Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life - John Gray

No living philosopher (nor human) has influenced my thinking so much as John Gray. But I never knew he was a big-time animal lover. 

His new book Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life are the lessons he learned from his two late cats Jamie and Julian (Jamie passed away this year at an age of 23). 

I can tell even before reading this book that the book oozes with timeless wisdom. I cannot wait to read this book on November 24th when it releases in the US. Thank you, John, from Max, Fluffy, Graph, and Neo. 

Here is a review and interview with him - 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future': 

Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognize that need because they naturally revert to an equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.

[---]

Gray never bought the idea that his book was a handbook for despair. His subject was humility; his target any ideology that believed it possessed anything more than doubtful and piecemeal answers to vast and changing questions. The cat book is written in that spirit. If like me you read with a pencil to hand, you will be underlining constantly with a mix of purring enjoyment and frequent exclamation marks. “Consciousness has been overrated,” Gray will write, coolly. Or “the flaw in rationalism is the belief that human beings can live by applying a theory”. Or “human beings quickly lose their humanity but cats never stop being cats”. He concludes with a 10-point list of how cats might give their anxious, unhappy, self-conscious human companions hints “to live less awkwardly”. These range from “never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable”, to “do not look for meaning in your suffering” to “sleep for the joy of sleeping”.

[---]

In these three-tiered times our original plan for this interview was to meet and sit outside a cafe in Bath – Gray, 72, is wary of inside – but the forecast suggested we’d have got soaked, so we have retreated, catlike, indoors, and to Zoom. In some ways, I suggest, Gray’s is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic. How has he coped?

“I’ve tried to emulate what I recall of my wonderful cat Julian,” he says. “Which is, not to live in an imagined future. We simply don’t know how this is going to develop. And of course, the political response in most places, and certainly here, has been shambolic. But that inability to come up with a clear response reflects, I think, something deep: that even the most well-developed systems of knowledge always leave an enormous amount of uncertainty.”

[---]

In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like?

“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.”

Biggest Animal Rights Case Begins Next Month - Self-Awareness and Happy, The Elephant

How messed up creatures are we...? Who gave us the right to test and decide another beautiful being if they are self-aware or not and chain her in a zoo for 43 years? If such cruelty doesn't trouble one morally not sure if we are eligible to call ourselves "self-aware", whatever crap that means. 

Listen to this three-part podcast on the life of an Elephant named Happy (a nonsensical name given we chained and robbed 43 years of her life):  

Welcome to 1970s America: Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war, Hollywood, the birth of Apple…

We are in California, just south of LA…

This is the world that greeted a young elephant, wrenched from her home and family, packed into a crate, and shipped to the other side of the world. She was not yet two years old.

But she was always a little special.

Back in New York in the 1970s, Happy was a celebrity. She wore a blue-and-black polka-dotted dress trimmed with tassels and studded with rhinestones. Once a year, while thousands of people cheered her on, she’d do a tug-of-war against teams of jocks – and always win.

Twenty years ago she hit the headlines again, this time for being smart rather than strong. She was the first elephant ever to take an experiment designed to test if an animal is self-aware enough to recognise itself – and she passed. That was quite a moment. It’s key to this whole story, and we’ll come back to it in episode two.

Now Happy is 49 years old and making what could be her biggest news splash of all. She’s caught up in a high-octane battle over her future – about whether she stays in the Bronx Zoo, where she’s lived for 43 years, or she’s moved to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee.

Next month, those five judges could change her life with one bang of the gavel. The decision – and what could be Happy’s retirement years – rests on whether the man who calls himself Happy’s lawyer can convince the court that an elephant can be a legal “person” and, if so, that she’s being unlawfully detained in one of America’s most-venerable zoos.

Happy’s case is about more than her future. It’s about our relationship with the animals that live among us, and which sustain us – as food, as clothing, or in any number of industrial processes. There are over 600,000 animals and birds in around 10,000 zoos worldwide. In Britain alone, we keep around 51 million animals as pets – at the last estimate. There are more tigers in captivity in China than in the wild in the whole world. And, as we have found out this year, the way we interact with animals can have deadly consequences.

