WHAT MATTERS

There comes a ripening to a word, to a thought, like raspberries along the roadside. First they’re hard and green, hidden among green leaves. With sun and rain they plump, soften and blush with color. When ripe, they’re juicy and red, spied by birds and bears as morsels of food, nature’s way to spread the raspberry seeds. Nature uses its wiles to insure raspberries, birds and bears survive. As words and thoughts, too, find soil to root and sun to ripen, it is for us to share them, spread their seeds to grow in other minds, seeking ways to preserve life and stay entropy, the inevitable disorder that come to everything.

Writing, “the weight of ink,” gives permanence to our thoughts, to our history, but the process also is creative, as new or altered thoughts sprout as our pen moves across the page. I have spent years with stretches of solitude and contemplation, had epiphanies about the universe. It does not matter so much whether I am right, but that my thoughts still resonate within as being true, confirmed by observations and bring meaning to my understanding of my world.

As I commence my eighth decade it may be that I have reached an understanding as full as any I will come to. So I begin, putting ink on paper, making thought visible and transmissible. Thoughts are the raspberries, the writer with his pen and ink, the bird and bear, carrying the seeds from mind to mind, from generation to generation.

Over the past several years, three general ideas have recurred in my consciousness—the primacy of the individual, the force of conatus, which is the striving of life to continue, and the necessity of memory.

Nature has a preference for individualism. All forms of life have walls, membranes, skin, hide, bark, some containing layer that confines, protects and separates them. The smallest unit of organic life that can reproduce itself is the cell. The plant cell is separated from the rest of its organism by a wall. Within the wall are all the things that allow the cell to live, reproduce, fend off enemies like viruses and harmful bacteria, protect its genetic code along with other processes. This wall is also semi-porous so that waste material can be removed from the cell, nutrients can be imported and the cell can communicate with other cells in the organism about conditions and needs of the plant. Animal cells have a membrane but many of the same functions apply.

In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben details the amazing interdependence of life in a forest among trees, plants, insects, birds, fungus, animals and how each seeking survival helps others also to survive.

One might think a tree in a forest is one tree growing on its own, but its survival depends on the other trees for shade, for warnings about dangers of drought, invading insects. Trees provide shade, fungus and soil hold moisture, birds and animals spread seeds. Even insects can be helpful if they are enemies of more harmful invading insects. Trees are homes for birds, animals, and insects. Nature has developed an interdependence among life forms to help the survival of all. The interworkings of fungi, trees, plants, humans, birds, insects are designed (or perhaps just “growed,” like Topsy) for organic communities to help each other survive. Some of these interactions may have evolved because they worked and some over time became obsolete because they didn’t work. Even when death comes to plants, animals, insects, those deaths can supply food and shelter for other life. It is the diversity of life in the forest that provides water, food, homes, warnings of danger, needed for life. As every life form acts to protect itself to survive, the consequences of its acts not only benefit itself but may well be advantageous for other life in the environment. Even though the ways of nature can mean death or harm to other life, even the death or weakness of nature’s inhabitants can provide assets to other life in the community, like nutrients or shelter.

As I think of the old riddle,”If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” perhaps a better question is “If a tree falls in the forest, what are the consequences?”

There could be more light falling on the forest floor because its canopy is gone, the plants on the floor of the forest will grow with more light, deer will have more grasses and plants to eat which could produce more deer. The soil will be richer because of the nutrients transferred as the tree decays, insects will have another food source and shelter. Depending on the tree, the supply of nuts and seeds would be less plentiful. Organic life produces chain reactions, a bit like dominos, with rippling effects through other life forms in the forest or nature’s communities. The cycles of life and death can promote more life by having decaying organic material return nutrients to the next generation.

Peter Wohlleben in The Secret Wisdom of Nature explains how the salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest contribute to the food cycle. As salmon come upstream and die, bears and other animals eat the fish and then deposit nutrients in their waste, the fish die and give nutrients directly to the soil, the fungi which envelope the trees’ feeder roots help the trees take up the nutrients. When the trees die, some of these nutrients wash back into the rivers and then the ocean to feed life there. Who would guess that trees help life in the ocean?

