27 April 1999: It's All Greek to Me

Yesterday I failed to get onto Andrew Weil's track. No walk. A burrito for dinner: chicken, guacamole, corn salsa (medium), lime cilantro rice. No beans. Such a gringo.

Today I shall continue my undisciplehood. I'm going to step instead of for a walk and I'll ride my bike instead of walk there. Heh. Or I could walk there and take a long way home, since sunset's late enough for that. If not for the long days I wouldn't know what time of year it is. Today is forecast to reach the upper 60s, finally, and the rest of the week to cool down again. The complex pool opened a year ago today. Somehow I think it'll be later this year.

Yesterday morning on the bus I began my next Gore Vidal, Creation. I looked at it askance on the shelf, but it's about Greek and Persian history during its most interesting age, the Persian and Peloponnesian wars; humans contemplated their origin B.C.E. but apparently I've been so propagandized that "creation" connotes "anti-evolution" to me before anything else. I've only read it on the bus so far and I'm not making a lot of progress. I think I'm feeling guilty for forgetting so much of Herodotus and Thucydides, whom I read once over a decade ago in one of my favoritest classes, Ancient and Medieval Political Thought. The novel begins with the narrator (with Persian father and Ionian Greek mother, raised in Persia, now an ambassador in Athens) gritting his teeth at Herodotus's version of the Persian wars, on the eve of the Peloponnesian war (so perhaps he'll like Thucydides's version of that better, if he lives so long).

For no reason than it's my head here, the Peloponnesian war also reminded me of a bit in Of Human Bondage when a vicar tries to distract and comfort the child protagonist by discussing the placement of the Athenian and Spartan ships. Or maybe it was the Persian wars. That's one book I have nada interest in rereading, so that reference is cast to the wind. Anyway.

So I'm feeling stupid and forgetful about classical Greece, like I've forgotten everything from 9th grade history (which might not sound so bad except that it sparked my nascent interest and inspired my history major), and I wonder if I could reread them outside a classroom. I did read selections of both again, in a tedious later course History and the Historian, which should have been fascinating and was not. I have to decide whether to slog on without adequate background, since this is "just" a novel, or to reread what I ought to reread. At least I hadn't forgotten my Greek mythology reading Judgment of Paris, and could spot minor characters like Cassandra (in an anachronistic cameo) as well as the major players.

In the meantime I'm reading Writing Women's Lives, and however much more current and applicable these selections are to my everyday life than classical Greek mythology and history, I can read and enjoy and learn without feeling guilty for not knowing Denise Levertov. I myself am resisting concluding that not only was my education chauvinistic (which I knew) but that I have not been working enough to explore the gaps. Mind the gap.

Last night I started working on the notMonopoly game and discovered more of its faults. I'm glad I bought the Monopoly tin, but I'll need a real game too. The notMonopoly "property trading style" game has only seven squares between its corners, not nine. I had thought I'd personalize a real board, but the size of the squares is probably different, so I couldn't. And the rules are different, and the prices (also different) are printed on the colored strips (again different), and the sides of the board are labeled north west south east, and there are no railroads!

Railroads and utilities are very important because as a child I wanted to buy only those squares with pictures on them. I kept trying to buy Luxury Tax. There's not one of those either! If I could find images of railroads, I could add them to other, wrong, not-middle squares, but the middle, proper railroad squares are uneditable Good News, Bad News, and two lottery squares. No Community Chest or Chance, just the news crap, and only twelve of each of those cards. I came up with some good ones there: "Invest in dairy cows and straws; pay $100 per property" (I said the rules were different).

This is why I need to customize a real game. It's a good idea in principle, but the right and proper limitations on copyright make its realization stupid. Parker Bros. licenses Denver and San Francisco and Paris and whatever other editions, but not such amateurism as this.

If you tell my sister about this ahead of time, I'll get medieval on your ass, Mr. Soon to Be Living the Rest of His Short-ass Life in Agonizing Pain. I'm a pacifist, really I am.

There's a new diet drug for the seriously obese, the news item began. Not for the casual dieter but only for people more 120% of their ideal weight. With 20% more, I'd call someone fat, but not morbidly obese. Anyway, this drug, Xenical, works not by suppressing the appetite but by preventing the absorption of fat in the intestines. What the hell? Allegedly you must take it along with a low-fat diet and exercise program, but the clinical trials showed that with the drug, people lost only 3% more than the control group? That's a statistical blip, not enough to justify the dangers of such a drug even if you're a blimp. The drug allegedly never hits the bloodstream but stays in the intestines, preventing enzymes from breaking down fat into molecules small enough to sneak into the body from the digestive track--neither fat molecules nor the fat-soluble vitamins they carry.

