Alienation

By Madeleine Kando

There once was a boy who was very young and very sad. He always dreamt of beautiful things but every time he was with other people, he was sad and quiet. He was beautiful and he was sad and lived in a world of thoughts and fantasy.

It went on like this for a long time. He got bigger and once in a while, he peeked around the corner of the real world, because he felt lonely in this beautiful world where he was all by himself. Every time he peeked into the real world, he was so frightened by all that strange real stuff, that he quickly closed the door and built new beautiful fantasies.

He grew into a young man when something terrible happened. His world was being attacked! He wasn't prepared at all and he felt an enormous carnage-taking place. It was awful. Everything that he so meticulously had built got destroyed. The awful reality knew no mercy. He suddenly found himself in a strange hostile world of reality and didn't know how to cope. He never learned anything about that reality and it was a terrible struggle. He knew one thing: nobody should ever find out that he did not belong here, that he came from somewhere else, because then his chances of survival were nil.

So, he got up and started walking and did everything that reality expected of him, except that he wasn't real. But only he knew that. And soon he got used to the situation, he lived as others did and soon thought that that was the normal way. But knowing that he belonged somewhere else didn't leave his mind. He knew that he was playing a role, and knew that it wasn't real and he kept feeling sad, closed off, and turned inward. He could not trust others because they were different, they were really from this real world, not his.

Once, there was a woman who came and tried to help him. She reached out and tried to pull him closer, because she knew that he was sad and closed off and she loved him, even though she knew he wasn't real. But the boy got frightened and made up a ruse to hide. He couldn't trust the woman, he wasn't from his world and she was a strange real woman.

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Hitchhiking in America

Tom Kando

In my previous post, I described a hitchhiking adventure I had in Italy as a child. Just a few years later, I was hitchhiking again, this time in the US. I first came to America in 1960, as an Fulbright exchange student. I was nineteen. I fell in love with this gigantic and magnificent country. I was eager to explore a wide world beyond the narrow confines of Europe. Having almost zero money, So I hitchhiked. 

I was enacting a book I had just read breathlessly, a revolutionary book - Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. To me, the book’s appeal was not in its glorification of drugs, but in that it was a celebration of America, of the American spirit of freedom, of the grandeur of America. I saw the book not as anti-American, but as quintessentially American, an ode to the beauty and diversity of this country and its people, in the tradition of Thoreau, John Muir and Jack London.

My Fulbright scholarship was for a year at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. At Easter break, all the college men (Union was still all male), went home for the recess. A great guy named “Buzz” Jackson was from Wichita Falls, Texas. He was going home for the break. He generously agreed to take me and two other exchange students all the way to Texas for a minor contribution to the gas expenses. The other two exchange students were Mike, like me also from Holland, and Saleem, an Algerian student. 

So the three of us rode with Buzz all the way to his parents’ home in Wichita Falls. We went non-stop in two days. We drove through Washington D.C. just in time to see the cherry blossoms. We crossed the whole Deep South, driving across the Carolinas’ bright red-earth landscape and Georgia’s and Alabama’s cotton fields. We only stopped to eat, fill up and go to the bathrooms for whites only. To the three of us from overseas, those segregated bathrooms were a stunning visual indication of an apartheid we had never pondered. 

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Reflections on the New Year

By Madeleine Kando

Another year has ended and we are all excited about it. We made new year’s resolutions which we probably won’t keep and we convince ourselves that the new year will be better than the last. But the real reason for all this frenzy is to celebrate the fact that the Grim Reaper hasn’t come knocking at our door.

But what’s so special about a year? Why not a day? A month? A century? Doesn’t that reek of anthropocentrism? There is no line drawn across the universe that says: “Today is January 1 2023.”

Some insect species never live long enough to celebrate New Year. They don’t even make it to the next day. The female mayfly ‘Dolonia Americana’ only lives for a few minutes as an adult. Can you imagine having to do your entire life’s business in under 5 minutes? Learn to fly, find a mate, make babies and then lay eggs in a safe spot? You wouldn’t have time to eat or go to the bathroom (which is just as well, since mayflies don’t have a mouth). You wouldn’t have time to retire and write your memoirs. You couldn’t wish anyone Happy New Year! You could wish your buddies Happy New Minute, but even that would not fit in your busy schedule.

Ordinary house flies are given some wriggle room, but they too have to cramp their entire lives into a few weeks. No wonder they are so determined to land on that sugar cube, no matter how many times you try to squash them. *

Mammals are somewhat better off, but some still have to sprint through their lives before their time is up. The lowly mouse lives only 18 months and a shrew lives for only about a year. Their metabolic rate is too high to allow them to live much longer. On the other hand, bowhead whales, the longest living mammal on earth, can live over 200 years.

Amazingly, some animals grow extremely old, because they have what is called ‘negligible senescence’. Senescence is the condition or process of deterioration with age, which means that once an animal grows old enough, it stop growing old. An example of negligible senescence is the Greenland shark. Covered with battle scars, it can live up to 500 years. Similarly, the 500 year old Ming clam could have gone on living its incredibly long life, were it not for a bunch of marine biologists who fished him out of the ocean and froze him on board to take him to the lab. Of course he instantly died.

In the plant kingdom life spans begin to increase dramatically. The Pando tree, one of the oldest organisms on Earth, is 14,000 years old. It is really a colony of clones of an original tree, but all of the trees are connected through an underground network of roots. In this way, aspens continue to live long after a single tree may fall or die. Read more...