It’s All in the Science • Your biological circadian rhythm coordinates a drop in core body temperature as you near My favourite passages from the book
It’s All in the Science • Your biological circadian rhythm coordinates a drop in core body temperature as you near typical bedtime (figure 1), reaching its nadir, or low point, about two hours after sleep onset. • The prefrontal cortex controls high-level thought and logical reasoning, and helps keep our emotions in check. • As a nine-year-old, the circadian rhythm would have the child asleep by around nine p.m., driven in part by the rising tide of melatonin at this time in children. By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase. The rising tide of melatonin, and the instruction of darkness and sleep, is many hours away. As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour. By the time the parents are getting tired, as their circadian rhythms take a downturn and melatonin release instructs sleep—perhaps around ten or eleven p.m., their teenager can still be wide awake. A few more hours must pass before the circadian rhythm of a teenage brain begins to shut down alertness and allow for easy, sound sleep to begin.
Caffeine is the Enemy! • Caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine for the privilege of latching on to adenosine welcome sites—or receptors—in the brain. Once caffeine occupies these receptors, however, it does not stimulate them like adenosine, making you sleepy. Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent. • For the entire time that caffeine is in your system, the sleepiness chemical it blocks (adenosine) nevertheless continues to build up. Your brain is not aware of this rising tide of sleep-encouraging adenosine, however, because the wall of caffeine you’ve created is holding it back from your perception. But once your liver dismantles that barricade of caffeine, you feel a vicious backlash: you are hit with the sleepiness you had experienced two or three hours ago before you drank that cup coffee plus all the extra adenosine that has accumulated in the hours in between, impatiently waiting for caffeine to leave.
Sleep, Memory and Time • Your brain, it seems, is still capable of logging time with quite remarkable precision while asleep. Like so many other operations occurring within the brain, you simply don’t have explicit access to this accurate time knowledge during sleep. It all flies below the radar of consciousness, surfacing only when needed. • In this way, sleep may elegantly manage and solve our memory storage crisis, with the general excavatory force of NREM sleep dominating early, after which the etching hand of REM sleep blends, interconnects, and adds details. Since life’s experience is ever changing, demanding that our memory catalog be updated ad infinitum, our autobiographical sculpture of stored experience is never complete. • Sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection. Said another way, forgetting is the price we pay for remembering. • In other words, if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter.
Lack of Sleep • When you don’t get enough sleep, one consequence among many is that adenosine concentrations remain too high. Like an outstanding debt on a loan, come the morning, some quantity of yesterday’s adenosine remains. You then carry that outstanding sleepiness balance throughout the following day. Also like a loan in arrears, this sleep debt will continue to accumulate. You cannot hide from it. The debt will roll over into the next payment cycle, and the next, and the next, producing a condition of prolonged, chronic sleep deprivation from one day to another. This outstanding sleep obligation results in a feeling of chronic fatigue, manifesting in many forms of mental and physical ailments that are now rife throughout industrialized nations. • With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health. • Insufficient sleep does not, therefore, push the brain into a negative mood state and hold it there. Rather, the under-slept brain swings excessively to both extremes of emotional valence, positive and negative. • Of relevance to this behavior is a recent discovery that sleep loss increases levels of circulating endocannabinoids, which, as you may have guessed from the name, are chemicals produced by the body that are very similar to the drug cannabis. Like marijuana use, these chemicals stimulate appetite and increase your desire to snack, otherwise known as having the munchies. • When you are not getting enough sleep, the body becomes especially stingy about giving up fat. Instead, muscle mass is depleted while fat is retained. • Not sleeping enough, which for a portion of the population is a voluntary choice, significantly modifies your gene transcriptome—that is, the very essence of you, or at least you as defined biologically by your DNA.
