February 2022
Books read:
- A Passage North
by Anuk Arudpragasam
- Wanderlust: A
History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
- The Circle by
Dave Eggers
- The Every by Dave
Eggers
Trails walked:
- Leadville Ramblings (Feb 5-6th)
- Red
Rock and Anemone Loop (Feb 18th)
Scientist Spotlight – Maria Mitchell,
astronomer
February Summary: I’m staring out
my window now as I try to find words to represent the ideas floating around in
my brain. It’s a beautiful scene, with
snow in the yard and in the nearby mountains.
A while ago there was a hawk sitting on our fencepost staring at a
squirrel, perhaps wondering if it would make a good meal. But surprisingly, the squirrel, after staring
right back, ran after the hawk and chased it away! The squirrels love to tease our dog, sitting above
on a branch chattering, while he looks up with impossible dreams of catching it. I was thinking about how lucky I am to be
able to witness these scenes while having so little to worry about other than
what to write in this month’s blog.
We have some dear
friends fighting through health issues, which I guess is something that happens
more and more as we get older. They have
way more to worry about than I do. Lots
of people do. Most people do. My family
is still grieving the loss of my mother-in-law who passed away last month. I still can’t believe she’s gone. It’s been eye-opening hearing from so many
people about the impact she had on their lives; people I’d never heard of before
are grieving her loss. It has me
thinking about all the people in one’s life and how they make your life better
and how you can make their life better. Why
is it so hard for us as a society to understand this simple concept of kindness
to one another? As Jewel wrote, “In the
end, only kindness matters.” Nefarious
forces seem to be in the airwaves constantly trying to divide us over issues
that never used to divide us, at least not as angrily. Yet another unnecessary war has begun as I write this; innocent people are dying in the streets of Ukraine. For what? We
humans are capable of so much destruction, and on the other hand, so much kindness.
The musician I chose
to spotlight this month, Allison Russell, has certainly seen both sides of
humanity in her life. She seems to have
survived some impossibly difficult situations brilliantly and is doing her part to not only heal herself, but also to heal others by writing and singing so beautifully and heart-breakingly about her past. What can each of us do to help others? Be
kind? Maybe keep this thought in mind as
you go through your busy life because the world needs a lot of help these days.
This month I’ve
read an interesting novel set in Sri Lanka after their long civil war, two novels
by Dave Eggers about our near-term dystopian future tied to technology, and a
book about the history of walking because, well, I love to walk. As much as I love to walk, I didn’t get out
too much this month for various reasons related to babysitting and weather, but
I still was able to explore the highest city in the US and a new trail recently opened by the
City of Boulder.
Scientist Spotlight: Maria Mitchell, astronomer (1818-1889)
Lots of firsts for this amazing woman from Nantucket (there once was a girl astronomer from Nantucket….): First female astronomer in the US, first US scientist to discover a comet, first female astronomy professor, first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Scientists, and one of the first professional women hired by the US government.
She was hired at
Vassar College to teach astronomy and she had to change the cultural norms of
the time in order to allow her and her female students to be outside and unaccompanied after dark
(after all, astronomy in those days worked best at night and outdoors). Three of her female students/proteges ended up in
the inaugural list of Academic "Men" of Science in 1906.
Mitchell was also
involved in the abolition of slavery and in women’s rights during her
time. In addition to the comet she
discovered, she also has a lunar crater named in her honor. Her home in Nantucket
has been preserved and is available for all to visit.
Song(s) of the month - Allison Russell
There’s paying your dues and then there’s PAYING YOUR DUES. Allison Russell is a Canadian musician and singer-songwriter who has “burst on the scene” at 40 years old with a debut solo album nominated for four Grammy awards this year. She has already won International Artist and Album of the year from the UK Americana Music Awards. That bursting on the scene has been a 30-year process that included a decade of physical and sexual abuse from the ages of 5 to 15 until she ran away from home to save herself. She somehow (her story would be a great book) made her way to being part of three eclectic roots bands, starting with Po’ Girl with Trish Klein from The Be Good Tanyas. Next, she became a member of Birds of Chicago with JT Nero (aka Jeremy Linsday – with whom she is married with a daughter). Her big break professionally seems to have come when the great Rhiannon Giddens invited her to join Our Native Daughters along with Amythist Kiah and Leyla McCalla, all multi-instrumentalist African American women. It was during her time with this group that a lifetime of her stories erupted inside of her, and she ended up writing what is now the incredible album, Outside Child.
