CONSOLATION EIGHTEEN: MY UFO

     Most people never experience a supernatural, paranormal, or UFO event.  They may be true believers in religions which claim that angels, demons, and other supernatural beings exist, yet they themselves make no claim to having interacted with such beings.  They're content to credit the testimony of others who say they've had this kind of interaction, without ever having it themselves.  Practical, down-to-earth types like handworkers, businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, and civil servants -- types, that is, who deal with the real world day in and day out -- let more mystically-inclined types supernaturalize for them.  Nor do they see ghosts or flying saucers, though they may believe others can.
     What, then, does someone like me, who not only prides himself on being as practical and down-to-earth as they come but who firmly disbelieves all things supernatural, paranormal, and space-alien, do when he sees an unidentified flying object?  Not just a UFO glimpsed for a second out a plane window, but a UFO hovering for several minutes above his stopped car on a chilly, chrystal-clear, November night in 1972?
     I and my former wife were living with our ten-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son in Davidsonville, Maryland, where a year and a half earlier we'd bought a stately but run-down old farmhouse from a family who'd owned it for generations.  Since then we'd scraped, sanded, or burned off the accumulated layers of paint and paper on walls, ceilings, and floors, doing out best to return them to their original condition.
     We did most of the work ourselves.  My wife tackled the interior walls and ceilings, while I sanded the floors, through as many as ten layers of paint, down to the magnificent Georgia heart of pine planking they were made of.  I also scraped, chlorine-washed, primed, and double-coated every outside wall.
     For special work, we hired local craftsmen.  Our carpenter replaced rotted-out exterior ornaments and missing or broken parts in the house's twenty sets of window shutters with copies he himself made.  Our mason rehabbed the four brick chimneys and reopened or rehabbed five of the original seven fireplaces.  We modernized plumbing and wiring throughout and added a new bathroom.  The project was a once-in-a-lifetime labor of love.
     Moreover, I was enjoying of of the most productive and successful periods of my career and was suffering none of the stress, anxiety, or psychosis typically associated with space-alien hallucinations.  I'd recently been promoted to tenure, had my first book accepted for publication, and returned with my family from a splendid year in Germany as a Fulbright professor.  I was putting the finishing touches on my dream house.  Why would I want or need to imagine I was seeing a UFO?
     I didn't imagine it.  It happened, just as undeniably and unmistakably as anything in my conscious life ever has.  I'd taken our babysitter home and started the two-mile return drive to our house.  Earlier in the evening my wife and I had been to a Davidsonville Civic Association meeting that ended around nine, where I'd had nothing to drink.  All my faculties were in excellent working order.
     Driving through a stretch of woods, I noticed a light above the leaf canopy ahead.  Slowing, I peered up through the windshield to see what it was.  Just then the woods opened into farmland, and I found myself staring at the strangest object I've ever seen.  I stopped, turned off the engine, and got out.
     The object was hovering several hundred feet almost straight above me, though judging its height and size was impossible because I'd never seen anything like it and had no basis for comparison.  It consisted of a kidney-shaped underside of bright orange light, inside of which five circular rings of bright yellow light were rotating clockwise at approximately ceiling fan speed.  The circles looked identical in size and equidistant from each other within the orange light.  Four of them were in the oval of the main part of the kidney to my left, one was in the bulge of the kidney that protruded slightly to my right.  All seemed to be symmetrically arranged within the kidney, creating a sense of balance and harmony in their overall spacing.
     The object made no noise I could hear.  It simply hung there silently against the moonless, star-filled sky, its yellow rings turning more like decorations or ventilators than propellers.  I stared a long time, possibly twenty or thirty seconds, before reacting in any way I remember.  My first reaction, or impression, when it came, was unequivocal.  I said to myself, That thing is man-made.
     Perhaps I got this impression from its symmetrical, ornamental look, which struck me as more human than alien, as something created more for psychological effect than for serious space travel.  I thought it might be some kind of elaborate hoax.
     Yet its uncanny ability to stay aloft noiselessly and motionlessly except for the yellow circles might well have justified my seeing it as non-human.  Why, given the total unfamiliarity and oddness of what my senses were registering, didn't I give more weight to that possibility instead of so quickly rejecting it?
     Part of the answer, I think, lies in the culture of realistic, scientific, evidence-based rationality I was raised in.  My mother was born in 1900 to an American family whose males had been college-educated for generations.  She and one of her three sisters were encouraged to get college degrees for the first time in the family's history.  My father was born in 1903 in Germany to a similarly well-educated family.  There was never a doubt I and my brother would go to college.
     My mother's family favored the liberal arts, which in those days meant studying math and science as well as literature, history, and foreign language at the college level.  My freshman and sophomore years at Amherst, where I enrolled in 1953, consisted of grueling requirements in english, history, foreign language, calculus, physics, and general science that inclined me toward a major in science till I ran afoul of a math elective I had to either drop or fail.  Since grade school I'd been taught to think critically and base my arguments on solid evidence.
     Part of the answer was also that the cold war with the Soviet bloc was in full swing, and the likelihood of secret military research, especially on intelligence-gathering aircraft, was great.  Since the object floating above me didn't seem at all hostile, I assumed it might be some kind of U.S. military vehicle.  This was reinforced a few minutes later, after it disappeared, when I recalled that one of the ring of antiballistic-missile Nike bases circling Washington was located in Davidsonville not a mile from where I'd stopped the car.  The UFO might have been linked in some way to the Nike base.
     Of course that possibility didn't preclude it's being an extra-terrestrial spaceship investigating terrestrial weapons, a thought that actually did cross my mind when I got back in the car to drive home after the UFO was gone.
     Yet even the weirdness of the way it left didn't shake my initial judgment it was man-made.  After hovering over me for a couple of minutes, during which I tried unsuccessfully to figure out what it was, it started moving toward Annapolis, ten miles east.  After following a straight path for a few seconds, it abruptly changed course to another straight path.  It zigzagged slowly back and forth like this several times, as though searching for something.  As it receded, the orange and yellow light from its underside gradually narrowed to a thin streak in the distance.  Nothing of its upper structure, if it had one, ever became visible.
     When the streak was just above the horizon, it made several quick zigzags, darted north at tremendous speed, and vanished.  Whether it went over the horizon, turned off it lights, or was simply too far away to see was unclear to me.  Its zigag movements and final burst of speed were so bizarre that to this day, despite my strong feeling it was man-made, I'm not absolutely sure it was.
     I've never discussed or described any of this before, mainly because I've never considered it worth talking about without corroborative explanation, which has never come to light.  Corroboration of a limited kind came the next day, when the local Annapolis newspaper reported that two state policemen had seen a kidney-shaped object with orange and yellow lights the night before near Severna Park, Maryland, fifteen miles north.  Though I never really thought I'd gone wacko and dreamed it up, I was relieved to learn the troopers had seen it too.
     I've decided to rehash what happened that night forty years ago in this post because I want to clarify in my own mind its relevance to my philosophical materialism.  Though I didn't choose to be a materialist till almost fifteen years after the sighting, which had no influence on that choice, I'd been predisposed from childhood toward the realism, rationalism, and moderation that dissuaded me from believing I was seeing something extra-terrestrial in Davidsonville and that also later drew me to materialism.  I think this predisposition came from the following sources.
     In addition to the open-minded, science-friendly family background that early on shaped my non-religious, evidence-based worldview, I grew up in the hardscrabble Vermont backwoods, where most of the neighbors thought of nothing but their next crop or meal and were asleep every night by eight for morning chores at four.  Because my family didn't have to work our fifty-five acres for a living, we were spared the brain-numbing drudgery of subsistence-level dairy farming that almost everyone else in the village was chained to.  But the rural poverty surrounding me taught me its lessons anyway.
     The first was that life was cheap, dangerous, and replaceable.  Many of the farmers fathered up to a dozen children, sometimes with a series of breeder wives, to provide enough manpower to work the farm and cover any gaps caused by infant, childhood, or adolescent mortality.  They also slaughtered most of their male calves, pigs, and chickens for food or cash and often worked their horses to death, leaving them to rot where they fell if the stench was far enough from anyone's house to tolerate.  When a barn-cat population got too large, new litters of kittens were summarily bagged and drowned.  Dogs and puppies were constantly being run over by cars, trucks, tractors, and wagons.
     The second, contradictory lesson was that survival alone mattered.  Enough food for man and beast was laid away in summer supposedly to last the winter, but often it didn't.  Some winters the ribs of the livestock jutted grotesquely from their skins, and at times my playmates next door had nothing to eat but sprouted potatoes from the cellar bin.  Their house was freezing cold most of the winter because their father refused to waste firewood in the main furnace.  The only warm room was the kitchen, whose wood-burning stove of course went out at night.  The kids slept two or three to a bed, huddled together for warmth under threadbare old horse blankets.  One of them remembers always being cold in bed in winter and vowing never to be so again when he grew up.
     The final lesson was to fend for yourself.  Short of killing or stealing, any means of improving your own lot was acceptable.  No one else could or would take care of you;  you had to take care of yourself.
     These harsh and unsentimental lessons of the impoverished individualism I grew up with in the Vermont hills merged with the skeptical, science-based rationality of my family's more affluent and liberal culture to create in me a mindset that scoffed not only at putative invasions from outer space but at any kind of supernatural or paranormal claim.  Undeniable proof of something's factualness and explicability was to me the sine qua non of taking it seriously.
     No such proof for my UFO ever materialized.  For out-and-out miraculous, magical, and supernatural events it never does, except in the imaginations of zealots and fanatics and the scams of frauds and liars.  But my UFO sighting wasn't like that.  It really did happen in time and space.  But the notion that the orange and yellow kidney would someday reappear in interstellar glory and confirm the existence of intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy was to me never worth talking about.
     So, unless it does, in repeated, unmistakable ways to a great many other human beings, I'll happily continue dismissing it as an altogether human contrivance.  One of the great strengths of philosophical materialism is its skepticism regarding all unexplained human apperceptions.  When confirmed by trustworthy witnesses as genuinely empirical events that actually did or could happen independent of particular perceivers, as mine with the UFO was by the two troopers, such apperceptions are always the result of material facts that are either artificially (humanly) or naturally (randomly) caused.  When not so confirmed, they too often become the stuff religions are made of
                                                                         ********
                                                           

