January 14, 2020
Good morning.
I was
amused at our marvelous annual New Year's Eve dinner at the home of our friends
Joe & Genie Dixon. All of the company receives these episodic messages of
mine, and several expressed (mostly) mock dismay and alarm that I was
abandoning the second space following a period. A reflection of the continued
decline in writing standards, several maintained!
I defend my decision on the
grounds—repeated in hundreds of websites on writing—
that double spaces made sense when we used typewriters, with
a single font size, but with proportional fonts used in electronic composition,
the double space is no longer necessary. I have even browsed a few of the books
on my shelves as well as random websites and realized that I could read text
just as easily with a single space as with two. I finally conceded to myself
that using only a single space looks better. I just took a decade to catch up
with the rest of the world. Some of my friends still resist.
* * *
I didn't
mention it in my last epistle, because I didn't want to end the year on a sad
note, but early morning the last day of 2019 brought a message from a friend in
Australia reporting the death of a very-long-time friend and colleague, Marion
Freeman. Marion was, I believe, 97 years old (give or take a year). Marion and
Gordy's daughter married an Australian, so when they both retired from the
University, they moved to Australia to be near her and her husband. (Unfortunately, Gordy died shortly after they
moved there.) They lived in Mossman, in northwestern Australia, north of Port
Douglas, very near the jungles of northern Queensland. Pat and I took Elliott
to Australia in 2003 and stayed in Marion's guest house while we explored the
area.
I knew Marion from working with her
at the University of Minnesota decades ago; we became friends with Marion and
her husband Gordy, and they were one of the six original couples in a
six-couple bridge group started in 1978 that is still meeting today. My bridge
partner Ann Sonnesyn and I, and then later my wife Pat and I, spent many an
enjoyable evening playing bridge with Marion and Gordy. There might have been
an adult beverage involved.
Marion could have a snarky sense of
humor when she wanted to. In a world long gone, Marion was chairing a committee
meeting at the University that I happened to be attending as well. Someone
asked that she prohibit smoking at the meeting. She responded that she'd
prohibit smoking as long as everyone agreed to prohibit flatulence as well.
More generally, however, she and Gordy were extremely gracious hosts and the
meals were invariably outstanding.
Marion visited Minneapolis sometime
during the 2010s—perhaps 5-6 years ago, when she was 90 or close to it. (She
was in fine physical shape at that point.) We had a small gathering of her
friends and had a marvelous time. Even though I had only seen her twice in 20
years, I will miss her spritely sense of humor and warm personality.
* * *
Those of
you who received my printed annual letters may recall that sometimes I would
intersperse quotes from selected writers between my entries (e.g., Oscar Wilde,
Dorothy Parker, Ambrose Bierce). That practice doesn't work as well in these
shorter missives. What I've recently been doing, however, is posting brief
excerpts from Bill Bryson's most recent book, The Body: A Manual for
Occupants on my Facebook page. So those of you who are Facebook friends can
skip the following paragraphs. Bryson's book is great and I heartily recommend
it.
Bryson: "Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion
(that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make
you. No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent
desire to be you. They are mindless particles, after all, without a single
thought or notion between them. Yet somehow for the length of your existence,
they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary
to keep you humming, to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you
enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life."
Bryson: "In the second or so since you started this
sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells. They are already
speeding around you, coursing through your veins, keeping you alive. Each of
those red blood cells will rattle around you about 150,000 times, repeatedly
delivering oxygen to your cells, and then, battered and useless, will present
itself to other cells to be quietly killed off for the greater good of
you."
Bryson: "Unpacked, you are positively enormous. Your
lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them
would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels
would take you two and a half times around Earth. The most remarkable part of
all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into
every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into
a single strand, it would stretch 10 billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of
it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most
literal sense cosmic."
Bryson: "And how do we celebrate the glory of our
existence? Well, for most of us by eating maximally and exercising minimally.
Think of all the junk you throw down your throat and how much of your life is
spent sprawled in a near-vegetative state in front of a glowing screen. Yet in
some kind and miraculous way our bodies look after us, extract nutrients from
the miscellaneous foodstuffs we push into our faces, and somehow hold us
together, generally at a pretty high level for decades. Suicide by lifestyle
takes decades.
"Even when you do nearly
everything wrong, your body maintains and preserves you. Most of us are
testament to that in one way or another. Five out of six smokers won't get lung
cancer. Most of the people who are prime candidates for heart attacks don't get
heart attacks. Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your
cells turns cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of
that. A couple of dozen times a week, well over a thousand times a year, you
get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you. Of
course, very occasionally a cancer develops into something more serious and possibly
kills you, but overall cancers are rare: most cells in the body replicate
billions and billions of times without going wrong. Cancer may be a common
cause of death, but it is not a common event in life."
Bryson: "It may be slightly surprising to think it, but
our skin is our largest organ, and possibly the most versatile. It keeps our
insides in and bad things out, it cushions blows, it gives us our sense of
touch, bringing us pleasure and warmth and pain and nearly everything else that
makes us vital. It produces melanin to shield us from the sun's rays. It
repairs itself when we abuse it. It accounts for such beauty as we can muster.
It looks after us.
