the world a letter

There's something unsettling I'd like to point out here . . . in this article, towards the end is the mention that families of 9/11 victims want the "millions of tons of rubble from Ground Zero to be treated as human remains and given a proper burial rather than dumped in a landfill like garbage." My first response was, that such an action was quaint. Then I remembered a time, not so long ago, when such an action would have seemed the appropriate thing to do . . . a little strenuous, but all the more right for that.

So I can't tell, having, in the last five years, gone through so much with my own illness, one result of which has been a constant and immediate intimacy with the transcient nature of what is normal (including the possibility of mortality), simultaneous with the national crises we've all experienced/witnessed. Does such an action seem quaint because its possibility is reported alongside the spectacle of years of seemingly-random slaughter in Iraq? Of floating, decaying bodies in New Orleans? Or maybe because my own, personal experience of health, health's fragility, and medicine's less-than-rumored capabilities to keep us healthy, has resulted in a sense that control of such issues (life and death) are a matter of crowd control, like so much else is? All this together? I really don't know. But things have changed a whole lot in the last four years. A whole lot. Sometimes it just hits you.

Makes me feel like rereading Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," actually. Though I don't remember it well enough to know exactly why.



p.s. Not that I don't sympathise with the families and their desire. I would feel the same way. But so often these years we've seen other such sane and reasonable desires thwarted for the stupidest reasons. And families torn (literally) apart for malicious, or at the very least, brutal, ones.