CONSOLATION SEVENTEEN: HANDICAPPING THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL CUP

     In this sweepstakes event, run quadrennially since 1789, the reigning champion, Demoblue Farm's HopefulFutureBarack, will on November 2, 2012, defend his title against the challenger, Repured Farm's BackToGreatnessMitt, over ten furlongs.  Four years ago, in the 2008 Presidential Cup, HopefulFutureBarack outlasted JohnAndSarahLipstick, who had edged BackToGreatnessMitt in the Repured Farms prelims.
     The bloodlines of the two stallions have sharply differed for generations, though both lines contain the only offspring of the Houhynhm breed discovered by Lemuel Gulliver in the early 1700s, as reported by Jonathan Swift in his authoritative history, Gulliver's Travels.  Houhynhms are the only equines able to talk to each other and to racing afficianados in English.
     HopefulFutureBarack's great-great-granddam, FederalMeltPotEqualizer, was a cousin of JefferJackCommoner, a rangy Appalachian stud.  She never won a race but finished in the money often enough to make race handicappers question her about it.  Her answer was that before each race she'd harangue the other contestants with her own brand of horse-sense.  "Listen, fellow Houhynhms," she would whinny, "the Yahoos ["Yahoo" means "human" in Houhynhm] are just plain using us.  For Ur-Yahoo's sake, don't try outrunning each other for Yahoo fun and profit.  Work together and cross the finish line abreast!  That way we'll all share their stupid prize money!"
     Sadly, her appeals always fell on some deaf horse-ears.  At least one selfish showoff would bolt from the gate and finish far ahead of most of the others, who had to eat his mud or dust, depending on track conditions.  BackToGreatnessMitt's great-great-grandsire PrivateRightLaissezFaire was one of these prancy egotists.  He was a stallion FederalMeltPotEqualizer hated, a sentiment he cordially reciprocated.  The two locked manes in a few races, and once, when she neighed a protest at him as he flew past, he squealed back, "Vulgar beast!  Common whor[s]e!"
     He couldn't abide her plebeian urge to change things.  She wanted to subvert the whole racing system by letting no one lose.  He, to the contrary, had a deep faith that the Ur-Yahoo who created racing and the rest of the universe not only knew what He was doing but designed it all intelligently enough not to need any changing.  "Ur-Yahoo made thoroughbreds like me winners," he'd snort, "and mixed breeds like her losers.  It's all part of His plan."
     PrivateRightLaissezFaire sired GildedAgeRobberBaroness, BackToGreatnessMitt's great-granddam.    This filly was as self-assured as her father and equally convinced that any horse who lost deserved to lose and was to blame for losing.  Inspired by the new doctrine of Survival of the Fittest, she liked to trot out inspirational slogans for her high-born yearling friends in Repured Farm's elegant Victorian stable.  "Cream always rises to the top!" she'd whinny, "Strength always puts down weakness!  Success always breeds success!"
     Among these high-born friends was IncomeTaxNationalParkLeveller, a talkative colt with the nickname Teddy.  Though Teddy was foaled by FederalMeltPotEqualizer, his sire was a scion of the Hudson River Houhynhms, which made Teddy a rare blend of thoroughbred and workhorse.  He was autocratic, pious, and bellicose, like most Repured Farm horseflesh, yet he'd inherited a big, Demoblue, common streak from his mother.  After winning his first Cup, he persuaded the Houyhnhms of both Farms to tax all prize money progressively for the benefit of losing horses, much to GildedAgeRobberBaroness's disgust.  He also had large undeveloped tracts in both Farms set aside as permanent free-range pasture.  "Ur-Yahoo made these magnificent landscapes," he liked to nicker, "for us to commune with Him in!"
     Teddy sired HopefulFurtureBarack's grand-dam,  NewDealSocialSecurityEverygal, who followed Teddy's habit of living high on the horse on the one hand and befriending low-class Houhynhms on the other.  She too lived in a fancy Hudson River stable, yet she too got both Farms to pony up retirement pensions for every Houyhnhm regardless of track record and to approve many other changes in the racing rules that helped her win four Presidential Cups in a row.  A backlash was inevitable.  When NewDealSocialSecurityEverygal died soon after her final Cup victory, her friends joined with her enemies in prohibiting two-time winners from ever running for the Cup again.
     Working at cross-purposes with her was our old friend GildedAgeRobberBaroness, who early on died in a tragic racing accident known as the Great Crash.  A colt she'd delivered just before she was killed by excessive risk-taking in that race was DivineMushroomCloudFreedomFighter, who, like his mother, loved inspirational slogans.  "Better dead than red!" he'd neigh.  "Bomb 'em back to the stone age!  Ur-Yahoo hates the New Deal!  Ur-Yahoo loves free capitalism!"  Convinced Demoblue Farm was crawling with communists, he vowed to hunt them all down and return the racing world to the faith of his fathers.
     But he was spooked by NewDealSocialSecurityEverygal's foal GreatSocietySpender, who aimed at nothing less than making every Houhynhm healthy, wealthy, and equal.  After getting the Yahoos to guarantee full medical care to all retired Houhynhms, GreatSocietySpender even rectified an old injustice among the Yahoos themselves.  During the first seventy years of the Presidential Cup, Yahoos owned other Yahoos as slaves.  GreatSocietySpender persuaded the Yahoos to abolish such relics of Yahoo slavery as segregated schools and toilets.
     All this cost money.  GreatSocietySpender was able to swing it for a while by raising taxes like there was no tomorrow.  But tomorrow did come and did start to drag him and Demoblue Farm down to bankruptcy.  As if that weren't bad enough, Repured Farm proceeded to win the Presidential Cup all but once during the next twenty-five years, mainly because of AntiTaxAntiGovJobCreatress, a filly with the nickname of The Gimpper because of an odd hitch in her gait.
     This hitch lulled The Gimpper's foes into thinking she couldn't win.  But she'd fool them by gimpping along five or six furlongs, then suddenly convulse into a gallop so spastic it made her look like she'd literally lost her head.  Yet that miserably awkward gallop often got her over the finish line first.  Her seeming incompetence masked enough racing smarts to win her a couple of Cups.  The same was not true of the two Repured Farm stallions who won Cups after her.  Their seeming incompetence was real.
     The Gimpper was BackToGreatnessMitt's dam.  He's idolized her ever since his training days in the Financial Paddock, where young Repured horses learn how to maximize their own feed, minimize that of their Paddock-mates, and do their best to starve each other to death.  "This is the code that Mother and all my other forebears lived by," BackToGreatnessMitt likes to neigh, "and if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me.  I want to return to their freedom-loving, Ur-Yahoo-fearing, private-wealth ways.  Depending on nothing but their own four hoofs, they were not, like some Houhynhms I know, afraid to fail!"
     Such pronouncements provoke many a horse-laugh over at Demoblue Farm.  HopefulFutureBarack, current Cup holder and son of GreatSocietySpender, may snicker, "BackToGreatnessMitt must have forgotten those two hundred and twenty years since the first Cup, during which all his ancestors have been rolling mane over hoof in Repured Farm clover.  Their 1% of Houhynhmdom has never been afraid to fail because they've hoarded millions in prize money from the other 99% who often do fail!"  Then, without sarcasm, "I look forward to helping that 99% get their fair share, meaning fortunate Houhynhms like me will have to pay at least the same tax rate as my less fortunate stable mates, as defined in the Water Buckett rule."
     Then BackToGreatnessMitt may nip back, "Since HopefulFutureBarack won the Cup, everything he's done to get us out of the Great Racetrack Recession of the last few years has been a disaster.  His gimmick of installing penny slots in the racetrack casinos to beef up track attendance with penny-ante Yahoos has been a total failure: -- all it's done is run up debt without creating good-paying jobs.  What we need is to get rid of job-destroying racetrack rules and taxes and lure the high-roller Yahoos back for some real, old-time, high-leverage betting!"