Dreamscapes • Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment. • Perhaps it was not time that heals all wounds, but rather time spent in dream sleep. • REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. • A dream-starved brain cannot accurately decode facial expressions, which become distorted. You begin to mistake friends for foes. • Deep NREM sleep strengthens individual memories, as we now know. But it is REM sleep that offers the masterful and complementary benefit of fusing and blending those elemental ingredients together, in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming sleep state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge, and then extract overarching rules and commonalities—“the gist.” We awake with a revised “Mind Wide Web” that is capable of divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems. In this way, REM-sleep dreaming is informational alchemy. • REM sleep is capable of creating abstract overarching knowledge and super-ordinate concepts out of sets of information.
Interesting Facts • Every component of wellness, and countless seams of societal fabric, are being eroded by our costly state of sleep neglect: human and financial alike. So much so that the World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared a sleep loss epidemic throughout industrialized nations. • Deep, powerful, rhythmic, and slow brainwaves will drench the entirety of one cerebral hemisphere, yet the other half of the cerebrum will be bristling with frenetic, fast brainwave activity, fully awake. • But if you bring that person into a sleep laboratory, or take them to a hotel—both of which are unfamiliar sleep environments—one half of the brain sleeps a little lighter than the other, as if it’s standing guard with just a tad more vigilance due to the potentially less safe context that the conscious brain has registered while awake. • These napping communities have sometimes been described as “the places where people forget to die.” From a prescription written long ago in our ancestral genetic code, the practice of natural biphasic sleep, and a healthy diet, appear to be the keys to a long-sustained life. • If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m. • Unfortunately, the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity, almost like a camera roll or, to use a more modern-day analogy, a USB memory stick. Exceed its capacity and you run the risk of not being able to add more information or, equally bad, overwriting one memory with another: a mishap called interference forgetting. • It is during sleep that this neural sanitization work kicks into high gear. Associated with the pulsing rhythm of deep NREM sleep comes a ten- to twentyfold increase in effluent expulsion from the brain. In what can be described as a nighttime power cleanse, the purifying work of the glymphatic system is accomplished by cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain. • So what does this have to do with Alzheimer’s disease? One piece of toxic debris evacuated by the glymphatic system during sleep is amyloid protein—the poisonous element associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Other dangerous metabolic waste elements that have links to Alzheimer’s disease are also removed by the cleaning process during sleep, including a protein called tau, as well as stress molecules produced by neurons when they combust energy and oxygen during the day. • World Health Organization has officially classified nighttime shift work as a “probable carcinogen.” • One distinction separates insomnia into two kinds. The first is sleep onset insomnia, which is difficulty falling asleep. The second is sleep maintenance insomnia, or difficulty staying asleep.
Beautifully Constructed Sentences • We sleep for a rich litany of functions, plural—an abundant constellation of nighttime benefits that service both our brains and our bodies. • Hard problems care little about what motivates their interrogators; they meter out their lessons of difficulty all the same. • Shakespeare prophetically states that sleep is “the chief nourisher in life’s feast.” • I, on the other hand, remained in the auditorium, realizing that this gentleman had just told me something that violated the most repeated and entrusted teaching edict: practice makes perfect. Not so, it seemed. Perhaps it was practice, with sleep, that makes perfect? • “The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.” • As many have said about such stoic institutions: theories, beliefs, and practices die one generation at a time. But the conversation and battle must start somewhere. • Phrased differently, and perhaps more simply, wakefulness is low-level brain damage, while sleep is neurological sanitation. • A sleep-deprived body will cry famine in the midst of plenty. • Journaling your waking thoughts, feelings, and concerns has a proven mental health benefit, and the same appears true of your dreams. A meaningful, psychologically healthy life is an examined one, as Socrates so often declared. • Through its therapeutic work at night, REM sleep performed the elegant trick of divorcing the bitter emotional rind from the information-rich fruit. We can therefore learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional baggage that those painful experiences originally carried....more
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
Part I: Stories · Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns★★★★☆ (4/5)
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