"The skin consists of an inner
layer called the dermis and an outer epidermis. The outermost surface of the
epidermis, called the stratum corneum, is made up entirely of dead cells. It is
an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body
meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every
month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly; some twenty-five thousand
flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty
shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your
former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust."
Bryson: "Nobody knows for sure how many holes you have
in your skin, but you are pretty seriously perforated. Most estimates suggest
you have somewhere in the region of two to five million hair follicles and
perhaps twice that number of sweat glands. The follicles do double duty: they
sprout hairs and secrete sebum (from sebaceous glands), which mixes with sweat
to form an oily layer on the surface. This helps to keep skin supple and to
make it inhospitable for many foreign organisms. Sometimes the pores become
blocked with little plugs of dead skin and dried sebum in what is known as a
blackhead. If the follicle additionally becomes infected and inflamed, the
result is the adolescent dread known as a pimple. Pimples plague young people
simply because their sebaceous glands—like all their glands—are highly active.
When the condition becomes chronic, the result is acne. . . .
"Also packed into the dermis
are a variety of receptors that keep us literally in touch with the world. If a
breeze plays lightly on your cheek, it is your Meissner's corpuscles that let
you know. When you put your hand on a hot plate, your Ruffini corpuscles cry
out. Merkel cells respond to constant pressure, Pacinian corpuscles to
vibration.
"Meissner's corpuscles are
everyone's favorites. They detect light touch and are particularly abundant in
our erogenous zones and other areas of heightened sensitivity: fingertips,
lips, tongue, clitoris, penis, and so on. . . .
"All are exquisitely
fine-tuned to let you feel the world. A Pacinian corpuscle can detect a
movement as slight as 0.00001 millimeter, which is practically no movement at
all. . . . Curiously, we don't have any receptors for wetness. We have only
thermal sensors to guide us, which is why when you sit down on a wet spot, you
generally can't tell whether it is really wet or just cold."
Bryson: "Women are much better than men at tactile
sensitivity with fingers, but possibly just because thy have smaller hands and
thus a more dense network of sensors. An interesting thing about touch is that
the brain doesn't just tell you how something feels, but how it *ought* to
feel. That's why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a
stranger would feel creepy or horrible. It's also why it is so hard to tickle
yourself."
Ewww. Bryson: "For years, Britain operated a research
facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without every
finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one,
a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils
at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with
other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid
contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on
after they had been mingling for awhile, the participants were astounded to
discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of
every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, bowls of nuts, you name it. The
average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches
transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third
party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone
and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot."
Bryson: "The heart is the most misperceived of our
organs. For a start, it looks nothing like the traditional symbol associated
with Valentine's Day and lovers' initials carved into tree trunks and the like.
(That symbol first appeared, as if from out of nowhere, in paintings from
northern Italy in the early fourteenth century, but no one knows what inspired
it.) Nor is the heart where we place our right hand during patriotic moments;
it is more centrally located in the chest than that. Most curious of all,
perhaps, is that we make it the emotional seat of our being, as when we declare
that we love someone with all our heart or profess a broken heart when they
abandon us. Don't misunderstand me. The heart is a wondrous organ and fully
deserving of our praise and gratitude, but it is not invested even slightly in
our emotional well-being."
* * *
I sent the
following letter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. I can
imagine that he doesn't read his mail and it will never reach him. I felt
better for writing it.
Dear Chief Justice Roberts,
My wife and
I very much enjoyed your conversation with Bob Stein at Northrop Auditorium on
the campus of the University of Minnesota. We have attended all but one of the
conversations with the Justices and found them enlightening and interesting.
I have read
on several occasions that you have given thought to what the legacy of the
"Roberts Court" might be. (Of
course, I have no idea if that's true.)
If it is true, here is one possibility:
the dissolution of the United States.
I suspect there is a non-zero chance that if Mr. Trump is re-elected,
and the Court issues rulings that support a more authoritarian and powerful
presidency, in combination with rulings in other cases related to abortion,
voting rights, religion and the First Amendment, the environment, health care,
the GLBT community, corporate power, the enfeeblement of federal regulatory
agencies, and so on, the west coast states will consider seceding and becoming
the Pacific States of America. New York
and at least parts of New England and the upper Atlantic Coast might well
follow suit. The past and prospective
rulings by the Court, especially when they are co-terminus with a president who
many believe represents the worst instincts of Americans, have been and may be at
such variance with the culture and politics of the west coast and other parts
of the country that those areas will seek to depart. (I realize that in theory the Civil War laid
to rest the proposition that states could secede, but would the federal government
really send in troops around the country rather than respect a vote—a
plebiscite—in those states calling for a separation from the United
States? That would certainly be
ugly. The British government may soon face
the same question with respect to Scotland.)
You may be
the only one who can head off the nation falling into the abyss. The decisions you and your colleagues make in
the coming months will surely affect how history judges the Roberts Court as
well as either help hold the nation together or push it apart. Good luck.
With warm regards,
* * *
We had been
very tentatively planning a trip to Egypt and perhaps Israel next February
(2021). With recent events in the Middle East, we've decided to postpone that
plan for the foreseeable future because that area of the world is unlikely to
be safe for Americans. Faute de mieux we may go to Florida for a period instead
for a winter break.
I hope your
new year is going well thus far.
-- Gary
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