     So, here's my prediction for the 2012 Cup.  On the basis of bloodline and in lieu of prior head-to-head competition or other comparables, the following considerations add up to a second win for HopefulFutureBarack.
     1) Though both bloodlines regularly win the Cup, Demoblue Farm horses have done better during hard times like those of the 1830s, 1930s, and today.  This is because low- and middle-class Houhynhms know that in downturns they do better when they share prize money than when they fight for it like dumb animals.  In good times, Repured Farm winners dole out enough of their prize money to losers at both Farms, either as charity or as easy work like giving kiddie-Yahoo horse-rides, to keep them more or less pacified.  But in hard times, class warfare between the haves and have-nots favors the have-nots, as does the mandated medical insurance introduced by Demoblue Farm since the last Cup.  The little-guy have-nots will cheer louder and bet more than the fat-cat haves.
Advanage:  HopefulFutureBarack.
     2) Counteracting this advantage is the fact that debt levels throughout the racing industry are so high that the system is almost dysfunctional.  BackToGreatnessMitt and his Yahoo trainers are right in demanding fiscal discipline, though their anti-tax and anti-government dogmas threaten the racing system as much as debt.  There's no question Demoblue Farm,  Repured Farm, and Yahoo-land as a whole will see their standards of living decline so long as debt and spending aren't curbed.  The fiscal hawks will outcheer and outbet the fiscal doves hands down.  Advantage:  BackToGreatnessMitt.
     3) The last fence to jump is religion.  BackToGreatnessMitt is vulnerable here for three reasons.  First, many Repured Farm Ur-Yahoo fundamentalists find his religion unacceptable.  His belief, that Ur-Yahoo revealed Himself to the world not just through the Holy Book of Holy Land but through another book called the Book of Mor[m]on with gold pages, which was given to a Yahoo named Smith by the angel Moron[i], was lost by Smith, and was recovered and translated by Smith with a see-through stone, strikes them as horse manure.  They see their holy book as pure Ur-Yahoo but his holy book as pure Mor[m]onism.
     Second, unfortunately for BackToGreatnessMitt most other Houhynhms agree with the fundamentalists.  Mainstream Ur-Yahoo conservatives see Mor[m]onism as a cult.  Moderates who like HopefulFutureBarack's liberal Ur-Yahoohism find it moronic.  Agnostics and atheists all go for HopefulFutureBarack's strict separation of church and state and abhor BackToGreatnessMitt's plan to slop them together.  Few Yahoos will cheer for or bet on the Mor[m]ons.
     Third, female Yahoos are tired of the bias against them in Mor[m]onism and many other fringe and mainline Ur-Yahoo sects.  They want a modern Bill of Female Rights and will not cheer or bet on BackToGreatnessMitt's nostalgia for the past.  Advantage:  HopefulFutureBarack.
                      
                              CURRENT ODDS:  10 to 7 HopefulFutureBarack,  by a length.

                                                                   ***************




                   