This is why I'm becoming a Weil disciple. Solutions don't come in a pill. If someone wants to become fitter and healthier (I don't say "lose weight"), the person has to eat a healthier diet and exercise (more). I myself have never "dieted" as the word is usually tossed around, a Weight Watchers diet or a Zone diet or whatever. I continually aspire to healthier eating habits, which I don't consider to be deprivation but recognition that vegetables are good for me and lots of meat is bad. The problem is that chocolate and meat taste better than lentils and kale, which is why it's a continual aspiration and effort rather than a once, long-ago, resolution.

I don't know how anyone could avoid yo-yo-ing once she began dieting at all. If anyone thinks that if she can eat 800 calories a day until she reaches a certain number of pounds and after getting to that point resume a 3000 calorie diet, she's bound to regain weight, whatever foods comprise those calories. To take a pill instead of (or in addition to) modification of diet means, as the developers concede, that a person has to remain on the medication indefinitely. That's whacked.

At the library I became Ms. Classic. I discovered Keats' fave, Chapman, was a lot older than I ever knew. He spells "eyes" with an i. I read Chaucer in the original but prefer my Shakespeare with current spelling. Why? Dunno [actually it's laziness], but it's the same reason I'll probably buy a Lattimore. I found selections of Herodotus and Thucydides. "Beckett." "A Man for All Seasons." Brideshead Revisited. Also a collection of Rudolfo Anaya, which I now discover has excerpts from but not the whole novel of Bless Me, Ultima. I have no idea how his name came up, but it did and that's what was available. (Also someone lent me a collection of Dorothy Parker today. Good stuff.)

Then I went to the museum, which was swarming with tours of the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, tours filled with elderly people and assisted by elderly volunteers. I felt really mean for noticing a distinct odor of urine wafting about in the hall. I waited about three minutes at the membership desk while the geriatric volunteers gossiped before one of them realized that the woman standing in front of them, making eye contact and smiling idly while not reading any of the books in her arms as she might if she were waiting for someone else, might want something. As I walked back to work reading Evelyn Waugh, someone punched me on the shoulder and told me to look where I was going. I looked up: it was the Director, COO, and CFO (the boxer) of Dot Org. I'm so alert.

In an idle conversation, someone expressed surprise that On the Origin of Species could have affected Western and Christian societies as much as it did. She thought it was much older than it is (1859) and didn't see how a book could have the profound influence I ascribed to it. I'd guess even the provable fact that the solar system is helio- not geocentric didn't affect European thought the way the theory of evolution did. Maybe I think so only because evolution is 400 years younger and its acceptance still challenged, memorably so within living memory.

My tenth-grade Modern European history class touched upon the changes Darwin's suggestion wrought. That year, I was surprised to learn anyone would spend an entire semester studying the French Revolution--that there was that much to it--so I was still learning about wanting to learn, but Silent Spring had already shown me how a single voice can revolutionize a society. While my high school education was chauvinist--by which I imply nationalist as well as sexist--political history at least built a trellis in my hindbrain for social history and "herstory" to bloom upon.

Imagine that in middle age, when you're pretty sure of yourself and, if troubled, at least set on a course, you discover, say, that you're adopted. Your whole world view changes. Everything you've understood about your self is untrue, but at the same time your mind is sparked to new ideas because you realize there are so many more possibilities to explain this or that aspect of yourself.

Now tell a culture, several cultures, world-domineering cultures, that their single diety didn't mold them out of clay in idle boredom one midsummer morning and see how they take it. Suggest that most of Genesis is poppycock and find yourself the fuel at a weinie roast. Tell 'em Earth isn't the center of the God's playground and watch people look around for heaven. Tell 'em their planet revolves around a minor star in an unfashionable arm of backwater galaxy and see them fight the realization they're not the end-all be-all of possible existence.

I'm open-minded about the possibility of life on other planets, although I consider the likelihood of its visiting Earth remote. However, six billion years is a long time for no one to have figured it out anywhere. Quite possibly my skepticism stems from my simple refusal or inability to wrap my puny mind around all the ramifications. The positive proof of extraterrestial life is the most obvious thing I can think of to rattle Earthlings to this degree. Think of Christian Earthlings: if the extraterrestial life isn't Christian, then could God have created the universe, sparked the big bang?* That would rattle everyone, of course. I consider it presumptuous to state that extraterrestial life s the only next possible frontier of thought, though, and used it only as an an obvious example.

What are we likely to discover here on our own planet that will rearrange and reupholster our mental furniture? Got me. Communication with primates and dolphins complex enough to exchange cultural heritage? The realization that we can pave only so much of the planet before she bites back? In a flip essay, I've proven myself no theorist, no futurist. I do think that I'd be surprised if any one work could work as quickly and profoundly as Darwin or even Rachel Carson. There are so many more sources of information now than Carson's 40 years ago (let alone Darwin's 140) that I wonder how one item could reach so many people.

*The flip side is that if the life is Christian (or unmistably similar), then that might be proof enough even for me to convert.