerting numbing of the fingers and toes. But mornings would be cold as hell, even in Cali and Mexico, we'd have no cars, and half of us would probably die of bacterial poisoning from spoiled food. It's enough to make you think about the basic weakness of our species and have a little more respect for the other species with which we share the planet.

Posted by Kim at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My generation has horrible handwriting. It's not like my grandmother's cursive or my mother's polite script. I can't even write proper cursive and I hate handwriting notes because I can hardly read them and the person receiving it certainly can't. When I was a well-mannered young girl, I would write thank you notes to family who sent gifts for my birthday, and my mother would always tell that while it took grandma two weeks to read my awful handwriting, she appreciated the card.

There was time, long before mine, where letter writing was practically an occupation; it was who people communicated their private thoughts to others because it was kinda hard to it most other ways. So people learned to write proper letters, which once discovered a few hundred years later, are published in books to remind us all we'll never write letters like that again.

E-mail is great. I love e-mail. I send it everyday, but it's not very private and for some reason I don't use it to write long, flowing letters. I did at one point, but my mind is much more scattered, I guess, or maybe I just don't value it like I did before. But to write something by hand? I only receive handwritten notes from people in the Peace Corps who don't have much choice like the Victorians didn't have much choice. Maybe it's also part of the loss of leisure time or what we don't think it's worth time to write a letter because we can save time (for something else) by sending a text message. People still handwrite suicide notes, right? What else?

But letters are a manifestation of consciousness, they are evidence of our thoughts in words written by us in particular letters and sentences that show a part of us. My way of forming letters is different than yours. Handwriting is unique to that person - it can signify if they are right or left-handed, in a rush or have plenty of time, learning their letters or a master in penmanship. It can also indicate a state of mind by how rushed the letters look and how they are displayed in the page. E-mail? I just know that most people have had spelling and grammar.

What do we lose with communicating everything in electronic forms? In the next hundred years will books be published filled with letters of famous writers alive today? The diaries and correspondence between intellectuals, common people, writers, lovers of centuries past inform so much of our history and if our inner most thoughts are captured only as ephemera of the internet, than how will that affect how history is written?

Posted by Dawn at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)