CONSOLATION SIXTEEN: FITNESS AND SPORTS

     I've loved physical exercise and competitive athletics all my life.  My boyhood in backwoods Vermont during the 1940s was nonstop work and play of the most rugged kind.  When I wasn't helping cut firewood, shovel snow, raise crops, tend animals, string fences, mow grass, clear brush, or work around the house, I was helping build small dams for swimming holes, playing in the woods, having day-long sagas of cowboys-and-indians, cops-and-robbers, hide-and-seek, and kick-the-can in the summer and, in winter, ferocious snowball fights and sled battles with the nine boys of the farm family next door.
     Though we had no organized sports during or after the one-room school we all went to in the village, we had pickup softball games at school and at home when we could drum up a bat and ball.  Of course we wrestled a lot and had a few fistfights.  And when we could beg, borrow, or steal ammunition, we'd spend hours shooting the seven shotguns and rifles owned by the nine-boy family, sometimes from their front porch at woodchucks in the front field or from their house roof at any wild animal in the vicinity.  1940s rural Vermont was a paradise for strong, conscienceless boys.  All of us were hardy physical specimens without realizing it.
     I didn't do organized athletics till I entered a local prep school where my mother worked.  Though tackle football was against the school's principles, and interscholastic baseball and soccer were played at a cow-pasture level, the one sport the school took seriously was skiing.  By senior year I'd learned slalom, downhill, jumping, and cross-country well enough to compete in all four events for the ski team at state and regional meets.
     Mediocre competitor though I was, I liked everything about it.  Waiting at the top of snow-covered mountains or ski jumps for my turn was transcendentally nerve-wracking and exciting.  At the end of the only race I ever won, the coach ran towards me, staring at his stop watch in amazement and yelling, "I can't believe it!  I think you're first!"  Far from insulting me, his disbelief echoed my own and somehow added zest to the greatest moment of my athletic career.  Also wonderful to a backwoods boy like me was the luxury of travelling to ski meets, which we did often for four solid days almost every week during the winter. We always stayed at the best inns or lodges and ate at the best restaurants.
     College was a different story.  One of the reasons I chose the college I did was that it was small enough to let me at least try to play football.  Fifteen or twenty of us at the prep school had organized a touch football team that actually played touch games against a few backwoods high schools, but it wasn't the real thing.  The college did offer the real thing, with recruited players, fulltime coaches, and first-class facilities and equipment.  I loved getting my pads, cleats, helmet, and uniform the first day of freshman practice.  Though I alone of the fifty men on the freshman squad had never played tackle football, I not only stuck it out for the season and played in a few games but found it indispensable morale-wise that first semester.  Without those  three hours of fresh air and exercise a day, I might not have made it.
     Ski season was the complete reverse.  The college awarded bonafide freshman numeral and varsity letters in skiing, but the ski team was as scruffy and poorly-coached as any college-level varsity ever was or could be.  Here, I and another freshman were the only skiers with competitive experience.  The coach, who didn't know how to ski, coached soccer and lacrosse in fall and spring but had to do something in winter too and so get stuck with skiing.  He let us coach ourselves and gave us athletic department funds for our trips to ski meets.  He never went with us.
     That was fine with me.  Having survived my first semester, I was more than ready for the unsupervised, multi-day, all-expense-paid trips, in a college van we ourselves drove, to major ski areas for slalom and downhill meets with a dozen other south-of-the-snowbelt colleges and universities.
     In college skiing, I was a whale in a puddle, whereas in college football, I was a tadpole in an ocean.  I didn't play enough football as a freshman to earn numerals but came out anyway sophomore year as a walk-on and had the satisfaction of getting invited back for pre-season camp junior year.  After playing a few minutes in a couple of games that fall I quit, convinced I'd done what I could for football.  In skiing, on the other hand, I lettered every year, was co-captain my junior and senior year, but as usual never won a race.
     All in all, given my rural background and modest athletic talents, I got as much from formal competition as I needed, and I remember my varsity career fondly.  But of far greater importance to my physical and mental well-being in the long run were the informal sports I've played and the other kinds of exercise I've gotten since.
     Beginning with those games in the Vermont hayfields, I played pickup softball in high school, college, and graduate school.  I also played squash and tennis at various times, though neither was a favorite.  In college I began playing pickup basketball and continued through graduate school and into my teaching career, where I played noon basketball with students and colleagues until finally I had to acknowledge that, though I much enjoyed trying to play it, basketball just wasn't my game.  Far different was the golf my uncle introduced me to in San Diego when I was fifteen, taking me often to the Torrey Pines course in La Jolla before it became the golf mecca it now is.  Back then, we played Torrey Pines for five bucks a round.  I still play public courses regularly (I've always been strictly a blue-collar golfer) and still much prefer walking to riding.
     Because competitive skiing requires lots of running to get and stay in shape, I became a regular jogger, though I had to give it up in my sixties because of blown hips.  But I can still walk and do so once or twice a week for an hour at four miles per.  I like biking too and ride both my bicycles often.
     But the core of the physical exercise I get these days is an hour-and-a-half workout I do several times a week in my retirement community gym.  This workout takes priority over all my other exercise, meaning I arrange walking, biking, and golfing around it.  One of its advantages is that it's indoors and hence weather-free.  Another is that the gym is beside the indoor pool and hot tub, where I spend ten minutes after every workout massaging my muscles and joints in the water jets.
     Many people think that seventy-five-year-olds like me are past working out seriously.  To dispute that and to encourage all oldsters (and youngsters), male and female, to keep as physically fit as possible, let me describe my workout routine.  It begins with a thirty-minute aerobic warmup on an ellipitical machine that gradually raises my heartrate from 120 to 160 and leaves me soaked with sweat.  Since the rule of thumb for maximum heartrate is 225 minus your age, my 160 is about ten beats a minute more than the 150 I should in theory limit myself to, but the gym supervisor says it's ok.  I hope he's right.
     Next, thirty minutes of stretching and flexibility work.  I begin with thirty seconds of shin-splint stretching, one minute of standing ankle holds, and three minutes of hamstring, back, arm, and neck stretches.  Then I do thirty sideward stepups with each foor and firty more frontward.  After that, I hoist two seven-pound weights from shoulder level thirty times and then stretch back and shoulder muscles for another thirty seconds.
     I continue with a hundred and fifty slipsteps against a rubber hose around my ankles, plus two squeezes per step on a tennis ball.  Then come five more minutes of back, arm, and neck stretches, followed by ten minutes of leg lifts, ab crunches, and other drills on a lie-down bench.  After one more minute of standing hamstring stretches and a minute of balancing on each foot, I'm ready for a concluding thirty minutes of strength work with weights.
     I begin with thirty curls of each arm using a twenty-pound barbell, continue with forty leg extensions at 450 pounds (all the weight machines are Keiser pneumatics), twenty arm pulldowns at 120 pounds, forty leg abductions (twenty per leg) at 25 pounds, and twenty seated pushouts at 120 pounds.  After an additional twenty leg extensions at 115 pounds, twenty seated pullbacks at 110 pounds, and twenty leg curls at 115 pounds, I end by first repeating the five minutes of post-elliptical stretching and then climbing up and down the six-floor stairwell next to the gym.  By then I'm more than ready for the ten minutes in the water jets.
     To many seventy-five-year-olds, this kind of workout will seem like Dantean torture.  To others, it'll seem like nothing.  The great thing about physical exercise is how relative it is.  What's hard for you may be easy for me, and vice versa.  The point isn't how well we score on some prowess scale but how much personal satisfaction we get.  Fitness and sports have not only always helped me work off steam but, since I thought my way to materialism three decades ago, helped me philosophically too.
     Now I see them as another of my favorite daily routines and rituals, like reading the morning newspapers, eating dinner and watching the evening news with my Lebensgefaehrtin, writing my blog, or doing household tasks and errands, that have made religious/spiritual routines and rituals like praying, thanking god, going to church, or trying to commune with dead relatives seem utterly needless and pointless to me.  I'm not referring here to pondering the ultimate source, nature, or meaning of human existence, which I do all the time independent of anything else.  I ponder ultimates because I have no proven knowledge of the final source, nature, or point of whatever it is I am.  Ultimate reality's a burdensome, compelling mystery I can never free myself from, so all I can hope to do is infer or extrapolate what it may be from the proven knowledge I do have of the finite cosmos I actually inhabit.
     Fitness and sports are part of this proven cosmic knowledge.  I can scarcely imagine what meta-spacetime reality could be, but I know perfectly well what the thirtieth of my fifty situps or an extra half-pound of pressure on my leg abduction feels like.  I cannot fathom the irrational chaos of the All,  but I know to a hair when to drop down a gear on my bike or how well or poorly I've just hit a golf ball.  Such personal, human facts greatly comfort and console me in the infinitely impersonal and inhuman mysteries  surrounding me.
     In other words, working out and walking, biking, and golfing help keep me mentally as well as physically sane.  They're as therapeutic for me as any daily routine I do.  I look forward to them, I enjoy doing them, and I remember them pleasurably.  They stimulate my zest for living.
     Whatever competitive bite they have stems from self-competition, though workouts, bike rides, and walks offer less of this than golf, where odious self-comparison never stops rearing its ugly head.  But for real man-to-man (or woman-to-woman) competition, I nowadays depend entirely on spectator sports, mainly on television.  I love watching football, baseball, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, golf,  tennis, and skiing on TV and, now and then, less commercial sports like lacrosse, swimming, track and field, or volleyball.
     But I'm a world-class fair-weather fan.  So long as a team's winning, I root for it, but if it loses too often I tune it out till it starts winning again.  Such fickleness may stem from my being by nature more athletically competitive than gifted -- I've always hated losing any competitive sport I've played.  The beauty of watching rather than competing is that losing's never your fault and can be assuaged by switching your loyalties to a winning team.  It can also help you maintain perspective on sports in general.

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CONSOLATION FIFTEEN: "THE GREY"