Part I: Stories · Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive? As, for example, when an arabesque in the pattern of a carpet is revealed to be a dog’s tail, which, if stepped upon, could lead to a nipped ankle? Or when we reach for an innocent-looking vine and find it to be a worm or a snake? When a harmlessly drifting log turns out to be a crocodile? · To this day, when I think of the circumstances that have shaped my life, I remember the elemental force that untethered my ancestors from their homeland and launched them on the series of journeys that preceded, and made possible, my own travels. When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me, wherever you are? · Ian Hacking, a prominent historian of the concept, puts it, probability is a ‘manner of conceiving the world constituted without our being aware of it’. · the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and ‘modern’ worldview. · the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizably modern novel. · This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability. They are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction. · Yet now our gaze seems to be turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness. How else do we account for the interest in the non-human that has been burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade and over a range of disciplines, from philosophy to anthropology and literary criticism. · I understood also that what I had seen in the Nicobars was but a microcosmic expression of a pattern of settlement that is now dominant around the world: proximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a seafront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations of middle-class patterns of living across the globe. · it was not till the seventeenth century that colonial cities began to rise on seafronts around the world. Mumbai, Chennai, New York and Charleston were all founded in this period. This would be followed by another, even more confident wave of city building in the nineteenth century, with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong. These cities, all brought into being by processes of colonization, are now among those that are most directly threatened by climate change. · The chronology of the founding of these cities creates an almost irresistible temptation to point to the European Enlightenment’s predatory hubris in relation to the earth and its resources. · a much more immediate link: a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities; that is to say, they were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (‘externalities’) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable. · But the earth of the era of global warming is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast. · We have entered, as Timothy Morton says, the age of hyperobjects, which are defined in part by their stickiness, their ever firmer adherence to our lives: even to speak of the weather, that safest of subjects, is now to risk a quarrel with a denialist neighbour. · Global warming’s resistance to the arts begins deep underground, in the recesses where organic matter undergoes the transformations that make it possible for us to devour the sun’s energy in fossilized forms. Think of the vocabulary that is associated with these substances: naphtha, bitumen, petroleum, tar and fossil fuels. No poet or singer could make these syllables fall lightly on the ear.
Part II: History · In accounts of the history of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns. · If it is the case that the climate crisis was precipitated by mainland Asia’s embrace of the dominant mechanisms of the world economy, then the critical question in relation to the history of human-induced climate change is this: Why did the most populous countries of Asia industrialize late in the twentieth century and not before? · Before the advent of the carbon-intensive economy, the populations of the ‘old world’ were not divided by vast gaps in technology. For millennia, trade connections were close enough to ensure that innovations in thought and technique were transmitted quite rapidly over long distances. Even ‘deep’, long-term historical processes sometimes unfolded at roughly the same time in places far removed from each other. · the one feature of Western modernity that is truly distinctive: its enormous intellectual commitment to the promotion of its supposed singularity. · In mainland Asia, the crucial linkages between economy, political sovereignty and military power were not restored till the paired processes of decolonization and the (temporary) retreat of the erstwhile colonial powers were set in motion by the end of the Second World War. · our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but towards our self-annihilation. · the universalist premise of industrial civilization was a hoax; that a consumerist mode of existence, if adopted by a sufficient number of people, would quickly become unsustainable and would lead, literally, to the devouring of the planet. · Japan diverged from the West in another way as well: an awareness of natural constraints became a part of its official ideology, which insisted that ‘nature is consciousness for the Japanese people’. · The phrase ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, frequently heard during the Paris climate change negotiations of 2015, is thus a rare example of bureaucratese that is both apt and accurate. Anthropogenic climate change, as Chakrabarty and others have pointed out, is the unintended consequence of the very existence of human beings as a species. Although different groups of people have contributed to it in vastly different measure, global warming is ultimately the product of the totality of human actions over time. Every human being who has ever lived has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet, and in this sense every human being, past and present, has contributed to the present cycle of climate change.