And so if Happy becomes the first elephant to be granted rights like we have – the right to bodily freedom – the trumpet could sound on a new era, and not just for her. How much do we really know about the animals around us – in our homes, our zoos, our farms and our factories? And is now the time to start rewriting their place in our world?

The end of those big arguments is some way off. But we know where they might begin; in the New York Supreme Court in just a few weeks with the case of Happy the elephant.

This podcast is part of the Non-Human Rights Project. They are doing some heartbreaking work, thank you, thank you,  thank you from Max and me. I still live and breathe after Max is only and only because of humans like you who are still trying and fighting atrocities. Fuck hope, you give me a reason to live and fight. 

You can support this project by ordering T-shirts here and they are beautiful. 

Rebel - Eternal Wisdom Of Albert Camus

Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment. Up to now this identification was never really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him. Very often he even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive to insurrection than the one at which he balks. He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights. But with loss of patience—with impatience—a reaction begins which can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive. The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. What was at first the man's obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. It becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts ("because this is how it must be . . .") an attitude of All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is born.

    [---]

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate. Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.

Those powerful words are from his book The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Now, more than ever there is too much meaningless rebellion for the sake of self-centredness. Camus was never considered those as rebels. 

One must accept the unacceptable and hold to the untenable… From absolute despair will spring infinite joy, from blind servitude, unbounded freedom. To be free is, precisely, to abolish ends. The innocence of the ceaseless change of things, as soon as one consents to it, represents the maximum liberty. The free mind willingly accepts what is necessary. Nietzsche’s most profound concept is that the necessity of phenomena, if it is absolute, without rifts, does not imply any kind of restraint. Total acceptance of total necessity is his paradoxical definition of freedom. The question “free of what?” is thus replaced by “free for what?”

Camus reminds us constantly our purpose is to sow the seeds today and don't worry about living to see it grow...

The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

No possible form of wisdom today can claim to give more. Rebellion indefatigably confronts evil, from which it can only derive a new impetus. Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov’s cry of “Why?” will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the last man.

 

The Greatest Human Achievement Of All Human Achievements Is Philosophical

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

- George Orwell

What is that simple but yet brilliant insight from Agnes Callard?

I would give the number one human achievement of all human achievements, I think, is philosophical, and I think is the idea of human rights.

Please listen to her insightful interview on EconTalk - On Philosophy, Progress, and Wisdom: 

Russ Roberts: Let's get started. Agnes, the philosopher David Chalmers has a paper, "Why Isn't There More Progress in Philosophy?" The title implies that there isn't much progress. Do you agree?

Agnes Callard: I think that progress in philosophy just means something slightly different from progress in some other fields. And so, if we're judging it by those standards, it will look as though there isn't much. I read that paper a while ago. I can't quite remember it. I think maybe Chalmers's view is that there's something like kind of outsourcing a philosophy where in effect philosophy creates these ideas and then they go off into other fields to become progress.

And that's once again saying like the progress part is the extra-philosophical part, is the thing that happens when logic becomes a science of its own or moves over into math. But, I actually do think that there are some internal standards that we could use to think about progress in philosophy. They just might not be as useful for comparing each other fields.

[---]

Russ Roberts: In particular, I think a philosophy--I feel really foolish saying this to a real philosopher, but bear with me--I think the point of philosophy is to help us not answer questions, but how to think about questions.

I think the truth standard or the science standard or the progress standard is really the wrong standard. It's like saying has human nature got--have we gotten more virtuous over the last 3,000 years? The human being, not me or you, but humanity. And I'd say we haven't changed so much. To me, philosophy is the way that we think about the challenge of living a meaningful life, being virtuous, coming to grips with suffering, coming to grips with the complexity of our consciousness and how it interacts with our actions and thoughts.

And I don't expect philosophy to answer those--I mean, I think it would be absurd for philosophy to try to answer those questions, other than to tell me that they can't be answered. And then, to me, philosophy should--and I don't think it does this particularly--but I would like philosophy to speak in the voice that I can understand as someone alive in 2020, so that I can do a better job coping with those questions. Not answering them, but coping with them. What do you think?