     This month I discovered a terrific follow-up subject to my last five posts -- three on Zest for Living and two on Solace for Dying.  It's the new movie "The Grey," starring Liam Neeson as an oil-company marksman named John Ottway.  In it, a plane carrying him and several dozen fellow workers to Anchorage from an arctic drilling site crashes in the mid-winter Alaska wilderness.  Those who survive the crash succumb one-by-one to the elements and to a pack of wolves, leaving Ottway at the end to face the pack and its alpha male alone.
     Three of the primary themes I discussed in the five posts are central to the film.  Foremost is the non-humanness of nature and its essential alienness to human civilization.  Second is the tragic riddle of human mortality:  why must we live and die?  Finally, when and under what circumstances does the human instinct to live give way to an acceptance of death?  Though flawed in minor ways, the film as a whole masterfully weaves the three themes into its narrative of a catastrophe.
     It begins at night with Ottway entering a company rec center with a neon cross by the door advertising a chapel somewhere inside.  What actually greets him is a bar full of brawling drunks behaving as anything but civilized Christians.  Ignoring the bedlam, he silently drinks while describing in glum voiceover what a bunch of louts and losers he and they all are.
     This initial hint of a chasm between civilization and wildness in the men themselves is underscored by the frigid weather.  As they embark later that night on the disastrous flight, the workers shiver inside their arctic gear, beards flecked with ice.  An airline employee barks at them to hurry up so the de-icing will last through takeoff.  Hours later, after earlier hitting some turbulence, the plane suddenly starts disintegrating and plunging earthward.  Ottway manges to double-belt himself to his seat before trees rush by below him in the morning light.  With a boom the screen goes blank.
     He wakes up face-down in an empty field of wind-blown snow.  Staggering to his feet, hands and feet caked with snow, he peers around stupefied.  This early scene and the crash sequence leading to it dramatize with stunning force and realism the vulnerability of human beings to raw nature.  Though many hardships await Ottway, none is more random and inhuman than this.  The only civilization he has left are the clothes he's wearing.
     Stumbling to the top of a nearby drift, he sees the wreckage of the plane and runs towards someone inside it yelling for help.  Eight men somehow survive, one with a fatal chest wound.  As the others watch in stricken silence, Ottway calmly tells him he's going to die and should let it "slide over" and warm him.  He tells him to choose death and let those "you love take you away."  Almost immediately the man does die, and one of the other men cries out in horror, "Did he just fucking die!?"  Ottway says they'll all die if they don't work together fast.  His demand for teamwork is another sign of the no-nonsense compassion he's just shown the dying man.
     His fitness to lead them is proven that night.  He hears a noise beyond the light of their fire and finds a dead stewardess being eaten by a wolf, which attacks him and retreats after a vicious fight.  The other men are dressing Ottway's wounds when they hear a new noise.  They warily investigate, and a huge, grey-black wolf steps into the light of their torches.  The eyes of other wolves gleam from the dark.  Realizing it's the pack's alpha male, Ottway tell the men to hold their ground.  Eventually the alpha turns and leads the other wolves away.  Ottway's company job is to kill wolves at the work-site, and he explains their territoriality and their hostility to anything that invades their den area.
     For the rest of the film, the wolves are the main threat.  Next morning, the men discover the body of the man who was standing watch ripped to pieces.  Telling them they should leave the plane at once for the cover of woods some miles away, Ottway first has them collect wallets from the corpses for their families.  Then someone else suggests offering an impromptu prayer.  Only a cynical, anti-social ex-con, tongue-lashed by Ottway for stealing from a wallet, refuses to cooperate.  Parallelling the wolves' deference to their alpha male, all of the men but the ex-con defer to Ottway.
     They set out for the forest in a blizzard.  As they plod on, one man straggles a few yards behind and is instantly killed by stalking wolves.  These are driven away, but as the men approach the woods that afternoon they're attacked from behind by more stalkers trying to catch them in the open.  Piling pellmell into the trees, they frantically light a fire to keep the wolves, barking and snarling on every side, at bay.  Then Ottway has them fashion "bangsticks" from spears capped with shotgun shells he's scavenged from the wreck.
     The ex-con ridicules and rejects everything Ottway orders.  Finally Ottway stares at him and says, "I understand.  You're scared."  This the ex-con hotly denies, and Ottway says, "Really?  I'm terrified."  The ex-con says, "That's because you're a punk" and threatens him with a knife.  Overpowering him, Ottway commands him to stop his "bullshit."
     Suddenly the alpha wolf appears, glares at them, and withdraws.  The ex-con, shaken by Ottway and the alpha, recants, apologizes, and gets to work on a bangstick.  Soon another wolf appears.  Ottway identifies him as an omega-outcast, sent by the the alpha to test them, and leads a successful battle to kill him.  To demoralize the watching pack, the men cook and eat the carcass and throw its head back into the woods.  This triumph cheers them into discussing the mortal dangers they've survived and still face.  One says there must be a divine plan behind it all, but the now-sympathetic ex-con dismisses that idea as a "fairy tale" and says its all "luck" when you live and "nothing" when you die.  Ottway agrees, saying he believes only what's "real," like his frozen breath.  When someone challenges his lack of "faith," Ottway retorts, "I only believe what I can see and feel."
     Worried they're too exposed, Ottway leads the men at once to rocks where the wolves can attack from just one side.  Here they continue their cheerful talk.  The funniest comes from the ex-con, who says he's determined to stay alive for more fucking because his last was with a whore so ugly he refuses to die on such an awful note.  Another man says his daughter lets nobody but him cut her hair.  Ottway describes his hard-boiled yet poetical Irish-Catholic father, who wrote and framed a short poem with the opening and closing lines, "Once more into the fray,/ To live and die on this day."
     Suddenly the only black man among them starts hallucinating, and they bed him into the snow for the night.  Next morning they wake up to another blizzard.  Unable to rouse the black man, Ottway doesn't want to acknowledge he's dead, showing how determined he is to try to save everyone.  He gets encouragement from a nearby tree stump left by loggers.  The sound of rushing water in the distance stirs hopes of finding a logging camp downstream.
     The've gone a short way towards the sound when they reach the top of a sheer, hundred-foot cliff extending straight across their path as far as the eye can see.  The only way down is for someone to jump from the cliff into treetops twenty feet away with an improvised rope that the others can then cross on.  After that they'll climb down the trees to the ground.
     The episode struck me as the film's weakest.  Mimicking the superhero stunts that currently trivialize so many action movies, it comes off mostly as melodrama.  After the leaper makes it, one of the others breaks through snow at the top of the cliff and is barely caught by someone else who also almost falls.  This kind of triteness is worsened by the cheesiness of the computer-generated cliff, the only phony special effect of its kind in the film.
     This is not to say the episode isn't exciting or nerve-wracking, just that it needn't have been so hyperbolic and full of cliches.  When in a panic the last man to cross breaks the rope, swings helplessly into the trees, falls through branches, and hits the ground on his back with a sickening thud, the effect is shattering.  He's lying in shock, hallucinating that his daughter's with him, when he's killed and dragged away by wolves.
     Scrambling down to help, the ex-con falls and critically injures his knee.  Realizing the wolves can somehow navigate the cliff, they hurry toward the river, the ex-con hobbling behind.  At the river's edge the ex-con stops and refuses the others' pleas to keep going.  He says he;s just had the "clearest thought" of his life, which is that he's too tired to take another step and will die here.  He asks Ottway if death will slide over and warm him, and Ottway, himself exhausted, reluctantly answers, "Yes."
     I found this the film's most powerful scene emotionally.  The man who earlier mocked everyone for following Ottway and who denied fear, now seeks and gets Ottway's approval for choosing to die.  He asks the others why he'd ever want to return to his drunken, oil-rig life when he's had "this," motioning at mountains forested with snow-covered trees in the distance.  Ottway and the other remaining survivor, named Pete, try to dissuade him but can't.  As a final token of comradeship they shake hands and tell each other their first names.  They also accept his wallet.  When they've gone, the ec-con faces the mountains and whispers, "I'm afraid."
     This is similar to what Ottway's wife says in a recurring dream or flashback he has of one of their last moments together, facing each other in bed.  But she murmurs, "Don't be afraid."  Ottway first has the flashback in his barracks before the flight while tearfully writing her some kind of farewell letter that concludes, "I'm past doing any good to the world."  After he and Pete leave the ex-con and trudge downriver, Pete says that the look on the ex-con's face was like the one he'd seen on Ottway's just before Ottway left the bar the night of the flight.  What Pete doesn't know is that Ottway left the bar to kill himself.  We know, because we saw Ottway put a rifle in his mouth and reach for the trigger, stopping only when he heard wolves howling in the distance.  We also know he brought the letter to his wife on the flight, retrieved it from the wreckage, and still has it.  Pete asks him why he left the bar, suspecting he meant to commit suicide.  Ottway answers, "It really doesn't matter now, does it?"
     The conversation's interrupted by two wolves who start chasing them along the riverbank.  Pete falls into rapids and is swept away, Ottway running alongside and yelling at him to hang on.  Then Ottway jumps in too, and they both bob wildly down the torrent.  Suddenly Pete's foot wedges in a rock.  Ottway tries to save him, but Pete's too panicked.  He drowns.
     Ottway drags himself out of the water and sits down in the snow.  In the film's intellectual climax, he stares up into a blank, grey sky and cries, "If I ever needed you, I need you now!  Show me something real, do something real for me, and I'll believe in you for the rest of my life!"  Nothing happens.  After waiting a few more seconds, he mutters derisively, "I'd rather do it myself anyway," and gets up.
     He has, out of supreme need and misery, asked the universe to care about and help him the way he's been caring about and helping those who've died since the crash.  Getting no response, he concludes that his empirical materialism (he'd never use those words) is best after all.  He is, like the ex-con, finally ready for the death he's been trying so hard -- and vainly -- to save other from and that he himself rejected two nights earlier.
     He strips himself of his outer clothing and everything else but the bag of wallets, walks into the woods, and kneels down to kill himself, probably with his knife.  After looking at their photos of girlfriends, children, and wives, including his own, he tearfully stacks the wallets into a sort of shrine, laying his and the letter to his wife on top.  It's his final affirmation of a human lovingness alien to the immense wilderness around him.
     He also has a final flashback of his wife saying, "Don't be afraid," but this time we see her medical drip.  She's dying and either consoling him for that or else hallucinatorily consoling him in his present ordeal.  Either way, it helps explain his jadedness when the film opens, why he has such a strange job, and why he tries to kill himself: -- he's still mourning her so desperately that he writes her a suicide note beginning, "Dearest one, I've been meaning to write you for a long time."
     He suddenly becomes aware of wolves around him.  Standing up, he sees he's in the middle of their den.  This final twist annoyed me with its echoes of the heavy-handed determinism of novelists like Thomas Hardy and Jack London.  Their worldview, premised on Newtonian physics, has long since been superseded by quantum indeterminism.  To this point, the film dramatizes the modern, indeterminate worldview well, even in its title hinting at the ambiguity and "greyness" of the natural order.  But in trapping Ottway in the irony of reaching the very destination he most wants to avoid, it carelessly implies that nature's a Newtonian machine.
     That said, the final scene also deftly ties together the film's three main themes.  Confronted by the alpha and ringed by his pack, Ottway knows he's going to be killed by  ruthless wildness.  But he's also affirmed his doctrine of material proof as the right answer for him to the riddle of mortality, and he chooses to die, not passively like the ex-con, but by fighting for his life, as he has throughout, to the bitter end.
     He breaks three small bottles of liquor and grips them in the fingers of his left hand and his knife in his right hand.  Facing the alpha, he recites his father's poem about living and dying on this day.  With a flash of grey and a boom like that of the plane crash, the screen goes blank and the credits roll.  This time Ottway will not wake up.
     "The Grey" is a tragic and, despite some adolescent gimmicks, uncompromisingly intelligent and mature film.  Its  portrayal of human confusion, death, and vulnerability in face of an inhuman irrationality and violence is unusually grim.
     Yet beneath the grimness is an affirmation of human courage, dedication, and compassion that will touch all thoughtful and sensitive men and women, no matter what their worldview is.  Ottway is deeply skeptical, of course, but his is an agnosticism of the best kind.  He's open to every possibility, demanding only reasonably solid evidence for claims to truth.  And he clearly cares about other people and dearly loves his wife, perhaps too much.
     He even sympathizes with the wolves he kills.  This is reinforced at the end of the closing credits by a quick shot of the alpha male lying on his side mortally wounded, heaving final breaths like those of a dying wolf Ottway had earlier shot and laid a comforting hand on.  This time Ottway's dead too.  But if he could, he'd comfort this one too.
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CONSOLATION FOURTEEN: SOLACE FOR DYING (2)