A flower produces blooms, colorful and fragrant to attract pollinating birds and insects. The bee is an individual insect looking out for his own survival, but in going about his business of living, he is attracted to the flower by its color and scent and seeks its nectar, but in the process picks up pollen on his body from the flower blossoms and carries it with him, leaving pollen on other blossoms he visits, thus aiding the survival of plants and trees, quite unsuspectedly.

Organic life strives to survive. It seems like a primal urge for life to continually work for life to continue and enhance itself. The cycle of birth and death in nature allows life forms to survive. Dead animals feed vultures, bears, insects. Carcasses can leave nutrients for trees and plants. One generation dies, another replaces it. Sometimes one generation will plant its eggs on a food source for their newborn, helping ensure their offspring’s survival.

Individualism is long a fundamental idea in America. The idea is still at the center of today’s political thought. The founding fathers had long discussions over the balance of power between the federal government and individual states, particularly in the Federalist Papers. Then when the Constitution was written they added The Bill of Rights to give protection to individuals against the power of government. We are still adjusting the scales between the individual’s sovereignty and government constraints on the actions of citizens when they are harmful to society and the general welfare.

Individuals in societies are similar to cells in organisms. Individuals have sovereignty; they are separate from other individuals, but their survival depends upon support and communication with other individuals in their community. The more populated and complex societies become, the more reliant individuals are on each other and their communities. We depend on each other for food, water, electricity, financial services, information, medical care, manufactured products, so many necessities of our daily lives, including love and emotional support from our family and friends.

It would be a rare, if not impossible, case for an individual in our world today to be totally self-sufficient.

When the individual feels he has lost control over his life because circumstances overwhelm him or some bureaucracy or government has become too controlling, he feels the loss of his sovereignty. He becomes frustrated and angry with his helplessness, his inability to effect his life. Governments cannot become too dictatorial, usurping the rights of individual citizens. Balance means governments have sufficient control to establish order and safety, and citizens have sufficient sovereignty to feel they have freedom that is provided with order and safety to make choices to determine their future as long as their choices do not infringe on others’ freedoms. Individuals cannot behave in ways that disregard others in their community. That would lead to anarchy.

Currently our world order is challenged with a rift between democracy and autocracy. The basis of the rift is whether sovereign individuals within a sovereign state are trusted to make decisions about the course of their country or whether some elite individual, often self proclaimed, or small council of elites is better able to determine a country’s course. It takes secure leaders to promote democracy. They trust citizens to make choices that seems best for them. Autocrats do not trust their citizens and must have control of decisions.

It appears now to bear out the words of Lord Acton in 1887 that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Democracies defer to the people and that, in the aggregate, they will opt for a course that is more beneficial to more people. Autocrats tend to choose a course that benefits themselves and increases their power and control over the individual. Once power is in their hands, it’s hard to think of an example where autocrats freely gave up their rule and their power. Democracies put their trust in the individual and autocracies do not. Freedom threatens their power so they restrict their citizens’ freedom and control the information they receive. Citizens who are not fully informed and educated cannot make the best decisions.

Individual rights begin with the principle that every human is born on Earth with an equal right to be here and should have an equal opportunity to use his talents to become all that he can become as long as he does not deny another human’s ability to do the same. Each human’s arrival comes at a different time, a different place and that can make all the difference in the difficulties he or she must face. In this world, global equality is a distant ideal. Parts of the world have more wealth, more freedom, more education and some parts live in destitute conditions because of climate, governance, natural resources and other factors. Thus factors of chance weigh on the scale of our successful navigation of our time on Earth. Humans all over the globe are born into circumstances not of their choosing. Some are born into privilege with access to wealth, education, favor; others are born in the vast middle with basic comforts; and some are born in drought, famine, poverty, submission, servitude with few ways to escape. Some of the favored will fall through their own failings, disease, accident, but most will succeed because they have the advantages of education, good nutrition, and medical care. A few of the least fortunate will with skill or luck plow a furrow to success even having been dropped on the fallow ground of drought, war, discrimination or other barriers to fulfillment. One cannot claim any power over one’s circumstances. It is chance that an individual is placed on the planet in any one place or another—chance of his parents’ and their parents’ choices, back through the generations.