Agnes Callard: So, I think you're right that philosophy shouldn't answer those questions, but that's not because they don't have answers or because there's no truth there. It's because philosophy can't do that for you. You have to answer those questions. That's what philosophy has been trying to tell you. And, so I think one really deep difference between progress in philosophy and progress in science is that in some sense progress in science is all about having less science to do. It's like we're trying to finish science, right?

And, so the progress means we've tied those loose ends. It may turn out we didn't tie them as well as we thought; we've got to go back, right? But, progress in philosophy is not about making there be less philosophy that has to be done. It's about making it the case that the people who are philosophizing in the future can do it better. In some way, there's more philosophy to be done, the more philosophical progress we make.

And, so I disagree with you about how human beings haven't gotten better over the past couple thousand years. I think they have gotten better, and they've gotten more virtuous, and it's because of philosophy.

So, I would give the number one human achievement of all human achievements, I think, is philosophical, and I think is the idea of human rights. That did not exist in the period that I mostly work on, the ancient world. People didn't have the idea of human rights. You start to see glimmerings of it I think really in the Bible, but it's not really fully--I would say it's fully articulated in the enlightenment by someone like Kant, the idea of human dignity.

I think nowadays, most human beings in the world just operate with this idea as almost like just written into their basic ethical framework of their way of thinking about conceptualizing the world, dealing with people around them is that people have--everyone has a kind of dignity and a kind of innate worth and that they have to be treated with respect.

I think that's a genuine change in human beings. It's a conceptual change and an ethical improvement that is because of philosophy.

One Health - Linking Human, Animal & Ecosystem Health

 Finally, a splendid initiative to capture the complexities of the life of earth!

This is the must-have knowledge tp make us humble and start to understand the complex interdependencies. The genesis of fake news to conspiracy theories is caused by ignoring these complex interdependencies and forcefully looking for simple answers which don't exist. 

Check out One Health and you can follow them on twitter: 

Definitions of One Health

One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and trans-disciplinary approach - working at local, regional, national, and global levels - to achieve optimal health and well-being outcomes recognizing the interconnections between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.

Scope of One Health

 

Some people misunderstand and think that One Health is about everything therefore if must be about nothing.  But the truth is that One Health thinking (see definition above) and implementation is needed in so many arenas that it just seems to be about 'everything'.

 

Here are a few areas that urgently need the One Health approach, at all levels of academia, government, industry, policy and research,  because of the inextricable interconnectedness of animal, environmental, human, plant and planet health:

• Agricultural production and land use
• Animals as Sentinels for Environmental agent and contaminants detection and response
• Antimicrobial resistance mitigation
• Biodiversity / Conservation Medicine
• Climate change and impacts of climate on health of animals, ecosystems, and humans
• Clinical medicine needs for interrelationship between the health professions
• Communications and outreach
• Comparative Medicine: commonality of diseases among people and animals such as cancer, obesity, and diabetes
• Disaster preparedness and response
• Disease surveillance, prevention and response, both infectious (zoonotic) and chronic diseases
• Economics / Complex Systems, Civil Society
• Environmental Health
• Food Safety and Security
• Global trade, commerce and security
• Human - Animal bond
• Natural Resources Conservation
• Occupational Health Risks
• Plant / Soil health
• Professional education and training of the Next Generation of One Health professionals
• Public policy and regulation
• Research, both basic and translational
• Water Safety and Security
• Welfare / Well-being of animals, humans, ecosystems and planet

Potential Outcomes from the One Health Approach:

• More interdisciplinary programs in education, training, research, and established policy (See http://bit.ly/2Hld7pl )
• More information sharing related to disease detection, diagnosis, education and research 
• More prevention of diseases, both infectious and chronic
• Development of new therapies and approaches to treatments

America Is Having a Moral Convulsion - David Brooks

 David Brooks's essay is at least a decade or more late but yet it is never late... 

In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,” the lowest number the survey has recorded since it started asking the question in 1972. Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.

Is mistrust based on distorted perception or is it a reflection of reality? Are people increasingly mistrustful because they are watching a lot of negative media and get a falsely dark view of the world? Or are they mistrustful because the world is less trustworthy, because people lie, cheat, and betray each other more than they used to?