Part III: Politics · There is perhaps no better means of tracking the diffusion of modernity across the globe than by charting the widening grip of this fear, which was nowhere more powerfully felt than in the places that were most visibly marked by the stigmata of ‘backwardness’. · For the body politic, this vision of politics as moral journey has also had the consequence of creating an ever-growing divergence between a public sphere of political performance and the realm of actual governance: the latter is now controlled by largely invisible establishments that are guided by imperatives of their own. And as the public sphere grows ever more performative, at every level from presidential campaigns to online petitions, its ability to influence the actual exercise of power becomes increasingly attenuated. · the flow of oil is radically unlike the movement of coal. The nature of coal, as a material, is such that its transportation creates multiple choke points where organized labour can exert pressure on corporations and the state. This is not the case with oil, which flows through pipelines that can bypass concentrations of labour. This was exactly why British and American political elites began to encourage the use of oil over coal after the First World War. · As an instrument of disempowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. ‘No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches,’ writes Roy Scranton, ‘they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.’ · ‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.’ · identity and performativity are now pivotal to public discourse, · ‘the most rational and considered response to the uncertainties of climate change can be found among military strategists. · That justice should be aspired to is widely agreed; it could hardly be otherwise since this ideal lies at the heart of all contemporary claims of political legitimacy. How such an end could be reached is also well known: an equitable regime of emissions could be created through any one of many strategies, such as ‘contraction and convergence’, for instance, or ‘a per capita climate accord’, or a fair apportioning of the world’s remaining ‘climate budget’. But the resulting equity would lead not just to a redistribution of wealth but also to a recalibration of global power—and from the point of view of a security establishment that is oriented towards the maintenance of global dominance, this is precisely the scenario that is most greatly to be feared; · Seen in this light, climate change is not a danger in itself; it is envisaged rather as a ‘threat multiplier’ that will deepen already existing divisions and lead to the intensification of a range of conflicts. · We are in an era when the body of the nation can no longer be conceived of as consisting only of a territorialized human population: its very sinews are now revealed to be intertwined with forces that cannot be confined by boundaries. · the populations of poor nations, because they are accustomed to hardship, possess the capacity to absorb, even if at great cost, certain shocks and stresses that might cripple rich nations. · It is not impossible, for instance, that in dealing with situations of extraordinary stress the very factors that are considered advantages in coping with extreme weather—education, wealth and a high degree of social organization—may actually become vulnerabilities. · In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast, there is not the slightest acknowledgement that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text. · ‘professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power [who] being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population.’ · ‘how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace’. · ‘a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’....more
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
· The more illustrious the dead the more arduous the labor, because the workers had to ru★★★☆☆ (3/5)
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
· The more illustrious the dead the more arduous the labor, because the workers had to rummage through the remains and sift the debris with great care in order to retrieve precious stones and articles of gold and silver. · In a few short years, however, she had been erased from the world by her abuse of fermented honey and cacao tablets. Her Gypsy eyes were extinguished and her wits dulled, she shat blood and vomited bile, her siren’s body became as bloated and coppery as a three-day-old corpse, and she broke wind in pestilential explosions that startled the mastiffs. · Everything was saturated with the oppressive damp of neglect and gloom. · She had begun to blossom under a combination of contradictory influences. She inherited very little from her mother. She had her father’s thin body, however, and his irremediable shyness, pale skin, eyes of taciturn blue, and the pure copper of her radiant hair. Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girl’s wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house. · for many years he had not left his house except on great occasions, and for many more years there had been no occasions greater than calamitous ones. · He had invented a pill to be taken once a year, which enhanced one’s health and lengthened one’s life but caused such mental derangement for the first three days that no one but the doctor had dared to swallow it. · “The human body is not made to endure all the years that one may live,” he said. · At the end of the previous century, an entire family had consumed poisoned soup because none of them had the heart to poison only a five-year-old boy. · and the Marquis followed the bird in its fugitive flight until it vanished among the brilliant domes of the fortified city. · “I am afraid I do not know Latin,” the Marquis apologized. “There is no reason you should!” said Abrenuncio. And he said it in Latin, of course. · “Books are worthless,” Abrenuncio said with good humor. “Life has helped me cure the diseases that other doctors cause with their medicines.” · So unusual an incursion into a man’s trade was the explanation given for her losing her reason, and in so drastic a way that teaching her not to eat her own filth was a formidable task. · “Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.” · More than any other danger, the unblinking hunting mastiff that guarded his bedroom unnerved him. He said it himself: “I live in fear of being alive.” In exile he acquired his lugubrious appearance, cautious manner, contemplative nature, languid behavior, slow speech, and a mystic vocation that seemed to condemn him to a cloistered cell. · The fortune that came to her by water left by water, and she was at the mercy of the skins of honey and sacks of cacao that she kept hidden in various places so she would lose no time when her relentless longings pursued her. · “The Señora Marquise will die on the fifteenth of September at the latest, if she does not hang herself from the rafters first.” Unmoved, the Marquis said: “The only problem is that the fifteenth of September is so far away.” · “It is horrible,” said the Bishop. “Each hour resonates deep inside me like an earthquake.” The phrase surprised the Marquis, for he had responded with the same thought at four o’clock. It seemed a natural coincidence to the Bishop. “Ideas do not belong to anyone,” he said. With his index finger he sketched a series of continuous circles in the air and concluded: “They fly around up there like the angels.” · He spoke of his magical prescriptions, of the pride with which he foretold death, of his probable pederasty, of his libertine readings, of his life without God. · For the first time since losing his faith, he felt the urge to pray. He went to the oratory, trying with all his strength to recover the god who had forsaken him, but to no avail: Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses. · After taking their vows of poverty, silence, and chastity, their only communication with the outside world was a rare visit held in the locutory, where wooden jalousies admitted voices but not light. The locutory was situated next to the turnstile gate, and its use was regulated, restricted, and always required the presence of a chaperone. · Abrenuncio understood. He had always thought that ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one’s faith had been, making it impossible to forget. · Delaura had dreamed that Sierva María sat at a window overlooking a snow-covered field, eating grapes one by one from a cluster she held in her lap. Each grape she pulled off grew back again on the cluster. In the dream it was evident the girl had spent many years at that infinite window trying to finish the cluster, and was in no hurry to do so because she knew that in the last grape lay death. · Delaura was aware of his own awkwardness with women. To him they seemed endowed with an untransferable use of reason that allowed them to navigate without difficulty among the hazards of reality. · She viewed with equal alarm the garden flowering with so much vigor that it seemed contra natura. As they walked across it she pointed out to Delaura that there were flowers of exceptional size and color, some with an unbearable scent. As far as she was concerned, everything ordinary had something supernatural about it. · The Abbess was terrified by the stains the water left on the walls. “Blood!” she screamed. Delaura challenged the frivolity of her reasoning. Just because the water was red, that did not mean it had to be blood, and even if it were, that did not mean it had to be diabolical. · “We cannot intervene in the rotation of the earth,” said Delaura. “But we could be unaware of it so that it does not cause us grief,” said the Bishop. “More than faith, what Galileo lacked was a heart.” · The Marquis used his remaining strength to get out of the hammock, fell on his knees in front of her, and burst into the harsh weeping of a useless old man. Bernarda capitulated because of the fire of male tears sliding across her lap through the silk. · And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. · “When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me,” she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: “What’s the rest of it?”“I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end,” he said. · “Into your hands at last I have come vanquished.” · The slave district, at the very edge of the salt marsh, was staggering in its misery. People lived alongside turkey buzzards and pigs in mud huts with roofs of palm, and children drank from the swamp in the streets. But with its intense colors and radiant voices it was the liveliest district, and even more so at twilight, when the residents carried chairs into the middle of the street to enjoy the cool air. · He stood without haste, put the chair back in its place, and left the way he had come, not saying good-bye, and not carrying a light. All that remained of him—a skeleton eaten away by turkey buzzards—was found two summers later on a path leading nowhere. · “You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it,” he said. “I do not: I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.” ...more
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