Human people are the youngest kind of people in the world; that’s why it’s important for us to listen and learn from every other kind of creature, because they’re all more experienced than we are, and they all know things that we don’t know. We are not, as it might seem, the only thinking and talking people.
Saint Francis had Clare. Abraham had Sarah. Adam had Eve. Well, that didn’t work out so well.
If you added up every holy bone that a knight has pulled from a dusty saddlebag, you’d deduce that Saint Peter had four legs and two heads. The cross must have been the size of three longships.
“Give him one of Ursula’s kneecaps.” There are half a dozen in the storeroom.
We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.
Something like 90 percent of people die of disease, a phenomenon so entrenched in human life that we attribute most such deaths to “natural causes.”
We tend to solve the problems we pay the most attention to
Dr. Alan Hart helped pioneer the use of chest X-rays to diagnose tuberculosis. Hart was married to a woman and practicing medicine in San Francisco in 1918 when he was outed as a trans man by a former colleague.
On my motorcycle, I had been treated with respect, often even with admiration and awe. I was invited to meals and welcomed everywhere in the country. But on foot, it was like I had lost my hero’s cape and gone back to just being a woman alone on the street, who had to be reminded of her place.
The most important point in the research, however, shows that those who do not fear death, for whatever reason, tend to exhibit behavior that is more benevolent, accepting of others, cooperative, and caring about the environment.
“Robert, when you see someone glued to a phone, you see a person ignoring this world—rather than a person engrossed in another world…a world that, like this one, is made up of communities, friends, beauty, horror, love, conflict, right and wrong. It’s all there. The online world is not so different from our world…except for one stark difference.” Katherine smiled. “It’s nonlocal.”
“Stop learning, start dying, ” I said seriously. “Why I’m a big believer in reading, any kind of reading, even reading pure wild fiction you learn about what someone else feels life is like. Get a different perspective than your own.”
“Seems to me a good man helps those who pass through his life. We all did that – help the folks that the winds of life blow through our own yard- the whole world would do a little better. I try to do that when I can. Right now I can do more than usual so, I will.”
Fitz studied me hard. “Even if other people don’t?”
“Other people do!” I said firmly. “There’s a world of damned decent people out there quietly doing good stuff. You don’t see much of it in the papers, on the news, probably not on the internet. Kindness doesn’t sell. Don’t mean it isn’t there.”