We may have reactive or cultural bias imbued within us that would resist that truth, but it’s hard for any reasonable intellectual approach to disprove that one’s arrival in whatever place or time somehow makes a difference in one’s right to be here and equal to every other being who is here. One an individual is born into a place and time, he or she cannot imagine that he has arrived at his rightful destination whether it is favorable or not. The place and time we arrive bestows upon us certain values and biases that can skew our view of others—that others are more or less valued.

Through our observation and research we know that each person is born with various abilities, genetic makeup, energy and circumstances that make his task easier or harder. In this way each human is different. But that does not negate his worth as a human being which is a natural right with inherent value equal to very other human regardless of time, place, abilities or appearance.

If every life is equal, some cannot be more equal or valued more. When the law, which is the supposed equalizer, punishes someone with greater penalty for crimes against some over others, we have given greater value to some human lives. For example, if someone’s brother is White, Christian, heterosexual and is shot by gang members, the penalty for his death should be the same as if someone’s brother was Black or Muslim, or homosexual who was shot by gang members. If the judgement is arrived at by using some hate crime law which penalizes the gang members more harshly for killing the Black, the Muslim or the homosexual, the law is saying that the brother’s life who is White, Christian or heterosexual has less value. The punishment should be for the action and not the perpetrator’s thoughts or the victim’s otherness. Lady Justice may not lift her blindfold or put her thumb on the scale to treat some offenders more harshly because their victims are persecuted by some. All offenders are equal and all victims are equal. Because all are equal, one human or group cannot use or abuse another individual or group. One human cannot be punished more severely for the same action because of the victim’s identity or whether he is more or less valued by some. Thus hate crime laws are discriminatory, denying equal rights before the law and should be unconstitutional.

How helpful it could be if we stopped making broad generalizations about people and thought about them first as individuals, not stereotypes of class, race, ethnicity, religion. When one wishes to bring focus to an argument it is far more effective to give a specific individual example rather than a generalization. Stephen Spielberg in “Schindler’s List” does not say save the Jews. Schindler has his assistant identify every Jew by name. At the end of the film, Schindler looks at his wedding band and thinks maybe his gold ring could have saved one more life. Each life was important. Touring Auschwitz a visitor sees individual pictures of prisoners looking into the camera and into the visitor’s eyes in rows of sepia photos on the walls. This is far more effective than seeing a mass of people and not being able to establish a one to one human connection.

Our freedom also depends on laws that protect the individual and his property. Several levels of government institutions write those laws, the courts determine whether they are supported by constitutions and government provides enforcement of the laws and adjudication, if necessary, by the courts.

Individuals cannot have freedom unless they are safe and their safety often relies on the actions of others. They cannot be safe when gangs are rampant in neighborhoods. They cannot be safe when people with guns take aim at people in public areas. They can not be safe when contagious diseases cause widespread illness and death. The lack of safety restricts freedom because of fear of the consequences of just going about daily life. The greatest freedom depends upon the actions of others to insure a safe environment to live, create, and be productive. For individuals to declare themselves to be free without boundaries or totally independent is a fantasy born of hubris. Everyone depends upon laws and the equal enforcement of those laws by law enforcement and upon the courts to provide equality before the law and safety for people and their property. Without safety and freedom, individuals cannot achieve the fulfillment of their talents.

It is incumbent upon each of us to protect the safety of others by not impinging on their rights by invading boundaries of their freedom. It is clear to most that invading or usurping another person’s home or property is a violation of their privacy and private property rights. But it is little different when a person fails to protect another person’s safety by reckless driving or disregard for others’ health by failing to protect them from contagious diseases.