Brandi
Carlile heard an early copy of the album and had this to say about it: “As a
songwriter, her abstract poetry mixed with a literal mind is just unbelievable.
She can take you out into the ether and describe something to you in an
abstract way, and then bring you right into a brutal reality.”
I’ve
included three songs from this album, along with one of the songs she wrote for
Our Native Daughters and her cover of the beautiful Fleetwood Mac song Landslide,
made even more beautiful by Russell covering it in the French language. Enjoy:
Nightflyer is the first song of hers I remember
hearing and is nominated for Best American Roots Song at the Grammys. It’s a
poetic song full of imagery from her critically acclaimed new album, Outside Child. The below version is one she performed on
Jimmy Kimmel along with Brittney Spencer and Brandi Carlile:
You’re
Not Alone is a song
she and Rhiannon Giddens wrote for Our Native Daughters. Russell sings it here in this
incredible live performance and try to not get teary-eyed:
4th Day Prayer, also from the new album is a prayer for other children suffering abuse with a positive message to come out on the other side (you were already choked up from the previous song, might as well keep it going):
Landslide – I guess the only way to make this Fleetwood Mac song more beautiful is to sing it in French:
Persephone, also on the Outside Child album, tells the story of a teenage girl in her past that helped her to overcome the abuse she was enduring at home. It’s a beautiful song about how love can rescue someone.
This is the author’s 2nd novel, and it was a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. His first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. A Sri Lankan Tamil, Arudpragasam got his undergraduate BA degree from Stanford and a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University in 2019, so he’s smart AND young. It’s not surprising after reading this book that he not only has a doctorate in Philosophy, but that the first books he read as a teenager were philosophy books from Plato, Descartes, and Wittgenstein. The novel is full of philosophical ideas.
It's
the story of Krishan and a train trip he’s taking to the northern part of Sri
Lanka where the brunt of the decades-long civil war took place. During the trip he reminisces about his life
in flashbacks. I love books that
transplant you to a different world, and I have to say that I’ve never read a
book set in Sri Lanka before. I had
heard about the civil war and the Tamil Tigers before but didn’t realize that
it lasted so long (25 years) and was so brutal (100,000 civilians killed,
50,000 military killed, not to mention all the displacement and torture). In
February 2009, months before the end of the war, Murugathasan Varnakulasingham,
a young college graduate set himself on fire in front of the UN in Geneva to
protest the treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka.
He was one of 7 young people to self-immolate for the same reason in
early 2009 and I have to believe that their sacrifice was part of the reason
the war ended in May of 2009.
Back
to the novel, the reason for Krishan’s train trip is to attend the funeral of
his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani.
Krishan had found Rani in a mental institution while she was dealing with the
war deaths of her two sons. The
psychologist at the institution felt that she might improve if she had a task,
so Krishan eventually hired her to take care of his grandmother. In addition to this interesting subplot,
Krishan goes on to describe his family, his unusual and passionate relationship
with his girlfriend, Anjum (with whom he’d recently broken up), and his guilt
at having avoided any conflict due to his university training and subsequent
work in India. His sentences are long
and contain so much information that you really have to concentrate on it, so
it’s a good book to read when it’s really quiet and you can take it all
in.
Here
are some of the lines I enjoyed:
He tried to make sense of the call he’d just received, the call that had put an end to all his plans for the evening, the call informing him that Rani, his grandmother’s former caretaker, had died.
Perhaps because of the frequency of sudden and violent death in the country in which he was born, he’d never really stopped to consider the fact that people could also die slowly, that dying could be a process one had to negotiate over the course of many years.
...desire
too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life…leaving
you almost in a state of disbelief, unable to participate in the world.