     In my last post I stressed the human cost of dying.  I said that the abhorrence of it we human beings feel in every fiber of our being was engrained in us by billions of years of evolution.  Contradicting this instinctive abhorrence is our rational knowledge of death's certainty, leaving us trapped in a tragic riddle:  why are we born and why do we die?
     I argued that no humanly satisfying answer to the riddle exists, because the All that created us is non-human.  It consists finally of a material substance whose infinite potential, indeterminateness, and unpredictability somehow transforms itself into finite matter.  At least in this cosmos, and despite its basic irrationality, this finite matter has acquired the chaotic orderliness of our space, time, gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces.  Humanity emerged from the random interaction of such lawless laws.
     I said that none of this makes human sense.  The origins and ends of the cosmos are an impenetrable mystery.  Human life is often so bizarre and farcical that dying seems like its appropriately absurd punchline.  Sooner or later most people sense both this absurdity and how alien death is to them.  It negates everything they've hoped and lived for and forever extinguishes their zest for life.
     This was my last, downbeat post.  In contrast, today's upbeat post affirms the availability of solace for dying even to people like me, who believe that nothing survives human death but leftover chemicals.  It also affirms that such solace is sufficient compensation for our mortality.  Atheism's three bedrock principles -- realism, rationality, and moderation -- helped me arrive at these affirmations, but many other people, especially theists, probably won't find them useful.  That's cool.  We all have to find our own solace for dying, and whatever works for you is fine with me.
     Mine rests on the assumption that when I die I'll fall into a deeper sleep than I've ever had, like the oblivion I was in before my parents' genes shaped me.  I'll know nothing and feel nothing.  I'll be at perfect rest, as void of sentience as the pebbles of the neighborhood path where I walk.  I'll share their stony indifference to sunlight and moonlight, ice and fire, the smell of saltwater marsh or of mountaintop spruce.  I'll exist only as inorganic matter no more aware than those pebbles are of anything else in the All.
     In this state of oblivion, I'll obviously have no conscious afterlife.  Unlike Hamlet, who fears "the rub" of being able as a corpse "to dream," I take as proven fact (see for example Sebastian Seung's new book Connectome) that my brain is powered by electrochemical currents that will end as permanently at my death as those of a dead car battery.  Empirical evidence has convinced me I have no supernatural soul or spirit and that my personality, selfhood, imagination, feelings, and thoughts are material objects produced by my neuronal and synaptic brain circuitry.  I contain no supernatural or immaterial ingredients whatsoever -- no transcendental flours, ineffable sugars, or sacred salts.
     Nor will I have to endure any postdeath sensation, consciousness, or other psychic grotesquerie.  Since I regard all such claims of death-survival as human fictions, they don't attract, theaten, inspire, or interest me except as literary devices.  I like good sci-fi, ghost, and angel-demon yarns, not because I think they're real but because they amuse, entertain, even move me.  This willing suspension of disbelief is as useful to today's poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and fellow artists as it was to Homer and Michelangelo.  Unfortunately, it's also useful to religious zealots and con-men bent on persuading people, who should know better from the available evidence, that their "souls" or "spirits" are immortal.  As W.C. Fields said, a sucker's born a minute -- and no religionist will ever give her a break.
     But if my belief that dying leads to a peace past all understanding helps compensate me for my death sentence, my luck in having been able to see, know, and to some extent comprehend the wilderness around me and to share it with other human beings compensates me even more.  I've elsewhere in this blog explained my use of the word "wilderness" as denoting everything that did, does, and will exist in our cosmos.  It refers to all the spacetime events and processes precipitated by the Big Bang, which in turn precipitated me.  It also connotes my sense of cosmic grandeur, beauty, and indifference.  I know I'm as much the offspring of the wilderness as I was of my parents.  But unlike my parents, it neither cares for me nor in any way reciprocates what I feel for it.
     Yet I sincerely love it and the bonus of living, thinking, and feeling that it's unwittingly given me.  On balance, I would much rather have lived the life I have lived and endured the death I will endure than not to have lived or died at all.  To those who question whether the pleasure of human existence is worth the pain of losing (or living) it, my answer is, It most certainly is.  To have experienced sunlit or snowy days, moonlit or rainy nights, the morning sounds of birds, the tastes of fresh fruit, and the smells of new-cut fields has been enough for me.
     Moreover, I've also had the chance to interact with other human beings.  Granted, many of these interactions have been disappointing.  But no one I've ever encountered has been truly vicious or life-threatening (I've been lucky), and though my wife and I were divorced after thirty years, our marriage gave us two children I prize as best friends.  My wife and I still keep in touch.
     My best friend is the life partner I met eight months after my wife and I separated.  We'd been high school sweethearts who hadn't seen each other in thirty years.  Then in the late 1980s, a couple of years after her husband died of a brain tumor in Baltimore, she read in our high school alumni magazine that I lived nearby and contacted me.  We've been together since.
     But many other boyhood, high school, college, graduate school, teaching-career, and retirement friends have brightened my life too.  And some of my most durable friendships have been with people like Gaius Lucretius, Philip Freneau, Herman Melville, and John Updike, who introduced themselves to me solely in print.  The web of sympathy, help, and knowledge these and countless other "strangers" have been weaving for me for thousands of years much consoles me for having to die.
     A final kind of solace I feels flows less from the fact that life is good than from the fact that dying's not so bad.  Personal experience with scores of terminal patients during the past fourteen months has taught me that, with good medical care, no one needs to fear major discomfort, much less agony, when they die.  Once a week I volunteer a six-hour shift with hospice patients at the extreme end of life.  Few of these so-called "actively dying" patients show much sign of pain, agitation, or restlessness, and if they do I summon help.  A nurse then gives them whatever pain-killer, anti-coagulant, relaxant, or other medicine they may need.  Sometimes the problem is positioning in the bed or reflex muscle motion.  Many of my patients sleep the whole time I'm there.
     In the past year, I've been alone with four who have died.  None of these showed any perturbation, alarm, or pain.  Two gradually stopped breathing, one slightly opening her eyelids after a final breath, the other breathing a few bubbles of saliva onto her lips.  The other two died so quietly I didn't even notice.  One must have died when she was being repositioned by two aides, because neither the aides nor I saw she was dead until they'd left and, looking at her closely, I saw she wasn't breathing.  The other died while I was reading to myself next to his bed.  Though as always I was glancing up every fifteen or twenty seconds to see, and keeping an ear cocked to hear, whether his breathing had changed, I never saw or heard it stop.  He died without a sound or movement.
     I consider this kind of death the best a person can have.  The worst is to die in an agony caused by physical violence or disease without medical help.  In between are of course many others, one of which is life's becoming the enemy and death the friend.  I have no idea whether Freud's death-wish theory is true, but I do know several people who want to die.  One's a 101-year-old who's been in hospice for years and who cheerfully tells me every time I see him that he's tired of life and wants it to end.  Another is a 93-year-old who worries she'll use up all her money and not have enough to support herself, much less leave her heirs, before she dies.
     I'm sure many other, younger people want to have done with it too.  I myself, at age seventy-five, feel my life's already been satisfying enough not to need anything more to make it worthwhile -- and I'm still fit (despite recent medical problems), clear-headed, and jolly enough to enjoy being alive.  On the other hand, people who suffer grinding pain, hopeless disappointment or failure, or abject poverty may find more solace for dying in death itself than in my kind of satisfaction with life.  To them, dying may be a welcome release from the torment of living.
     This leads to a final question:   Should we try to control death by timing it?  I think all reasonable people would like to know in advance, at least roughly, when they will die.  I for one hope to die well before I fall apart physically or metally.  I and many other people don't want to be profoundly debilitated in old age.  We'd rather, like the sufferers in the last paragraph, find our solace for dying in literally dying.  We feel our lives might become so diminished that dying would be the better alternative.  Unlike the voice-over narrator in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, who at one point says that "the dead know only one thing -- it's better to be alive,"  we say that the dead's utter obliviousness to such nonsense and their freedom from misery rightly makes them attractive role models to many people.
     The only way I know of to try to time death is either to refuse medical treatment for a mortal illness or injury or to commit suicide.  While I plan to ponder the first option carefully when and if the time comes,  I plan never to do the second, mainly because my own father's suicide would make mine seem like an Ernest Hemingway-like imitation.  I simply will not burden my own children with that.
     But in general, and with the standard caveats against rashness, immaturity, treatable depression, abandonment of dependents, botched attempts, killing yourself to kill others, and the like, I respect suicide as a last resort for anyone whose life has become intolerable.  I see it as a genuinely inalienable right, not because a higher power says it is but because it's available to almost anyone who needs it and is willing to pay the physical price it can cost.  Its availability and permanence (if successful) makes it, oddly enough, a sort of sure-fire solace for dying to anyone determined to control his own death by causing it.
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CONSOLATION THIRTEEN: SOLACE FOR DYING (1)