An article in The New York Times on March 17,2020 told about William James’ thoughts on individualism. Willam James was a famous psychologist in the late 1800’s. He came from a famous family of individualists including his father who was among the circle of intellectuals in Boston like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bronson Alcott, Henry Thoreau. William James’ brother was the novelist Henry James, and his sister, Alice, was a unique individual who might have been neglected by history had she not written a diary in her last years. The article cites James’s “pluralistic” philosophy on the idea that individuality and particularity should be respected almost at all cost. The only thing truly common, actually universal, James contended, is that each of us is uniquely and meaningfully different, that we find significance in our own particular ways.”

William says “we have an ‘ancestry blindness’ that prevents us from recognizing the worth of other types of life particularly difficult if not impossible.” Said a different way, individuals should be valued for what they bring that’s different from others and not just what they have in common, even if it is not fully understood. Our survival may depend on diversity. If, for example, there were only Dutch elm trees and a disease that claims Dutch elms appeared to decimate those trees, there would be no trees or they would be severely weakened. With a diversity of trees, like oaks, pines, maples, and birch, the forest can carry on. Diversity is often attacked in societies, discriminating against those different from the dominant culture without recognizing the differences bring a variety of skills and viewpoints, and genetic weaknesses and strengths that will provide support for societies’ health and well being. Humanity might not exist long if one race of people existed and that race had a genetic propensity for cancer , mental illness or other devastating genetic conditions.

If a community were filled with farmers, there would be food, but no plows, shoes, books, cars. A society must be diverse to supply all the needs and desires of the community. Diversity is nature’s insurance policy for survival. Every community, whether people, plants, or other animal life, depends on diversity to enhance its chances of survival. Ancient walled cities had within bakers, farmers, merchants, cobblers, blacksmiths, tailors, bankers, soldiers. This diversity provided them with the necessities to maintain life.

Nature and humans use diversity to insure survival. Yellowstone Park and its wolves show how nature, without disruptive interference, supply a necessary link to the park’s environment. Years ago, ranchers were angry that their cattle and sheep were being killed by the wolves. The wolves were removed. The elk multiplied without a primary predator and ate the berries and trees upon which other animals depended. The bears left, the beavers left, the vegetation changed, the rivers wandered outside banks that were no longer stabilized by vegetation. When years later the wolves were reintroduced, nature gradually returned to a balance that encouraged animals to return, plants and trees to flourish again and rivers to flow on course. Diversity means that every stone in the foundation helps preserve the whole edifice and saves it from collapsing.

Individualism is often linked with the idea of individual freedom. My mother had grown up with her sister who was 10 years older. My mother wanted to do everything her sister did, but her mother knew my mother would just be a pest to the older kids. My mother vowed she would not tell her children what they could do or not do. I came to understand that freedom is very difficult to give because of the trust it requires and the power it cedes, and that freedom is very difficult to receive because of the responsibility it bestows. Freedom does not mean one can do whatever he or she wants. Freedom has boundaries. We are not free to take liberties with other people’s safety. We are not free to choose which side of the road on which to drive nor free to ignore a red light, nor free to breach private property. Other people’s freedoms must be protected and everyone is responsible for not encroaching on others’ liberties. (Even the canopies of trees of a similar height in the forest do not touch, do not invade each others’ space.) The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution specifically to protect individual rights. Individual rights are guaranteed, but within the bounds of not using or abusing other individuals or groups. Thus people can protest peacefully but should it become violent then harming others becomes likely, threatening their freedom and safety. Our laws are written primarily to protect private property and individual rights. We expect unbiased courts to uphold those laws that protect us and our property. Freedom has fences, and as Robert Frost writes his neighbor thinks “Fences make good neighbors,” and it is task of the justice arm of government to maintain those fences. No one’s liberty should be infringed by others breaking boundaries of sovereignty.

