Tired and stunned. Maybe the course of antibiotics I finished last week scrambled my synapses. Maybe I'm so sick of my job that I'm too distracted to bat the emotional vampires away. Maybe I just want a toy. Whatever. The cause is almost irrelevant. The effect is not.
I just read a review of a new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus. From Booklist: - "Whether it's memory, rationality, language, or free will, our noble human traits are hopelessly entangled with our baser drives, which have survived the dynamics of evolution."
I ask you, isn't that a perfect expression of our shared dilemma? It certainly expresses mine. I want to be compassionate, but the world keeps throwing things at me that challenge good intentions. (Eliot Spitzer, what the hell...?) I love to learn and read and think, but my professional world has succumbed to the imperative of survival of the fittest, and I now buy almost every book I wish to read. (I've had to fight to keep more than one or two titles by Henry James on the shelf, away from those who would weed based only on circulation statistics. "Fittest," in the library world, doesn't mean what it used to.) Well, here's what I want right now. I want to finish two pairs of socks. I want to read Pamela and finish Madwoman in the Attic. I want to listen to the last disk of A Thousand Splendid Suns, and begin a Miss Marple or two. (Thank goodness for audio books. Suns made me cry so much that it would have been impossible to read with my swollen eyes.) I want a good Greek salad with plenty of cheese, but no onions (since onions are not food). I want to listen to the Goldberg Variations in a darkened room, with ice in back of my neck. At least I don't want anything unattainable in the short term, anyway, eh? Have a good, peaceful weekend, everyone. And be sure to have some Peeps.
