Restingmotion

I have loved the idea of Twelfth Night since I was a small child living in Spain.  We have not always celebrated but my father did indulge me a little in this.  When I became an adult I decided to indulge myself. We have, when the calendar allows, had a party and Reyes Cake, but generally we have a quieter celebration and put out our shoes for the Wise Men along with offerings of sustenance for man and camel.  Later today the Christmas decorations will finally be taken down and the holiday will be officially over.

Of course part of the childhood thrill was the gifts that came from the wise men, but in truth I liked the idea of Christmas and gifts being slightly separated.  You would not know that now from the piles of wonderment that existed under our tree on Christmas morning.  In the days of my youth I would get big, ripe, Rio Grande Valley oranges, a real prize before fresh food was flown daily around the world and the miracle of UPS and FedEx could bring ripe citrus to any door.  Today I awoke to find that this had been left behind:

It is nice to know that my numerous hints did not go unheeded.

I have been curled up with my nose buried deep in its pages this morning.  It is bright and entertaining, a far cry from the dull gray skies that await outside.  I think that is the worst thing about winter here.  I don’t mind the snow.  I don’t mind the cold.  But I hate the dull somber grayness of it all.  Only three days of gray in a row now and I am ready to crawl back under the warm down comforter and hibernate.

Many of the photos are quite outré, but are also filled with inspiration.  This is definitely a biased sample of modern talent.  Still there are designers and ideas which I might never have encountered.  I will leave you with a brief collage:

I finished Never Let Me Go , perhaps not the best way to begin New Year’s Eve revelry, but a perfect ending to a year, a perfect setting to a new beginning.    The book, told in it’s placid way, is unsettling even from the beginning, before the reader even has a sense of why it is unsettling.  Vague references keep cropping up, the most mundane and ordinary things are described in such luminous detail so as to seem out of touch with this world.   The tensions, the vague sense of growing awareness, almost as if the readers are experiencing the same childhood mystery of the protagonists, the “knowing without knowing” that is described in the book, creeps into the reader’s psyche.  It is a book beautiful and terrifying, horrible and heartbreaking, filled with great humanity while at the same time reminding us what a fragile thing that humanity is.

The book is tender and touching: One becomes wrapped up the lives of these characters, the protagonists of this story, who are not really the protagonists at all.  This book is not about what it appears to be about. It professes to be about three friends, and on this level it is touching and poignant.  But truly this is a book about innuendo, about reading between the lines, about the little details of our lives and the things we don’t want to know  It is a book about life and what we take for granted, about what we accept and what we keep hidden; it is about the banalities of the small things and how we can be so wrapped up in our secure private worlds that we never see or contemplate the big picture.  Indeed this is a book caught up in small things.  Big issues are never addressed, and yet they are present.  It is also about the nature of humanity and the soul and the nature of evil and conscience.  The skill of this author is that he has written a novel of great beauty which is really an allegory for a bigger and more terrifying thing.  He leads us into thought without our really being aware of where we are going until it is too late to escape.

Although the characters in the book are clones, created to be used as organ donors for ordinary people, the book is not really about the dangers of science, or morality or religion.  It is a call to conscience however, a call to responsibility, a reminder that evil can creep in the most unassuming of ways.

Perhaps equally as disturbing, to me at least, as the idea that this novel is about a world in which clones “students” they are called, are raised in isolated rural schools apart from society, isolated in knowledge, limited in their interactions with others, is the idea that they accept their fate so unconditionally.   The protagonists are fully developed characters, as caring, warm, and human as any person we might meet, and yet they blindly and accept their fate like sheep or cattle, herded to their hospitals to make their “donations”.  It is sad and frightening that they so willingly accept their fate, and it is also profoundly disturbing that the society of caring humanity which they serve also accepts their fate so blindly, removing itself from any recognition of what is being done in its name.

Kathy’s question, near the end of the book “Why should we not have souls?” echoes through my mind.  It will continue to do so for quite some time.