This individualism and individual freedom is critical to survival only to the extent it doesn’t put restraints on the freedom and rights of others. Individualism in nature’s design is a driving force of species that strive to survive and to do so find themselves having to cooperate with others in their environment either with intent, instinct, or happenstance..II

Nature working together helps survival of all. Spinoza, DesCartes and others professed a belief in an intrinsic life force that urged life forms to endure and adapt themselves. This theory, called conatus, seems apparent in all of nature. Plant cells fight off viruses; trees blossom with colorful blooms that attract pollinators like bees, butterflies and other insects; the pollinators find nectar and carry with them the pollen of the trees and plants to other places; birds adapt their bills sometimes within a generation to reflect the change in food supply; animals are drawn by scent to sexual partners; the moth turns black because pollution has blackened the tree he clings to and he is camouflaged for his safety; the ripe raspberries lure birds and bears to spread their seeds; the spider spins his web to catch food, and people flee violence and poverty to seek a better life for themselves and their children.

Inherent in the conation of nature is the striving for life to continue and enhance itself. It may be by design or it may have developed organically through the centuries because certain developments worked and established themselves and some did not work and became obsolete. When disruptors enter and the balance is destroyed, nature suffers. Nature itself can be a disruptor with floods, storms, earthquakes, hot and cold periods. Man is increasingly a disruptor with chemicals, refuse, over population, etc. Much of man’s disruption is his attempt to supply more and more people with food and supplies to live a more comfortable life. Some of man’s disruptions are wars with weapons that destroy man and his communities and their structures. The former is man’s attempt to forestall entropy, the inevitable destruction that comes with time and work; the latter is man’s folly that hastens entropy by destroying life and resources.

Human beings have similar instincts as animals for procreation but have also created other methods to affirm our existence. We draw on cave walls, make pots, build tombs, write history, write our stories, pass on recipes, press our palms in clay.

In the billions of years of life finding ways to continue, here we are on this third planet from a star in vast galaxies of stars, planets and debris from some great beginning disruption billions of years ago.

Here we are on this sphere of elements orbiting our sun along with other orbiting planets that have no signs of life, all created from some distant imploding star.

Here we are evolving from some one-celled life form billions of years ago and that life form did what it did to survive and enhance itself through evolution. And quite amazingly, here we are.

Life goes forward and here we are among a myriad of life forms from amoebas, to apple trees, to tigers and spiders, all evolving to survive, inventing creative, desperate ways to urge each life onward. Even the smallest unit of reproductive life, the microscopic cell, protects itself in a cellular wall or membrane, fends off dangerous enemies, helps other cells, and as it dies(apoptosis)generously leaves itself to nourish and serve others.

Here we are, humans born on a planet by accident in places fertile, in places fallow, each of us different with varying talents but one goal—to survive by reproducing and passing on learning.

The bee works with the flower, fungi help the forest, the worm aerates the soil, plants give us food and air. Everything is trying its damndest to put one virtual foot in front of the other to keep marching on.

The dragonfly on the cedar siding of my house emerged from his shell but without wings sensed there was something that he was meant to be, but something was wrong. He waited and waited before dropping to the walk to await death.

Not so different from a little girl born on the parched plains of Africa or the little boy in North Korea bound by the suffocating tendrils of tyranny.

Fulfillment may never come but the vision lives in the mind of the dragonfly, the little girl and boy. As long as they take breath, they hope.

At 77, my mother-in-law, Alma, lay in her hospital bed with her granddaughter sitting beside her. She was not educated or profound, but she turned to her granddaughter and said, “It wasn’t what I thought.” There was always a wish until there was no time remaining, and yet she passed on her view. Like Alma, every human has a conception of what life should be. We could call it the American dream or telos, aspiration, or Shangri-La..Some part of that lives within us as long as we have breath.

Here we are birthing children, reproducing ourselves, passing on genes, writing stories, keeping diaries, creating art. Our lives are about continuation and with everything we do, we are saying “I am here. I matter. Try and stop me.”