(What
women have to deal with): In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally
male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely
unrelenting, so that even when you weren’t being harassed in more explicit
verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological
resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these
men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter
the privacy of your house without permission…
There was a tendency, he knew, when thinking about people from the past, to believe that they’d remained the same while you yourself had evolved, as if other people and places ceased moving once you’d left them behind, as if their time remained still while only yours continued to advance.
It
would take several more hours for the burning to be complete, he knew, the
human body contained a lot of material, not just flesh and bones and organs but
feelings and visions, memories and expectations, prophecies and dreams, all of
which would take time to burn, to be reduced to the soothing uniformity of ash.
He
wondered whether this was what Rani had, during all her time in Colombo,
secretly desired, the complete dissolution of all her thoughts and feelings,
the extinction of consciousness that she could never hope to achieve through
sleep the way most people did, that she hadn’t been able to achieve through the
mind-numbing quantity of sleeping pills she took or any of her other
medications either.
We had planned a weekend in Leadville with our kids and their significant others long before the unexpected death of my mother-in-law. We decided to go on with our plans and it turned out to be cathartic for my wife, a way to forget her grief for a moment and enjoy and embrace her family.
Leadville is the highest elevation city in the US at 10,152 feet. There are two other towns in Colorado higher than Leadville (Alma and Montezuma), but they are officially considered towns and not cities. Also, it’s far lower in elevation than the highest city in the world which is La Rinconada, Peru, clocking in at 16,700 feet!
In the late 1800s, during its mining boom,
Leadville was the second most populous city in Colorado, after Denver. The city sometimes calls itself “The Two Mile
High City” to throw some shade on Denver’s nickname. And speaking of shade, it’s surrounded by the
highest peaks in Colorado so it would be a great base to summit some 14ers if
that’s your thing. The setting is
spectacular and the downtown strip on Harrison Street contains lots of great
shops, restaurants, and bars. Also, at over 10,000 feet, it’s really cold in
the winter. I was cold the minute I
stepped out of my car and didn’t warm up again until I got back home. Summer sounds really nice up here.
On
Saturday we rambled east from our lodging, up a hill, to ever expanding views of the valley and
mountains below. Then on Sunday we
attempted cross country skiing at the Ski Cooper Nordic center. It was probably very entertaining for all the
native Coloradans to see us bumbling and tumbling our way for 2.5 miles. And even though some of us were a bit sore and nearly frostbitten after that experience, we had a blast.
Halfway through the trail, there was a yurt called the Cookhouse where we
replenished with beer for the rest of the "trip." There are several groomed Nordic trails in
the area which I may be able to accomplish someday when I get much better at
this tough sport. There was a great New Yorker article by Bill McKibben that came out shortly after our trip about why cross country skiing is the most
difficult Winter Olympic sport; he'll have no argument from our group. The
views along the trail were spectacular, even though it was hard to see while
laying flat on your back with skis and poles scattered all around.
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| View down the street from our lodging |
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| Grandson admiring "big train!" |
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| Wife and daughter exploring a trail near town |
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| Wife and daughter headed back to town |
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| Daughter skiing, wife snowshoeing...don't ask |
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| Lots of incorrect and unofficial X-Country skiing postures |
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| There was a lot of this.... |
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| Great views though |
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| I'm not gonna show you the part where I carried my skis up the rest of this hill |
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| Wife and I with views |
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| Thinking...why didn't we attach ropes to the dogs...mush! |
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| Somewhere behind those pins and scarves is my wife... |
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| Son, daughter, me and my wife |
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| Son, wife, daughter-in-law and me enjoying a drink with a view |
I first heard about this book years ago from Maria Popova’s wonderful blog that is now called The Marginalian. I put it on my reading list and there it stayed, until recently when I listened to Ezra Klein interview Nick Offerman. At the end of all of Klein’s interviews he asks the person being interviewed which 3 books they would recommend. One that Offerman recommended was Wanderlust. The first chapter starts out promising, sort of describing the physical process of walking and how it helps the body and mind. But then chapters 2 and 3 really bog down with long sentences containing even longer words, here’s an example: “Much of the terminology of location and mobility—words like nomad, decentered, marginalized, deterritorialized, border, migrant, and exile—are not attached to specific places and people; they represent instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seem as much the result of the ungrounded theory as its putative subject.” Sigh...I nearly stopped reading after chapter 3, but I’m glad I pressed on because it got much more readable and enjoyable as she begins chapter 4 while walking to the healing sanctuary in Chimayo, NM with other pilgrims. She goes on throughout the book describing all the various reasons people have walked, from philosophers and scientists walking to think, to pilgrims walking for religious purposes, to reformers walking to promote political and social change. Up until the late 1700s it seems that there was always some other purpose for walking other than for enjoyment. She pinpoints William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy for writing about walking simply for enjoyment. It then gets interesting because in much of the world in the 1700s and 1800s only men were culturally allowed to walk; it was unsafe or unladylike for women to walk (as she shows in Jane Austen’s character Elizabeth Bennett who loved walking but was always chided for it by other men and women). The issues of public access to land comes up also because in England, much of the land was (is?) private and there were (are?) many legal battles over access for the general public. She doesn’t focus only on the West, she discusses walking’s history in the East as well, with Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim rituals (like walking around the Kaaba in Mecca).