There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful. The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception. Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be. Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.

Thus the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam argues that it’s a great mistake to separate the attitude (trust) from the behavior (morally right action). People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place. As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time. I’d add that high national trust is a collective moral achievement. High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

[---]

On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system. In state after state Republican governors sat inert, unwilling to organize or to exercise authority, believing that individuals should be free to take care of themselves.

On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy. Power to the people has meant no power to do anything, and the result is a national NIMBYism that blocks social innovation in case after case.

[---]

In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy. In the emerging value system, “privilege” becomes a shameful sin. The status rules flip. The people who have won the game are suspect precisely because they’ve won. Too-brazen signs of “success” are scrutinized and shamed. Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.

From self to society. If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group. Each person speaks from the shared group consciousness. (“Speaking as a progressive gay BIPOC man …”) In an individualistic culture, status goes to those who stand out; in collective moments, status goes to those who fit in. The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”

Different Faces Of Courage

 

- #WorldMentalHealthDay

The Eight Secrets To A (Fairly) Fulfilled Life - Oliver Burkeman

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

[---]

The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness. You already know it won’t kill you to endure the mild agitation of getting back to work on an important creative project; initiating a difficult conversation with a colleague; asking someone out; or checking your bank balance – but you can waste years in avoidance nonetheless. (This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.)

It’s possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it’s usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway. The rewards come so quickly, in terms of what you’ll accomplish, that it soon becomes the more appealing way to live.

That's from Oliver Burkeman's last column on Guardian (read about the other six secrets). Thank you, Oliver. I have learned so much from you over the years. You can signup to follow his future writings here. 

Cowpea Mosaic (Plant) Virus - Fascinating Cancer Treatment Option

Jack Hoopes spends a lot of time with dying dogs. A veterinary radiation specialist at Dartmouth College, Hoopes has spent his decades-long career treating canine cancers with the latest experimental therapies as a pathway for developing human treatments. Recently, many of Hoopes’ furry patients have come to him with a relatively common oral cancer that will almost certainly kill them within a few months if left untreated. Even if the cancer goes into remission after radiation treatment, there’s a very high chance it will soon reemerge.

For Hoopes, it’s a grim prognosis that’s all too familiar. But these pups are in luck. They’re patients in an experimental study exploring the efficacy of a new cancer treatment derived from a common plant virus. After receiving the viral therapy, several of the dogs had their tumors disappear entirely and lived into old age without recurring cancer. Given that around 85 percent of dogs with oral cancer will develop a new tumor within a year of radiation therapy, the results were striking. The treatment, Hoopes felt, had the potential to be a breakthrough that could save lives, both human and canine. “If a treatment works in dog cancer, it has a very good chance of working, at some level, in human patients,” says Hoopes.

The new cancer therapy is based on the cowpea mosaic virus, or CPMV, a pathogen that takes its name from the mottled pattern it creates on the leaves of infected cowpea plants, which are perhaps best known as the source of black-eyed peas. The virus doesn’t replicate in mammals like it does in plants, but as the researchers behind the therapy discovered, it still triggers an immune response that could be the key to more effective treatments for a wide variety of cancers.

The idea is to use the virus to overcome one of the gnarliest problems in oncology: A doctor’s best ally, their patient’s own immune system, doesn’t always recognize a cancerous cell when it sees one. It’s not the body’s fault; cancer cells have properties that trick the immune system into thinking nothing is wrong. Oncologists have puzzled over this for nearly a century, and it's only in the past decade that researchers have really started to get a grip on cancer’s immunosuppressive properties. Immunotherapy, which has emerged as one of the most promising types of cancer treatment, is all about developing techniques to help the body’s immune system recognize cancerous cells so it can fight back. It’s the medical equivalent of putting a big flashing neon sign on the tumor that reads “ATTACK HERE.” And that’s where the cowpea mosaic virus could help.

[---]

“If you have a metastatic disease, oncologists always use systemic treatments,” says Fiering. “I think that’s fine, but it’s missing one of the fundamental ideas of immunology, which is that the response you get in one part of the body can distribute throughout the body.”

