2022.12.18
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.
There is evil for you. "We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly wicked wishes.
We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.
I give you a holy word: DISARM.
We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
Some people, of course, find inhabiting an epilogue so uncongenial that they commit suicide. Ernest Hemmingway comes to mind.
[...]
I suppose that's really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue.
Mother's story ended when she married the handsomest rich man in town.
souls are in our bone marrow