Aging & Alternatives

“…A past where I sat at a workbench  at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake  learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard.  A gift for my mother.  I had never seen anyone use a lanyard.  Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them.  But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand  again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother.  She gave me life and milk from her breasts,  and I gave her a lanyard  She nursed me in many a sick room,  lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,  set cold facecloths on my forehead  then led me out into the airy light  and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard.  'Here are thousands of meals’ she said,  'and here is clothing and a good education.’  'And here is your lanyard,’ I replied,  'which I made with a little help from a counselor.’ ‘Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,  strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world.’ she whispered.  'And here,’ I said, 'is the lanyard I made at camp.’  'And here,’ I wish to say to her now,  'is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,  that you can never repay your mother,  but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands,  I was as sure as a boy could be  that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom  would be enough to make us even.’ ”

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” 

“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I’ve discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”

― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

Humans did indeed try to band together and survive by founding cities. The outcome when they did so was that they wronged each other, because they did not possess the art of politics, and so they would scatter and again be destroyed. 

Zeus was afraid the that our whole race (humans) might be wiped out, so he sent Hermes to bring justice and a sense of shame to humans, so that there would be order within cities and bonds of friendship to unite them. Hermes asked Zeus how he should distribute shame and justice to humans. “Should I distribute them as the other arts were? 

This is how the others were distributed: one person practicing the art of medicine suffices for many ordinary people; and so forth with the other practitioners. Should I establish justice and shame among humans in this way, or distribute it to all? 

“To all”, said Zeus, “and let all have a share”. For cities would never come to be if only a few possessed these, as in the case with other arts. And establish this law as coming from me: “DEATH TO HIM WHO CANNOT PARTAKE OF SHAME AND JUSTICE, FOR HE IS A PESTILENCE TO THE CITY.”