Overall
I enjoyed the book, but skipping chapters 2 and 3 will help to enjoy it even
more. Here are some lines from the book I thought were good:
Thinking
is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and
doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing
something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.
It
was a strange pavement to be walking on, both lavish and impoverished, like
much of New Mexico… Like
much of northern New Mexico, the town of Chimayó exudes a sense of ancientness
that sets it apart from the rest of the forgetful United States.
In another northern New Mexico village I had lived in the year before this pilgrimage, someone once tartly remarked of a neighbor, “They’re not from here. We remember when their great-grandfather moved here.”
Perhaps Gandhi was the founder of the political pilgrimage with his famous 200-mile-long Salt March in 1930, in which he and many people living inland walked to the sea to make their own salt in violation of British law and British taxes.
Generally speaking, it is true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth.
The
Chinese phrase for ‘going on a pilgrimage,’ ch’ao-shan chin-hsiang, actually
means ‘paying one’s respects to the mountain,’
On
March 17, 1923, while on a speaking tour to raise money for an Everest
expedition, the great mountaineer George Mallory apparently got exasperated
with the continual questions about why he wanted to climb it, and uttered the
most famous line in mountaineering history, the one sometimes cited as a Zen
koan: “Because it’s there.” His usual reply was, “We hope to show that the
spirit that built the British Empire is not yet dead.” Mallory and his
companion Andrew Irvine themselves died on that expedition, and mountaineering
historians still debate whether they got to the summit before vanishing.
(Mallory’s battered, frozen body was discovered seventy-five years later, on
May 1, 1999.)
To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot,…
“People
don’t walk in Texas. Only Mexicans.”—character in Edna Ferber’s Giant
Jane Holtz Kay, in her book on the impact of cars, Asphalt Nation, writes of a study that compared the lives of ten-year-olds in a walkable Vermont small town and an unwalkable southern California suburb. The California children watched four times as much television, because the outdoor world offered them few adventures and destinations.
Last
Christmas season, the parking lot of the hip outdoor equipment store in
Berkeley was full of drivers idling their engines and waiting for a parking
space, while the streets around were full of such spaces. Shoppers weren’t
apparently willing to walk two blocks to buy their outdoor gear
Eduardo Galeano wrote a brief essay about fishermen in a remote village of the Dominican Republic puzzling over an advertisement for a rowing machine not very long ago. “Indoors? They use it indoors? Without water? They row without water? And without fish? And without the sun? And without the sky?” they exclaimed, telling the resident alien who has shown them the picture that they like everything about their work but the rowing. When he explained that the machine was for exercise, they said “Ah. And exercise—what’s that?”
The City of Boulder recently completed its newest trail, the Anemone Loop after nearly two years of construction. After hauling 85 tons of stone to build 470 stone steps and 1,000 square feet of stone retaining walls the trail was officially opened the day before my hike (although it had been partially open while construction was taking place). The loop is around 2.2 miles, and I added parts of the Red Rock trail to make for a nice 5 mile walk on this day. Temperatures were in the low 40s and sunny with little to no wind, so I ended up just needing my sweatshirt for warmth and ended up carrying my gloves and puffy in my daypack.