And here we are—all human beings, so much alike, so little different and yet all identifiable, distinct, individual, whether rich or poor or in-between, whether blessed or cursed by nature’s wand, know that all—the least of us to the most powerful—are at the mercy of disease, sorrow, turns of fortune, but even if born in famine and chaos still hold in our minds and hearts the same hopes and dreams of seeing our vision come to pass, if not for ourselves, for our children. As Darwin said, “Intelligence is based on how efficient a species becomes at doing the things it needs to survive.”

Annie Dillard, in her book For the Time Being, writes of man’s time on earth. The stark reality she relates is that nearly all human life that has existed on the globe now lies under the surface. While we would celebrate life’s striving to survive, individuals do not survive, but their seeds produce future generations, and their artifacts leave a history—a memory to live and learn from. The struggle that all life forms, whether cognitively or instinctively, grapple with is their survival but more important and intrinsic is the survival of their genetic heritage.III

So many of those past generations buried are known for their bones, their tools, their art and artifacts, but only in recent generations with the invention of print do we know what they were thinking, their ideas, thoughts and feelings. Memory cannot be passed on without some tangible, concrete form that will last through generations. Although oral transmission had to suffice for ages, it was not reliable as it was misremembered from mouths to ears.

It is memory that allows survival. It begins as all thought does with one neuron connecting with another through a synapse. So simple a touching, a joining, an electrical connection, a chemical transmission. Without memory there is no learning, no art, no understanding of life. How would we learn a nearly perfect pirouette, a repeatable golf swing, a clear, concise sentence if we did not try over and over, adding, deleting, altering what we had done before? How would hummingbirds, monarchs, whooping cranes find their way, or spiders build webs, or turtles get to the sea, or we understand the stars or yesterday or who we are and how we fit? How would we pass what we learned to our children if we didn’t remember one thing in order to join it to another and another to tell them how we understand the world? And it is the weight of ink on paper that has given permanence to our experiences and allows them to be shared with current and future dwellers on earth for most of history. Now film, video, recordings add to the record.

Often we understand the illusive through metaphor. I see memory like a water lily. Its fruit full of seeds drops into the clear pond. As the fruit fills with water, it sinks, the seeds fall out, dropping to the sediment at the bottom. Seeds sprout from the rich soil, the shoots forming rhizomes to store nourishment and new growth. From these rhizomes, roots can seek the soil to anchor it to earth and find nourishment, and stems can rise to the surface of the pond, spreading their green pad and shooting forth blossoms that open and close to accommodate pollinators and to find light. So an image or sound of some part of the present buries itself in our brain, puts down roots, spreads to store itself in the brain’s nooks and crannies and rises to leaf and blossom into our consciousness and can be shared. Reality exists only once; it is stored in our brains until pieces rise to the surface whether with intent or just bursting into our day uninvited without knocking or a “May I,” welcome or not.

Madeleine Albright in her book Hell and Other Destinations, writes about memory.

we put down in writing what our senses tell us because humans, alone among the species (as far as we know) believe it important to remember. Rickety though it may be memory is the one railing we can hold on to in our unequal dual with time. Loved ones die, but their faces, words, favorite expressions, teachings, characteristic movements, and the distinctive shape of their mouths when smiling remain with us, crisp for a while, then less so. Months pass, then years, and the images fade, only to recover suddenly their sharpness when a sight or sound jogs our brains.

She recognizes the rhizomes in our brains that store memories. Stems can rise from their rhizomes and come into consciousness where we remember them as they were or as they are transposed by error or need.

When going through the family photos, it’s so hard to throw any away. It’s like erasing a person, a part of ourselves, a time. If we did, would there be a gap in time never again filled or a blank in the space where someone stood and might someone accidentally fall into that nothingness we left when we tossed out evidence of a memory? There are no chalk artists in the history books unless someone made a picture. Chalk memories are gone with the rain.

A poem by Frank Bidart renders how memory builds in us and allows us to seek perfection.

“Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera “Giselle

Many ways to dance Giselle, but tonight as you

watch you think that she is what art is, creature

who remembers

her every gesture and senses its relation to the time

just a moment before when she did something

close to it

but the everything was different so what she feels

now is the pathos of the difference. Her body

hopping forward

remembers the pathos of the difference. Each

hop is small, but before each landing she had

stepped through

many ghosts. This and every second is the echo

of a second like it but different when you had

illusions not

only about others but about yourself. Each gesture

cuts through these other earlier moments to exist as

a new gesture

but carries with it all the others, so what you dance

is the circle or bubble you carry that is all this.

Poetry June 2007, p. 171

Whether it’s a dancer, a golfer, a writer, a craftsman, an artist, or anyone, it is learning through memory that enhances his or her skills. Without memory we cannot learn, we cannot become better, we cannot progress and enhance life.

Writers of fiction and non-fiction pass on life’s stories and occurrences. Recently survivors of WWII and southeast Asian wars have written their stories, which are efforts to preserve their heritage, their genetic code for their survival. One such novel is On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. It is a novel of survival of his family’s own lives and their genetic line. The author, Ocean Vuong, writes in a poem, “by pressing/ this pen to paper, I was touching us/back from extinction.” The weight of ink has the promise of immortality. In Voung’s novel, Little Dog, the main character, has emigrated to America from Viet Nam with his mother and grandmother. To survive, the grandmother has prostituted herself, the mother works as a manicurist who constantly defers to her clients with “Sorry,” hoping not to draw attention to herself, to be invisible. They find ways to survive and protect their children. They give their boy the name of Little Dog because it was thought that by giving your youngest a name of something despised it would protect him.

Little Dog’s mother drives to a house where she thinks her sister lives, but her sister no longer lives there. A little boy comes out with a toy gun and points it at Little Dog, who looks him “dead in the eye and [I do] what you do. I refuse to die.”

After all Little Dog and his family have come through —the violence, the prostitution, the subservience, the discrimination— he says, “Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.” The will of the human spirit strives to stay alive and better itself, to fulfill its own vision.

The book seems more like a memoir than a work of fiction. As a first generation immigrant, his mother hopes for invisibility; Little Dog, as second generation, wants to be noticed. He becomes a writer to make permanent his story, his memories. He is conscious of memory, conscious of history being significant in our survival. Little Dog says, “Memory is our second chance.” He, too, recognizes it is memory that allows us to fulfill our vision of our life.

The structure of the narrative is like memory. It isn’t linear but pulls up threads of the past as they jump into consciousness. It’s difficult to discern whether we consciously remember events, feelings, smells, images or whether they come to our minds unbidden, entering without knocking, or a “May I.”

Science fiction writers often conceive dystopian societies. They can create societies in which an elite class has created methods to subdue the masses by mental, physical, emotion or psychological control, often with attempts to suppress the individuality, the humanity of people which attempts to delete history and memory from their experience.

The Giver by Lois Lowry creates a society in which everything is regulated. Human emotions are constrained, self-motivation removed, the intrinsic human spirit is smothered.

Jonas, the main character, is Twelve, an age one’s career path is chosen by a committee that has been observing all the children. At 12, they’re given their career assignments. Jonas is chosen to be Receiver of Memory, a high honor. His mentor, the older Receiver, and Jonas are the only ones burdened with the knowledge of man’s history.

The Receiver calls the time of now “sameness,” saying variety, otherness is not allowed. This is an attempt to reduce diversity and individuality which ironically will also endanger survival.

The Receiver holds memory for all so that ordinary people do not experience the pain of memory. On the other hand, we might think they do not experience the pleasure of remembrances or the learning that comes with memory. History, knowledge, memory threaten autocratic societies.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley strives to manufacture classes of human organisms that are identical and each class is equipped to fulfill certain functions. As they make as many like people from the same embryo, they learn to duplicate a thousand or more identical “twins.” Each class is determined with the manufacturing process of levels of oxygen, exposure to elements, stimulation, giving certain levels of intelligence, sensitivity, physical characteristics that are needed for their functions. The concept of individualism is essentially deleted. Again, diversity is the victim.

