Author Archives: pfannkuchea

Recently, I stumbled into the new world of online discussion or group chat, which seems to have been shaped by Twitter/X. I’m inclined to see it as a commodified version of the Renaissance and Enlightenment-era tradition once known as the “Republic of Letters.” Before European countries achieved a measure of egalitarian and democratic polity, thinkers,Continue reading “ALS Diary (part 53): Solidarity in extremis”

What is the measure of life? Voltaire philosophizes about the response of a fine young man who in consequence of falling off a horse became quadriplegic—reduced to a life without activity, physical love, or initiative of any sort. Voltaire expresses wonderment that the young man nonetheless loves life. I have heard from my neurologist friendContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 52): Life and Schopenhauer’s Will; Love Versus Solidarity”

“He wanted to live in his wealth of minutes, the ones he had left anyhow.” said of the retired Irish detective Tom Kettle in Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time What are the little delights of daily living? I can’t say that they include food. I do get hungry and I retain my sense of taste.Continue reading “ALS Diary (part 51): The Little Delights of Daily Living.”

“Kitsch is a folding screen set up for curtaining off death.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera is generalizing from the forced positivity of May Day celebrations in socialist Czechoslovakia, where the Communist authorities had declared the struggle between good and evil to be superseded by the progression from good to better, aContinue reading “ALS Diary (part fifty): Kitsch and Death”

Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, even on All Souls’ Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being I don’t regret the direction of my life andContinue reading “ALS Diary (part forty-nine): We Scholars: Actors Without a Stage, Musicians Without an Audience”

We just finished watching Orphan Black (Laura in Urbana and me here at home). I had seen it before. So had she on my recommendation. It grows on you, so another viewing was worth it. Orphan Black is thought-provoking fare for the ALS patient or anyone intrigued by the mystery of life. OB implicates questionsContinue reading “ALS Diary (Part forty-seven): An Updated Theme of the Double: Are We Really Interchangeable?”

After a lunch conversation with Terri in which, inevitably, the topics of illness, pain, and death came up, I read a thoughtful and moving New Yorker article by Peggy Orenstein in which she recollected her father’s old age dementia. The New York Times had an article recently about Dutch communities for elderly sufferers of dementia.Continue reading “ALS Diary (part forty-six): Why Does Letting Go Get Such a Bad Press?”

It’s absurd to talk about normalizing death since nothing could be more normal as it is. Nonetheless, we all naturally fear it. Aside from its horrific variants wrought by violence or disease, death means a foreclosure of all human possibility. No other living creature, we are told, knows that it will face this foreclosure. ItContinue reading “ALS Diary (part forty-five): Normalizing Death and Dying”

Nietzsche’s poetry, which we too often try to unlock with the code of his labyrinthine philosophy, is accessible to existential empathy. He was a loner whose body was signaling its imminent demise but whose spirit could still rouse itself to flights of incandescent illumination. I’ve known that condition since my student days. I know whatContinue reading “ALS Diary (part forty-four): Nietzsche and the Lyric Poetry of Death, “Die Sonne sinkt””