     My last three posts were easy to write.  They explained humanity's zest for living as an evolutionary freak that made human beings cravers of life and sex and high-level reasoners and fantasizers.  Evolution has hardwired us to love life, not death.  Finding genuine solace for dying is hard.
     Some think it's impossible.  Dying is so contrary to what most people want that a vast majority of the earth's population denies, ignores, and euphemizes it.  All the major religions preach some type of immortality.  Most people who say they believe in a god without belonging to a church usually claim to believe in life after death, as do many agnostics and skeptics, among them the composer Brahms.  Omitting direct reference to Christianity from his Requiem, Brahms nonetheless avows immortality throughout the work as humanity's only real compensation for dying.
     The human wish to hide and soften death is equally understandable.  From mashed and bloody roadkill seen through a car window to the stench of an unseen carcass in the woods hitting your nose like a fist, it can be ugly.  Slaughterhouses aren't for the weak of heart or stomach.  Nor are the institutions that process human remains -- morgues, mortuaries, medical schools, and the like.  Little wonder dead animals in general and dead human beings in particular are so rarely seen.  Seeing them can be shocking to those who don't handle them professionally or kill them for sport or a living.  Euphemisms like"passed on" or "passed away" counteract our instinctive recoil from imagining ourselves as rotting cadavers or being eaten alive.
     Such denials and evasions mirror a tragic contradiction at the heart of human existence.  We're born with instincts that drive us toward life and away from death.  We yearn to live, yet all our experience of the world teaches us we unfailingly die.
     The contradiction is intractable.  Though religionists claim to have found supernatural answers to it, they've in fact found only human fraudulence, self-deception, and craziness.  Their so-called revelations and miracles never withstand scientific scrutiny, which tells us instead that sentient intelligence is nothing but a random offshoot of insentient and unintelligent natural processes.
     These processes are, I believe, ultimately linked to an unpredictable and immeasurable substance or stuff at the core of reality.  This stuff or substance is an infinite potentiality capable of becoming countless kinds of finite matter by somehow transforming its potential into the chaotic lawfulness we see around us in our own cosmos.  In 6th century B.C.E. Greece, Heraclitus explained this chaotic lawfulness as the product of an endless flux of warring elements, an explanation that, while wonderfully insightful at the time, needs some updating.  Heraclitus' hard-matter universe of flux is today better imagined as an infinite, meta-dimensional energy field or reservoir that somehow unpredictably morphs itself into countless subsidiary kinds of finite matter.  It might be thought of as quantum uncertainty writ infinitely large.
     So alien to life in general and human thought and feeling in particular is this basic energy that human existence seems altogether incidental and insignificant in relation to it.  So far as we know, it in no way echoes or responds to human intelligence or emotion.  If this isn't discouraging enough, its infinite particularity or singularity also alienates us from one another.
     This is because all material reality is infinitely divisible.  No matter how far you burrow into smallness or expand into bigness, you never reach an end.  You never find a final, indivisible object.  There is always an infinity of additional particulars and singularities awaiting you, and they always have an inimitable and unrepeatable uniqueness no other material objects ever have.  They are all absolutely separate and different from each other, no matter where in the All they are and no matter what kind of dimensionality, compactness, diffuseness, monotonousness, or other feature they have.  What unites them is the basic substance they're made of.  And one of the key attributes of that substance, along with its infinite potentiality and unpredictability, is an infinite divisibility that entails uniqueness on every object it becomes.
     I say "entails" because the separateness of material objects from each other that follows from the infinite divisibility of ultimate matter is in my opinion an inescapable fact of existence.  Imagining the All, as I do, as a material stuff or substance whose potential to become subsidiary objects is infinite, yet which never itself objectifies, implies that every existing object is finally indefinable.
     This in turn implies not only that all material objects are radically separate from and alien to each other but that finally what they're made of and where they come from can't be fixed or specified.  All objects are totally alien to all other objects and have absolutely indeterminate origins.
     I find little solace for dying in these convincing (to me) speculations.  Unlike the All, human beings are instinctively affectionate.  They're capable of strong emotional attachments to each other and to pets, homes, nature, and countless other things.  Unlike inorganic objects, they can sense and comprehend the world around them, imagine fictional worlds, generate and reciprocate love.  Compelled to try to understand the workings and origins of nature, they've repeatedly explained it as the handiwork of deities onto whom they project their own capacity to think and feel.  While such explanations have been completely undermined by modern science, they're still at least partly believed in by most people and have an enormous impact on their notions of reality.  Most people persist in believing that the universe personally cares about them and their well-being.  They refuse to think of themselves as radically alienated objects in a material All made of some absolutely indefinable, uncaring stuff.
     Those of us who do think of ourselves in this way find living and dying in such cosmic -- and metacosmic -- isolation cold comfort at best.  I myself find it dubious luck to have been born, through no choice of my own, with a capacity to think and feel that I'll lose forever when I die.  I get little solace from knowing that the beauty and vibrancy of living will completely end with my death.  As Clint Eastwood puts it in The Unforgiven, when a man dies he loses "all he has and all he's ever going to have."
     Materialists have always acknowledged the harshness of human mortality.  Lucretius says he wrote De Rerum Natura in verse to help sweeten the bitterness of its doctrine of personal annihilation.  Even religious skeptics like Kierkegaard prefer leaps of faith to what they see as the existential horror of the Lucretian viewpoint.  Dostoevsky's rumination on the decapitated head that for an instant grasps what has happened to it before it dies has chilled everyone who's read it -- theists, agnostics, and atheists alike.
      I've had two close encounters with the Grim Reaper myself.  Since I narrate one of them at length in the "Wilderness" section of the May 19, 2011 post of this blog, I won't rehash it here except to say it's about the heart attack I had in 1995 hiking alone in the Sierra Nevadas.
     The other happened in the summer of 1951 when I was driving through rural upstate New York with my brother.  We were returning to school in New England from our first summer with our guardian aunt and uncle in San Diego after our mother's death the winter before.  Though only fifteen, I was an experienced driver and realized I had to slow for a hill I'd just started down in a light rain.  Touching the brakes, I felt the tires hydroplaning us into a long, horrible skid I couldn't control.  As we spun halfway round and began hurtling backwards down the two-lane road, I thought, So this is how I'll die.
     Along with fear, shock, and disbelief, I remember above all tensing for a huge, crushing blow.  Nothing flashed before my eyes but what was flashing by outside the car:  every nerve and muscle in me was too busy trying to protect itself from that pulverizing blow.  When suddenly I realized the car had spun all the way round and was again heading frontwards down the road, I fought without success to control it.  We bounced off the left shoulder down a steep bank onto somebody's back lawn, which the front bumper hit with a frame-springing jolt.  We sat a moment, dazed but unhurt.  The skid had slowed us almost to a stop before we went off the highway.
     Both of these near-death experiences showed me how little I want to die.  Like everything else in this post, they suggest how hard it is for most human beings to find much solace in their own destruction.  It can be even harder when close friends or relatives die, especially if they're one's own children.
     Yet I do think such solace is possible.  In my next post I'll explain why.
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requi