A familiar example of this is flu shots, which are delivered in your arm but trigger an immune response that protects against a respiratory infection. Fiering started to wonder if a similar approach might be taken with cancer. His idea was that if doctors injected something into a tumor that would cause the body’s immune system to start attacking it, the heightened immune response wouldn’t be limited to just the area around the tumor. The immune system’s T-cells—its frontline soldiers—would also track down any cancer cells that might be lurking elsewhere in the body.

- More Here

X-Risk - How Humanity Discovered It's Own Extinction

Excerpts from the new book X-Risk - How Humanity Discovered It's Own Extinction by Thomas Moynihan:

Only very recently in human history did people realize that Homo sapiens, and everything it finds meaningful, might permanently disappear. Only recently did people realize the physical universe could continue — aimlessly — without us. However, this was one of the most important discoveries humans have ever made. It is perhaps one of our crowning achievements. Why? Because we can only become truly responsible for ourselves when we fully realize what is at stake. And, in realizing that the entire fate of human value within the physical universe may rest upon us, we could finally begin to face up to what is at stake in our actions and decisions upon this planet. This is a discovery that humanity is still learning the lessons of — no matter how fallibly and falteringly.

Such a momentous understanding only came after centuries of laborious inquiry within science and philosophy. The timeline below revisits some of the most important milestones in this great, and ongoing, drama.

c.400 BC: Even though they talk of great catastrophes and destroyed worlds, ancient philosophers all believe that nature does not leave eternally wasted opportunities where things, or values, could be but never are again. Whatever is lost in nature will eventually return in time — indestructibility of species, humanity, and value.

c.360 BC: Plato speaks of cataclysms wiping away prior humanities, but this is only part of eternal cycling return. Permanent extinction is unthinkable.

[---]

1705: Following Leibniz and Newton’s invention of calculus, long-term prediction of nature becomes feasible. Halley predicts the return of his comet.

1721: Population science takes hold: People start thinking of Homo sapiens as a global aggregate. Baron de Montesquieu writes of humanity expiring due to infertility.

1740s: Reports of behemoth fossil remains found in Siberia and America begin to interest, and confuse, naturalists. Could these be extinct beasts?

[---]

1844: Reacting to Thomas Malthus’s theories of overpopulation, Prince Vladimir Odoevsky provides first speculation on omnicide (i.e. human extinction caused by human action). He imagines our species explosively committing suicide after resource exhaustion and population explosion cause civilization’s collapse. Odoevsky also provides first visions of human economy going off-world in order to stave off such outcomes.

c.1850: Large reflecting telescopes reveal deep space as mostly empty and utterly alien. Artistic depictions of Earth from space begin to evince a sense of cosmic loneliness.

1859: Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” published. Progressivist tendencies in early evolutionary theory fuel confidence in human adaptiveness and inexorable improvement. Fears of extinction are eclipsed by fears of degeneration.

Happiest Day In My Life - October 4, 2019

The sweetest sentence I have ever heard in my life came from Max's oncologist on the morning of October 4th, 2019: 

"He is walking, you can take him home."

"Miracle" is an oversimplified word in the English language to capture the complexities of the life of earth that we don't comprehend. 

But what I was able to comprehend that day was the sparkle and twinkle in Max's eyes. Everything I ever asked for in my life came true that moment when I saw his eyes. 

After 4 days of continuous blood transfusion, IV's, multitudes of pills, and 24 hours of monitoring - Max not only woke up but came home walking with that famous twinkling eyes. 

That day, I lived these beautiful lines from this famous Tamil love song: 

With your life in mine, how come you can be buried?

Am I not inside your life

Even the death which came to kill, stood there still and confused. 

Whatever little good deeds I did all my life probably cumulated to that moment in time;  my good karmas or call it entropy. Max will not die in a remote place far away from home nor will he be killed by poison in a syringe euphemistically called euthanasia. My Max will be coming home. 

That moment in time changed me forever. It's been exactly a year since that moment but that change has been constant. I have got what I wanted in my life at that moment. I will not ask anything more from and in life. The rest of my life is a journey to pay back for that miracle of a moment.

