Who's Going to Read It?

An innocent anthropologist reached a small West African town, when he found a notice of a campaign against illiteracy that read:

The illiterate adult, incapable and lacking information, has always constituted an obstacle to the setting of any initiative tending towards the general upliftment of a country.

The anthropologist mused,

"It was not clear how illiterates were supposed to read the placard."

excerpts from The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley

This Is My Song

............

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

This is my song, oh God of all the nations;

a song of peace for their land and for mine.

Our Precious Yet Fragile Memory

I was sitting in a neurology clinic recently when I saw a lady in her late-70s with a chief complain of memory problems. In fact, the complain came from her concerned husband who was also present to meet the consultant neurologist. The patient, a lady with some memory loss was quite unaware of her situation. According to her husband, she also struggled to recognize him at times! She had to be corrected by her husband many times throughout the consultation, only to her embarrassment. 

How much do we value our memory? Isn't it the one thing that glues together all our experience into a meaningful narrative, and gives meaning to our private lives?

----

We forget a lot of things all the time - except the savants among us, of course. And yet there are things that get stored in our memory - intentionally or otherwise. Things that we want to remember, especially our achievements, memories of our loved ones, relevant knowledge to pass exams, etc are not the only ones that define our being. In fact, even memories that we try hard to forget like embarrassing moments and hateful things also make us who we are.

So what is it like to lose our memory? To the person who is losing all her memory, it will cause some confusion and distress, quite obviously. "Where am I? Who are you? ...Who am I?"

But there will be even more distress for the carer, and loved ones. On top of the trouble of looking after people with dementia, the fact that someone who once knew you really well could no longer recognize you would make you even more upset. 

Without realizing it, the sadness and pity that we feel when we find out that someone we care about is suffering from dementia - or any memory problems - actually comes from of our own insecurity facing the new reality that the other person no longer remembers us. We'd then ask ourselves, "Who else cares about me?"

Reflecting on Death

Death is the only thing that is certain. I've been made even more aware of this fact on my current one-week clinical attachment on palliative care. This is a branch of medicine that specializes in helping people with incurable diseases to deal with their symptoms, especially pain. Palliative care doctors also looks after those who are approaching the terminal stages of their illness.

When should one start reflecting on death - on attending a funeral? with the loss of a loved one? on being diagnosed with cancer? 

This ability to anticipate death is what distinguishes humans from other animals. The fear of our mortality is not about being afraid of the afterlife. Rather, it is all about the fear of losing out from this earthly life. So long as we aspire to achieve something in our waking life, we will be afraid to die. 

But what about daredevils and stuntmen? I think these are the few who can suppress the fear of death by psychologically trying to minimize the potential that their risky activity might kill them. We must only ask among those that have barely escaped a fatal accident during a dangerous stunt, if the the fear of death was not resuscitated with that experience. 

On the other hand, when one exaggerates the potential that certain things like insects or flying on a plane can kill him, then one gets a phobia of those things. 

It's all too human to be afraid of death, but I think there's a way to transcend this fear. Our  worldly desires must be why we want to live longer - so that we we have more time to achieve them - and they are the cause of our fear of death. If we can constantly be mindful of our fulfilled ambitions - and contemplate on our achievements - desire for greater things can be compensated or better, extinguished.

"The aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death"

Socrates

Stupid and Confused

Galileo Galilei wrote in his Dialogue (1632):

And when I run over the many and marvelous inventions men have discovered in the arts as in letters, and then reflect upon my own knowledge, I count myself little better than miserable. I am so far from being able to promise myself, not indeed the finding out of anything new, but even the learning of what has already been discovered, that I feel stupid and confused, and am goaded by despair.

If I look at some excellent statue, I say within my heart: "When will you be able to remove the excess from a block of marble and reveal so lovely a figure hidden therein? When will you know how to mix different colors and spread them over a canvas or a wall and represent all visible objects by their means, like a Michelangelo, a Raphael, or a Titian?" Looking at what men have found out about arranging the musical intervals and forming precepts and rules in order to control them for the wonderful delight of the ear, when shall I be able to cease my amazement? What shall I say of so many and such diverse instruments? With what admiration the reading of excellent poets fills anyone who attentively studies the invention and interpretation of concepts: And what shall I say of architecture? What of the art of navigation?

But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by might intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page!

When the Father of Modern Science humbly admitted (indirectly through a character in his book) that he feels "stupid and confused" that he was far from discovering anything new, or, even further from learning all that has already been discovered; I think he was simply admiring the vast sea of Divine wisdom and knowledge.

Far from shying away from the quest to traverse that sea of Divinity, through the realization of his own limitations, Galileo has gained greater insight into the workings of the universe than others who are full of vanity.  

Museums and Horded Items

I just got back from visiting the Science Museum at South Kensington. There are quite a number of museums in London. Why do we have so many of them?

Museums reflect the compulsive hoarder that's inside all of us. We tend to keep things, even if they have no use for us anymore - over/undersized clothes, books, dvds, old newspapers, etc. We buy things that do nothing but collect dust, like ceramic souvenirs. And we take thousands of photos even if no one (including ourselves) would be interested to see them again anyway.

There are huge differences however, between our collection of useless stuff and museums. Firstly, museums employ curators to look after their collections. Also, thousands of people flock museums everyday. In contrast, our private collections get much less attention. They usually do nothing but lie around just taking up space in our room.

Why do we value things that can be of no practical use for us anymore that we keep them? That's because we value our history, and our hoarded items are pieces of that memorable past. Those clothes remind us that we were once skinny or thick. Our books and dvds tell us that we have read and seen quite a lot of interesting things. Old newspapers and photos are the ones that really capture our history, either by journalists or our camera.

Maybe it's time to let go - donate, recycle or throw away - our collection of unnecessary stuff.
As much as they can remind us of our past, keeping too many of them for too long would only clutter our present.