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LOVE AND DEATH... ...are so inseparable as to be one. Maybe Freud was wrong about the libido and the death drive. Maybe Sophocles was wrong about intra-familial lust and fate. And Shakespeare. And Da Vinci. And Solomon, and Lester Young, and the great American novelists... Maybe all of these artists and thinkers were wrong about love and death. Maybe they were wrong on the particulars. But they were right on the connection between them. This is a miserable fucking planet. I guess today everyone is connected, the world is getting smaller, blah blah blah. And what of it? Nothing changes. We have been loving and dying for thousands of years. Without the advent of email or whatever. And in thousands of years, this is still what we'll be doing. Loving and dying daily. Because we love and then we die, in that order. It's all we do. In a global community we rich modernists fly all over the world. Our affluence and airlines allow us to do this. We make money. We get on planes and travel overseas. We sleep with women; we fall in love, maybe; we make more money. We retire and we die. Rinse, repeat. So... what of international romance—say, between a Welsh mathematician and his Canadian mistress? What of it? Here's what I think, anyway: http://www.murrayjames.net/loveletter.html -murrayjames 10/29/08 |