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Re: I hope someday you'll join us...
On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Dusty Volume wrote:
> All this talk reminds me of when I was about a kid about 2 years old.
> It's the first time I can remember having an abstract thought.
I don't remember anything from before the age of 4 or so. My official
first memory is of sticking a piece of paper in a typewriter and realizing
that the side I looked at as I stuck it in the back was not the side I
looked at as it came out the front. I don't know whether that qualifies
as abstract, but I've never been very good at mechanical reasoning.
I was no older than 6 when I learned the facts of life (thanks to an
Usborne book called _How Your Body Works_, which explained the different
functions of the body by pretending they were robots or machines -- see
the JPEGs below), and I remember being aware of how utterly random my
existence was (all those sperm cells, and mine just happened to win the
jackpot), and I remember wondering about all the people who would now
never exist because my sperm cell had beaten all the others to the punch.
Whenever life got kind of depressing, I envied those non-people.
My family lived in Poland for a year when I was 6, and I also remember
being very aware of the fact that I could have been born somewhere other
than where I was, in fact, born. I could have been born in a different
country, in a different era, to different parents, into a family that
practised a different religion, in a different birth order, with a
different gender, with a different colour of skin, etc. I wondered if my
soul was separate from my body, and what it would have been like if my
soul had been teamed up with another body instead. Would I be me?
I'm not sure I would have phrased all these thoughts that way when I was
6, but when you're alone with your parents and kid sister in a country
where almost nobody speaks English, you have time to think ...
http://peter.chattaway.com/jpegs/books/bodyworks1.jpg
http://peter.chattaway.com/jpegs/books/bodyworks2.jpg
--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
"I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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