Home
February 20, 1998
|
x |
x |
n |
When I ran into Tom this afternoon at Starbucks, the first thing he asked me was whether I'd found anymore on the web about Mt. Fuji having tremors indicating that it could be coming back to life - we read about this Monday in the Earthweek section of the Boston Globe. I hadn't checked Volcano World since then because of my disk errors, unmapped memory errors, and corrupt Mac TCP settings, so I didn't have anything to tell him. The second thing he mentioned was that he thought about me when he heard that Halldor Laxness died last week. I think I had heard this but had somehow forgotten it - I listen to the news in my sleep. I loved Independent People, one of the best known works of Iceland's Nobel laureate Halldór Kiljan Laxness . Tom had given me a used copy of the 1946 English translation of Independent People - oh, when was that - out of print at the time and highly prized and sought after - then a few weeks later, it was back in print. I had been reading it aloud to Nancy, a chapter at a time, but we got distracted by one thing and another and never finished the read-aloud project. I bought Nancy a copy of The Atom Station, another of Laxness' great works. It's in the pile of things to be read. The Iceland that Laxness describes is a harsh place, not quite like Iceland today - at least as far as we could tell. Everything is more urban now. Fewer people live on farms trying to make a living out of the harsh earth. When we rode past Laxness' house in Mossfellsbaer (I hope I spelled that right) on the bus, and our tour guide pointed it out, I wondered what he thought of what Iceland has become in the modern world. Today's weather is very warm for February. I went out in my shirtsleeves. This has been a very warm winter and seems on the verge of ending early. Nancy has already spotted redwing blackbirds near her office (Newport area) but none in Providence and certainly none here yet. There's still some light left at 6:00PM - though not much - and I can feel the year turning toward spring. The sky remains gray and heavy but without the harshness. Oh, we could still have just about any kind of weather - cold, hot, rain, snow, sleet, ice... but it just feels like we got a break from winter's grip. I don't know if it's the gray sky dragging my mood down or the reality of the human condition. In our circle of acquaintances at the coffee shop, Tom and I encountered a guy who thinks he's got a terrible disease and is declining precipitously, even though there is nothing medically wrong with him, and a woman who denies there's anything wrong yet does have a terrible disease, which is visibly impacting her despite her denials. Imagining illness seems to cause it, yet denying illness doesn't seem to make it go away. The human mind is so strange and complicated that all our medical science barely scratches the surface of understanding it. No wonder I feel confused. The mundane task of scanning the slides seemed a little bit beside the point as I pondered the mind-body connection and the illnesses - real and imagined - of acquaintances, but I finally got the Mac to stop crashing so I unpacked the rest of the slides and scanned them in one by one. If I worked at this pace in the real world - er, I mean real job? - I'd be downsized in a minute. Fortunately, I have plenty of time to work at my own pace on this now that everything is all setup. | |
|
x |
x |
|
|