Familiar Ring

Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, and that our children will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden than we know, going from strength to strength in an ever-widening circle of achievements? What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state...form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.

H.G. Wells, A Short History of the World (1937)

The cold-blooded massacres of the defenseless, the return of deliberate and organized torture, mental torment, and fear to a world from which such things had seemed well nigh banished--has come near to breaking my spirit altogether... "Homo Sapiens,"as he as been pleased to call himself, is played out.

H.G. Wells, A Mind at the End of Its Tether (1946)

Lucky Punks

In college there was a friend who would initiate late-night, loopy, girl conversations with questions like: If a Nazi put a gun to your head and said you had to choose one guy out of all the guys we know to be with or he'd shoot you, who would you choose? Usually, we'd all take the bait to drool and sigh over the impossible person we'd chosen to admire.

A few weekends ago I spent some time at the coast with six other women, getting our craft on and catching up on life. They are all married, several with a kiddo or two...or five. They are all equally stellar and ordinary human beings and it was fun to listen to how their lives are arranged with the complications of husbands and children and their own selves.

It's been said before and better, but it occurs to me that the gun-to-the-head excitement is short-lived fluff. These women seem to have found a key element to a good relationship...the main person who goes with them through the day-to-day grind of repetition, frustration, boredom and befuddlement, making it all a bit more fun, a bit more bearable. It's in the everyday that the real deaths can lie and where we need reasons to keep our hearts pumping.