Privacy

Cogito ergo sum; coito ergo sum.

Post-lapsarian Man pays a terrible price for his short and nasty life: not just death, but the foreknowledge of his own death. And he passes the bill to his children for them to pay it too. Exiled, east of Eden, even unto the Land of Nod, man makes his children and their children pay the price of understanding. And he tries to cheat the price, claiming that this price is not the price he must pay but some other price, some deal is to be made, some escape clause that he'll deal with later-- but not yet!

Gilgamesh asks: "Must I too, like my friend, lay me down, never to rise again forever?"

Is our mortality ennobling, or does it just produce more dirt?

If we look at the world of man as he lived before the age of Modernity we'll see a world with very little privacy, a world in which men were little more than beasts to be used till they die, and then off to heaven with the soul of them, maybe. A man's private life, his individual reason for being, his inherent worth as who he is, was more or less not an issue. His own existence was not his own private possession. such today is the world of Islam. That has some genuine benefits, like having a reason unquestionable for living and dying, for having children, for existing at all.

We'll bury Cindy tomorrow, and who really cares? Cindy was maybe 50 or 25. It's hard to say. She used to scurry up and down the median on the street, screaming, spitting, pounding on cars that stopped for the traffic light, demanding money from those who had to stop. She was filthy, ugly, and generally disgusting. No one loved her, and we don't miss her. She died in the parking lot beside the diner. Connect the dots. She had scabby sores and running sores, and the scratches ran from one to another. But Cindy died as an individual person, free in her own way to live and die as a person in her own right.

Nearly 2000 years ago Jewish slaves died building the Latrun Road for the Romans. The Jews, slaves in Israel, died building a road for their conquerers. Nearly 2,000 years later that very Latrun Road saved Jersalem's Jews from annihilation during the War of Independence.

On average the meat wagon hauls away a body a day on our street here. Is there some reason for the lives of those who die like dogs? Ask in 2,000 years, friend.