CONSOLATION TWELVE: ZEST FOR LIVING (3)

     In my last post, I argued that a zest for living is the strongest instinct terrestrial organisms have.  Reinforced by billions of years of evolution, it helps them survive long enough to mate and perpetuate the genetic advantages natural selection's given them over the course of countless generations.  It also helps blind them to their own mortality.
     But in human beings and perhaps other large-brained mammals like whales and elephants, the chance emergence of high-level intelligence has created a personal awareness of dying that runs counter to their survival instincts.  Though all human beings recoil naturally from their own extinction, many for example choosing to believe that the sensual/cognitive mechanisms they call "soul" or "spirit" are immaterial and immortal, atheists reject such notions,  insisting that human death is total and irreversible.
     In today's post I'll conclude my Zest for Living series by arguing not only that human self-awareness is a product of insentient nature but also that it both enhances and undermines our will to live.  Obviously, all organic brains on planet earth have always consisted of nothing but a vast number of several atomic elements, chiefly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.  Jumbled into more and more complex molecules by evolutionary process, these atoms eventually became self-enclosed, self-regulating biological systems able to sense the outside world.  As these sensing mechanisms got increasingly acute, neuronal circuitry to harness the information they fed their owners' brains got increasingly elaborate.  Currently, the most complex terrestrial product of the process has been the human brain.
     In other words, humanity's ability to apprehend, reason, imagine, fantasize, dream, sense, and so on emerged from chance combinations of atoms, each without a hint of any such ability.  Human percipience and cognition arose from the oblivion of atomic mass and energy and consists now of nothing but trillions of electrochemical events constantly occuring in the human brain, each as void of consciousness as a grain of sand.  The components of human intelligence are literally dumb as dirt.
     But while we're alive and our brains are working, we have a vibrant sense of being alive and conscious that may be utterly unlike anything in this or any other cosmos.  While the odds of human-like intelligence elsewhere in this cosmos seem high, given the billions of known galaxies and the billions of stars in each galaxy, there's no question that, even if intelligence has evolved elsewhere, it's as unique to each brain that manufactures it there as ours is here.
     Throughout these Zest for Living posts I've stressed this uniqueness, which I've also called particularity or singularity, as essential to cosmic objects and by extrapolation to the All.  I find it deeply consoling.  If the All's basic stuff is infinitely singular, a conclusion implied by the empirical evidence of our cosmos, every thing it constitutes is infinitely unique and original.  Every human life is as fresh and radiant as the entire cosmos but, unlike the cosmos, aware of being so -- another reason I love being alive.
     The assumption that at bottom the All is as insentient as the natural order of our own cosmos, and that sentience is its rare and accidental offshoot, diminishes neither kind of being.  It makes both more wonderful.  Though consciousness is inorganic matter fortuitously jumbled awake, it can change itself and its surroundings in amazing ways.  Rather than bemoaning the All's indifference to humanity, I cherish our great good luck in being able to experience and savor our human existence at all.
     A billion years before it evolved, human intelligence was foreshadowed by primitive forms of mentation that were already miracles of happenstance.  But with human intelligence a huge range of new realities materialized.  Though the brain of an early sea-creature could neuronally re-create its surroundings, it couldn't make tools or fantasize.  The human brain could.
     When and in what sequence human beings began making tools, fantasizing, communicating, and doing the things that require human brainpower isn't known.  But without an ability to communicate through sounds (speech) or markings (writing), they couldn't have reported real events or told made-up stories, though then as now fact and fiction often blurred.  Nor could they have created and maintained social, religious, political, and military systems of order.
     All such creativity depended on the communication of consciousness from brain to brain by one brain's putting its thoughts into some kind of symbolic code like spoken or written language, then a second brain's translating the code back into its own electrochemical impulses.  All communication consists of a constant translation of brain impulses into and out of coding systems.  No human thought or feeling ever exists except as a material brain event or as codified matter.
     Many philosophers dismiss the theory that human consciousness is streaming electrons as crudely reductionist.  They argue that the theory doesn't account for the creativeness and originality of what they call purely mental states of being.  I disagree.  Human thought and feeling are obviously generated by brain electricity, and accounting for them in this way is anything but crudely reductionist.  In the first place, more than a century of brain research has shown that all animal intelligence is so generated.  To deny or ignore this research and cling to exploded theories of immaterial mentation is like insisting the sun orbits the earth daily.
     A related claim is that yes, human consciousness consists of electrons but no, the thoughts and feelings it produces aren't the same thing as electrons.  Electrons can't know or feel, yet human brains throb with knowing and feeling.  To equate electrons with thought and feeling is both to mix apples and oranges and to deny that the brain creats a brand-new emergent reality out of electrons.
     While I agree that a thought or feeling is in some ways unlike an electron, I disagree they're fundamentally different.  Like an internal combustion made of individually impotent but collectively potent parts, the brain is made of countless neruonal circuits that organize electrons into doing what brains do.  Just as an engine is nothing but the sum of its parts, so too is a brain.  Without gas for the engine and electrochemistry for the brain, neither works.  No material system ever mysteriously transcends the sum of its parts.  The most basic part or component of reality is an unknown stuff or substance with an infinite potential to realize itself in new combinations.  The only difference between an engine and a brain is that one's a product of intelligent design and the other isn't.
     The newness, freshness, and originality of brain products is what I think the anti-reductionists are getting at in not wanting to "reduce" intelligence to electrical energy.  They don't want to lessen the uniqueness of the different stages of cosmic evolution or suggest that they were planned or pre-determined in any way.  Nor do I.  I too see every event in cosmic history s having a uniqueness that nothing else in the All has.  One of the most astounding and unlikely of these events was the evolution here on earth of the human brain.
     Human intelligence has created countless new realities, among them many interesting fictions about, and one solid factual explanation of, cosmic origins.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims have traditionally held that a single deity created heaven and earth is six days, populating it with fish and birds on day five and animals and a man and woman made in the deity's own image on day six, and then on day seven rested.  Though scores of other creation stories exist, they tend to echo this one's fictional charm and factual emptiness.  Very different is the scientific explanation know as the Big Bang theory.  It rests on centuries of experimental proof that gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces separated thirteen billion years ago in the Big Bang and now dominate cosmic mass and energy.
     All such mental creations are unique.  They're as fresh, new, and beautiful as my sense of winter sunlight or your sense of summer moonlight.  They can be as fearsome and unsettling as a sudden insight into one's own mortality, an insight most organisms are incapable of having.  Human existence is a uniquely unplanned and spontaneous product of the All, as are each of the molecules human beings are made of and each of the electrons that generate their thoughts and feelings.  To equate human consciousness with the electrons that cause it is not to crudely reduce it but to link it to the infinite worth of absolute material Being.  So seen, human life assumes an All-like gloriousness.
     But it's also perishable in a way the All's inhuman and oblivious fecundity is not.  The human joy of living and knowing ends in death.  No matter how it's rationalized, dying is a hard, hurtful fact of human existence.  Having a capacity to reason sequentially and to create original marvels like space travel, digital technology, and artificial intelligence has helped enhance our zest for living, to the point of making some of us want to postpone death by somehow replacing or renewing our aging minds and bodies.  Though I don't share this wish, I acknowledge the tragic underside of human life and its utter transience.  I know I must get myself emotionally and intellectually ready to die.
     In my next post I'll begin explaining how, as an aging materialist and atheist, I'm trying to do just that.
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