[b]Valeria Luiselli
Although it might seem paradoxical, growing up in a family of liberal-minded atheists, committed but never militant, tends to have devastating consequences. Being raised without a rigid backdrop of religious, political, or spiritual beliefs makes it hard to have a real crises later in life. There is no way forward if your point of departure is the comfortable passivity of someone who has been a self-professed agnostic since the age of twelve, without ever having considered those important - one might say grave - matters, such as God, death, love, failure, or fear. For a precocious agnostic, the virtues offered by skepticism become terrifying hands that strangle and suffocate the already rare capacity of an individual to question things. Conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believe is open to doubt - stark, brutal doubt - can truly enjoy a profound crises that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better.[/b]
Let’s decide: Which is worse?
Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sanchez.
Anyone recall how Sanchez responded?
There’s nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects.
metonymy: a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated
So, what do you think?
But rereading is not like remembering. It’s more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of reinventing our past through the twice-underscored words written by others.
If she says so.
But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces—it’s also the first draft of a future face… In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future reading.
With my face, I skipped all that.
Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut.
Let’s file this one under, “strange peace is better than none…most times”.