Sandwiched
between Boulder Canyon and Sunshine Canyon, Anemone Hill provides great views
of both canyons, the city of Boulder, and the Indian Peaks Wilderness to the
west. The new trail provides a couple of
spurs out to nice viewpoints where you can ponder life, rest, and take
photos.
The
red rocks covered with snow made for some nice scenery and the 1,000 feet of
elevation gain provided a good little workout.
There are two trailheads available to access this loop; I started at
People’s Crossing where Canyon Drive meets Pearl Street. You could also start at the Centennial trailhead
in Sunshine canyon, where the Mount Sanitas trails begin.
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| Light dusting of snow on the ground at the beginning; red rocks and Boulder in the background |
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| Nice view of Boulder |
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| Views west towards the Indian Peaks Wilderness |
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| Artsy shot towards the west |
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| Snow got deeper up on top of the hill |
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| Saw this big cat on the hike |
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| Red rocks and white snow |
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| Giant rabbit checking out the view? |
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| Looking down towards the trailhead |
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| Mitten rocks? |
The Circle and The Every by Dave Eggers – Dave Eggers is a really creative, funny, and intelligent writer. I reviewed his great memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in my May 2020 blog. The Circle, published in 2013 is the prequel to The Every which was published in 2021. Both novels have a strong female protagonist, but they have very different goals in mind for the company they’ve hired onto.
In
The Circle, which is about a Google/Facebook-like conglomerate called…um…The
Circle, Mae Holland is hired there after working 2 miserable years for a public
utility company in her hometown. The company has the best people working for it, the best health care, and the largest share
of the market in every line of work they pursue (with a long list of small businesses gone under in their wake). The company wants to eventually monitor every human
on earth, in their home, at work, and in public, ostensibly to make the world safer,
more democratic, and less stressful for everyone. Mae buys into this whole heartedly, even if
her ex-boyfriend and parents don’t, which set up the most incredible scenes in
the book.
The
Every which is set in a later, but not too-far distant future is the name of
the new company formed when The Circle purchases an ecommerce company named
after a South American jungle (an openly hidden reference to Amazon). So now The Every controls even more of what
humans use to run their lives and they want more. Delaney Wells is the protagonist in The Every
and her goal in getting hired by the company is to destroy it from the inside. Her reasons stem from the way her parents’
family business was taken over by The Every and also from her work as a forest
ranger and being more disconnected from all the devices now conspiring to
connect us all (whether we want it or not).
Both
books offer a fascinating look into how out of control our world can get (has
gotten?) when it comes to giving up our privacy in order to make our lives easier
(“Hey Alexa, tell everyone listening in Russia what our social security numbers
are”). The Circle more narrowly focusses
on technology and privacy but also adds human psychology and politics into the
mix. The Every has these same themes,
but also includes the rampant political correctness and ultra-sensitivities we’re
seeing today. One example is that each
person at The Every wears an app that dings them negatively when they use an inappropriate
term such as mankind, when they should have said humankind. Another great example is a field trip that
Delaney set up for her team which turned disastrous when nearly every person
had something to complain about (from the caterer’s country of origin to the farmland
on the way subjecting animals to bondage, to the carbon footprint being wasted
for a trip that could have easily just been viewed virtually). It’s painfully hilarious.
One
of the ideas throughout both novels is the use of algorithms to assign numbers to
everything: your physical beauty, the strength of your orgasm, your personal carbon
imprint, your approximate date of death, and eventually something called a SumNum
where you’re assigned 500 when you’re born and that number can increase or
decrease depending on all the good or bad you do in life….punch a first grader
on your first day of school and lose 2 points, give your teacher an
organically, locally grown apple and you win 2 points. We see this happening now with rating numbers
given to movies or restaurants or businesses.
The novels take it even further by using machine algorithms to judge art
and literature rather than the subjectivity of humans viewing or reading
them (since subjectivity is prone to error). In one scene the students protest
because their art professor is too subjective and demand to have their art judged
by an algorithm instead.
