Brothers

 According to the internet, it's not wise to get inked shortly before surgery. Okay then. Henry's morning star remains, for now, a guiding light in my imagination but not yet on my forearm. No point in gambling gratuitously with my health, still and always worth "all the 'truths' under the firmament." Not yet.

Same goes for easing back into regular and casual public intercourse with unmasked others. Wife and Younger Daughter are at a casino in Indiana, celebrating her birthday. I was happy to stay behind and teach my class last night. Not yet, thanks. 

But I do intend to "live my life," as my wife put it, and not be unduly cowed by the specter of contagion. A life of zest is also a life of measured risk. Mustn't be blind to that.

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant...there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be. On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

I'm just not interested in taking reckless risks that offer insufficient reward in compensation. 

I'm not ready to rub shoulders at the multiplex (for instance) with potentially-viral strangers here in Tennessee--one of those rebellious and least-immune southern states where so many are so belligerently unwilling to acknowledge our shared obligation to balance the personal and the public. They are benighted, not enlightened. I'll just chill here on the couch with the dogs, for now. ("Namaste home,"  as announced by the mug my wife thought it clever to gift me.)

Thinking about all this is a welcome distraction from the ticking clock, counting quickly down to the surgeons' (there are two) scalpels in less than two weeks now. I'm trying not to think too much about the "procedure," projecting ahead instead to that time in mid-July when (if all goes well) I'll be good to go up to Ottawa for that long-postponed conference. 

My topic: The Brothers Karamazov and The Brothers K ("David James Duncan's wildly excessive, flamboyantly sentimental, tear-jerking, thigh-slapping homage to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy -- and the game of baseball"), and what both have to say about undue suffering and the absence of justice in our world.

I wonder if Brother West is a baseball fan. I know he has things to say on this topic. On every topic. Did you hear him with Brother Robert yesterday? If Thrasymachus had his way, there'd be no justice for sure. We don't need an "argument" to refute the nihilist. We don't need to refute the nihilist. We just need an eagerness to live our lives in the zest and tingle and excitement of reality. 

Sometimes we don't need to argue.