The title of this dispatch was the title of a short story by Ray Bradbury. Seems to me that all the good titles (as this one is) have been taken. It’s okay for me to use them as dispatch titles just as long as I acknowledge the author. This way, the author’s work lives on.

What amazes me is this: prolific writers live on an average, 70 years; that is, those who don’t drink themselves to death. And the very prolific may write 70 books. I see evidence of this now, every day. Their works, however, are often much the same. Mystery writers like Agatha Christie crank out the mysteries. And horror writers like Stephen King crank out the horror books.

Some writers deviate some and work in differing genres. But not many. And even they stick with what they think they do best. This has got me thinking – all writers have just one voice. They don’t live long enough to speak in more than

one voice. But collectively, the voice of each writer is a polyphony of voices. Thus, individual writers are merely contributing to the whole of literature.

It’s a glorious song they are all singing. I no longer count myself in their numbers. But I am and will remain in awe of what I’m hearing.

My ability to “see into the life of things,” (Wordsworth) is now far more developed than it was twenty, thirty years ago. For example, I am now reading To Tame a Fox, a book that in my mind raises more questions than it answers. The book is about a Russian experiment – foxes were, for 57 generations, bred to be tame. And as the researchers suspected, over time the foxes became quite tame.

The fox were, and continued to be, bred for their fur coats. Now, there had to be an overabundance of tame fox – and undoubtedly, they were eventually slaughtered. To me, this is a form of human betrayal. The bred animals liked and were trusting of humans. And, of course, they were given names. What gives? This is not mentioned in the book.

In another experiment, the fox were bred to be aggressive. I suppose it was not so hard to off them. But why do this?

I mentioned my above misgivings to a friend who read the book and she said that animal experimentation/research is necessary because it saves lives. I didn’t say what I was thinking, which is that this sort of thinking is top of the food chain logic. If we saw ourselves as being kindred spirits with animals, we would think about the consequences of our actions as being as significant as the projected outcome.

I once took an anatomy class where we were shown the lungs of a sheep that had been forced to smoke cigarettes. I could only think of what that animal had to endure. A model would have had the same effect.

Yes, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo once said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Next: 114. 4/26/23: Sprinter