I found all of the ideas fascinating, terrifying, hilarious, and well, did I say terrifying? Here are some of the lines:
"That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication."
"I
can’t send you emails, because you immediately forward them to someone else. I
can’t send you a photo, because you post it on your own profile. And meanwhile,
your company is scanning all of our messages for information they can monetize.
Don’t you think this is insane?”
“Mae,
I’m looking at your profile, I’m finding nothing about you and kayaking. No
smiles, no ratings, no posts, nothing. And now you’re telling me you kayak once
every few weeks?”
"You
willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly
socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues.
You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying
to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in
Dubai.”
"I saw the golden lights of the city, and the black foothills toward the Pacific, and even saw a shooting star.” “A shooting star! Lucky you.” “I was very lucky.” “But you didn’t take a picture.” “No.” “Not any video.” “No.” “So there’s no record of any of this.” “No. Not outside my own memory.” There were audible groans from the audience.
After the pandemics, handshakes were medically fraught—and, many thought, aggressive—but no one substitute-greeting had been agreed upon. Dan chose to tip an imaginary top hat in Delaney’s direction. Delaney offered a brief bow.
...there
was no local news, there were no journalists—all of that wiped out by social
media, the advertising apocalypse and, more than anything else, the war on subjectivity
We are obligated to tell customers that this establishment has no cameras. Eat here at your own risk.
Her parents, finally, intervened again, this time sending her to a detox camp in Montana, not far from her grandmother, JuJu—a former airline pilot, onetime bass fishing champion, and serial dater of far younger men.
Delaney’s devastation was many layered. She would never be able to correct this moment, the news of her JuJu’s passing not delivered by tearful phone call, or in person, or in any way fitting of thousands of years of human evolution toward increasing refinement. The news of her grandmother’s death was delivered by a weeping Pac-Man. When Delaney confronted her parents, they couldn’t recognize the transgression. They pointed out—correctly, Delaney had to admit—that JuJu loved emojis, too.
....humor
does not easily survive the intense filtering that the twenty-first century
made mandatory
She appeared to be at least fifty, with gorgeous white hair that swept around her head like a hurricane seen from space.
All of my students are overwhelmed. It is not because the workload has changed, because it has not. The students now are taking a normal college course load, which has been stressful enough for hundreds of years, but they have added a thousand messages to read, write, send, process. It is too much. They take drugs to stay awake. They drink and get stoned to get to sleep. All of this will get far, far worse. There is simply too much.
“You
know how when you look up a flight online, and you leave the site, and the next
time you go to that same flight, the cost has gone up by $500? The guy who
wrote that code was on your bus.”
She
sat atop it near sunset, and watched a shaft of godlight sweep the valley,
slowly, so slowly, touching every creature and thing, one by one, caressing
rocks and wildflowers and mice and moose with a melancholy golden touch.
Delaney had been alone at the time, not a soul for miles, and was sure she was
the only human who had witnessed the sight. It happened, a moment so beautiful
it burst the heart, and only she had any record of it.
A street orchestra was playing “Rhapsody in Blue.” It was good, very good, and no one was recording it. No phones. Delaney had a reflexive moment of panic, knowing that something was happening that would not be captured, would be heard only by the few dozen people within earshot—and lost forever.
Humans
are error-prone knots of biases, they insisted, and should not be involved in
determining what was beautiful or good.
If
a man ogled a woman at a New Jersey dog park, those eyes could instantly be
paired with the offender’s name, and his family, employers, and the public
would be duly notified of the transgression. A new wave of suicides ensued,
...the
pandemics had given the human race much practice in isolation and fear.
Millions more became unemployed with every new thing the Every canceled, but there was always work in the Every warehouses, where humans were invited to work beside robot package-pickers and while monitored by AI, and be paid a fair minimum wage for it. It was an orderly system.
We
don’t trust ourselves or each other to make a single choice, a
diagnosis, to assign a grade. The only decision we’ll be left with is
whether to live or die. This is the changing of the species from a free animal
to a kept pet.