My Max taught me that moment that life is extremely precious. Including my life; so I cannot and will not kill myself no matter what. We lived a simple, mundane but yet beautiful life together filled with wonder.  His final lesson to me is the same - keep doing the mundane, boring, ordinary right things in life every moment. There is no other grandiose way to payback for that miracle other than to make the right choice every moment. 

Max left a bubble of gratitude for me to dwell inside for the rest of my days. Inside that bubble, my desires ended, and my life without Max began. 

Max has the Sapien inside me on a tight leash. Max inside me is the one helping me to keep breathing every day even with the pain of him not being next to me. 

I got more than I ever deserved that day on 4th October 2019. Max got his wish granted. He was able to come back to his favorite place on earth - Home. 

The Longest Night Of My Life - This Day In 2019

Max's oncologist had told me that we have to make a decision tomorrow... and she cannot let him go home in the current situation he was in. After 4 days of being at the oncologist, his eyes were still sinking. The poison masqueraded as a cancer treatment was draining my Max of his life full of his Max-ness. 

I have read reams and reams on how there are some things one cannot control. This was the one and only thing that I badly wanted to control to have more time with Max. But yet, I had no control. I had never felt so helpless in my 44 years of life on this planet. 

For the past 4 days, I was whispering in his years... wake up Max... wake up Max... we have to go home. That is the only I did other than kissing him often and feeling his warm body against my hands and body.

I wasn't prepared to live my life without my Max. I wasn't prepared to let him go off me. My days, hours, moments which were always filled with Max, and I had no clue what will happen to the future days, hours, moments with my Max. I wasn't prepared and even today, I have no clue how I am doing it. 

All I could that night was wait for the sun to rise so that I can do back and see my Max again. All I did was wait, wait, and wait. 

For all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams it is still a beautiful world. 

Max Ehrmann

My Max had a wonderful life and I had given my time more than anyone or anything ever. He had given me everything I have today. Indeed everything. He made my world beautiful. He taught me how to live inside the beautiful bubble we had built for 13 plus years. I still live inside the reminiscence of that beautiful bubble. And I wasn't ready to let him go that night. I never wanted him to die in a hospital far away from his home where he grew up. Not like this. Not here. Not away from home. 

For Camus, It Was Always Personal

If you want to understand the perils of socialism and communism one should read Camus first. The surprising insight one would stumble upon would how these perils overlap with current-day capitalism and democracy. Camus understood that the roots of socialism to democratic misery begins with human nature. The verbs can change but the noun remains constant - humans. Great thoughts on Camus here: 

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Stop me if you’ve already heard this quote. You will find it on greeting cards and T-shirts, at the bottom of emails and the top of posters, on key chains and coffee mugs — including the chipped and scratched one sitting next to my laptop. It was a gift from someone who, if he knew me better, would not have given it to me. It is a line, at least when ripped from its context, that’s suited for a coffee mug, less inspirational than insipid.

The line is taken — better yet, pried — from “Return to Tipasa,” the second to last of the works included in Personal Writings, a newly repackaged and reissued collection of essays by Albert Camus (ably translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy and Justin O’Brien). For those looking for a chapbook of quotations to start each day, be forewarned. The French Algerian writer did not do inspiration.

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Invincible summers suggest indestructible hopes. But Personal Writings reminds us that, just as Camus did not do inspiration, so he also did not do hope. Hope is for suckers like Epimetheus, who disregards his brother Prometheus’ warning and opens Pandora’s box. In that mass of evils, Camus writes, the “Greeks brought out hope at the very last.” Contrary to coffee mug sentiments, hope is, Camus explains, the most terrible of all the evils because it is “tantamount to resignation. And to live is not to be resigned.”

This explains Camus’s paradoxical claim that while there is no reason for hope, that is never a reason to despair. As we face our era’s many crises, a glance at the volume’s shortest essay, “The Almond Trees,” might help. Writing these few pages soon after France declared war on Germany in 1939, Camus tells the reader that the first thing “is not to despair.” Instead, we must simply unite and act:

"Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. […] [I]t is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all."

The quote runs a bit long, but still, it’s a quote I’d like to see on a coffee mug.