Category Archives: ALS Diary

First of all, I regret having started this ALS Diary to begin with. I must have expected it to elicit some ultimate profundity, which of course it cannot. I expected it to confer a sense of control over the process of decline; but that sense instead morphed into a kind of self-imposed tyranny. I haveContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 57): The Circularity of Regrets; Kicking the Habit of Living”

One peculiarity of ALS: you feel your body slowly dying even while your mind is unaffected, free to contemplate your whole existence even as you are soon to depart it. Since throughout life you’ve been haunted by the feeling of things needing to be done (Good heavens! how onerous that was for me as aContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 56): Reflections on the Brink”

I don’t get it. Here is a site under the aegis of a self-declared Marxist and socialist, Freddie DeBoer, whose followers (though clearly not all of them) regularly applaud his posts with the warmest accolades, yet one gets the impression that such terms as “expropriation” or “worker solidarity” are absurdly out of place here. TheseContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 55): Some Things I’ll Never Understand”

Here are my thoughts on the present cacophony of responses to the situation in Israel/ Palestine: One man can kill another man but one truth can’t kill another truth. Many things on the ground are invisible from a height of 10,000 feet or from an equivalent historical distance. Their invisibility isn’t the same as theirContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 54): Isn’t Killing Worse than Dying?”

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?”