Sometimes the elite class creates methods to subdue or restrain the freedoms of subordinate classes. By restricting physical, emotional, psychological freedom, the elite class has more control. By suppressing individuality and the knowledge of history they constrict the sense of self so important to creativity and aspiration.

We all have memories of people or events that have had a great effect on our lives—our parents, a grandmother, friends. Memory often becomes more piercing when a special person dies and memory is all that remains. A photo of Sue and our foursome stands on my desk. For maybe a moment I imagine Sue alive when I know her ashes are strewn on the hillside—substance of a life seared to it elements. The Sue we knew no longer has heft or shape. Only memory holds our Sue—a story, a posture, a laugh, a crook’d eyebrow—more like wind, unseen but palpably present.

Sue brought balance to the lives around her. When the bubble floated right or left over the center lines, Sue was the shim to bring us level. When our table rocked on uneven floors, she was the matchbook that wedged the wobble out. When our balloon sagged and drifted downward, she was the waft of air that buoyed it aloft once more.

When she left us, our world shuddered and wobbled, unsteadying our stance on the earth. And forever after when we lean on the table, it may tip, but we will remember Sue and the wobbling will steady.

After a while our memories of Sue wedge the table, shim the bubble level, bring our lives nearer to plumb.

The memory of Sue can do that.

It’s hard to think that the face of my grandmother is held fondly in my brain in electrical synapses or chemical transmitters. How does it do that? It boils down to physics or science, but my grandmother was just a sweet old lady who laughed at a good one and scolded me when she disapproved, who knew nothing about neurons. Yet there she was sitting in her rocker, nodding off in the afternoon as I remember her, not manipulating neurons or synapses that I could sense.

Memory is who we are. We are the sum total of our memories. Our conclusions are influenced by the connections we make and the inferences we draw from our experiences, from our memories.

Individuals beset with Alzheimer’s or other dementia gradually lose their selves until they are only physical bodies—empty vessels. My college roommate who had Alzheimer’s used to repeat “I am Linda. I am Linda,” as if to hold on to that self she had inhabited all her life that she now felt slipping away. And then silence.

All this—-freedom, individualism, conatus, memory—-face the unremitting challenge of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that with time and work, disorder increases.

The formula for entropy is Q÷T=S. Q is thermal energy, T is absolute temperature and S is entropy. It measures the transformational loss when a process occurs. When an automobile runs, it creates motion and heat which causes wear on the engine, tires and other parts. This transformational loss is entropy. Like the automobile, our bodies, our implements, our machines, all plants and animals, everything is always in the process of becoming, of transforming. Nothing is static. Even when we work to improve something, we use up energy and resources to maintain or enhance things. Entropy is inescapable. Even as a write this essay, I have aged, used energy, pencil, paper, put wear on my chair. I have increased entropy.

The physicist James Gleick wrote “curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.” What this says is that the purpose of all life is to hold off entropy, to delay life’s end as best we can. Humans do this in a variety of ways. We eat properly, we exercise, we create medicines, we fortify our homes, our communities, our countries, we invent things that make our life easier, but ironically everything we do creates more entropy, more disorder. Aging and work always produce entropy. That’s why there will never be a machine that can run forever, just as our body eventually wears out through aging and work despite our efforts to maintain.

Thus our purpose here is to value the individual, do what we can to survive through learning, and passing the learning on, but we will always succumb to entropy.

We should live in this world always mindful that it is transitory and infinitesimal. Our aspirations and efforts are of this world, and our work is to extend and enhance life while we are alive. The life forces that sustain life are the sovereignty of the individual, his intrinsic will to seek his telos through effort and awareness and learning through memory to enhance life The three threads of thought are linked with each individual born with the instinct to survive, with memory as the faculty that allows learning to survive and enhance life..

I came to realize over my eight decades that life is about the individual, about me at the center of the universe. Each individual observes his world to find surprises. Surprises are revelations about the world, about life. They come from observation, experience, memories to understand the world and how we survive the bumps and ruts life puts in our road. But the surprise is not out in the world but inside us. We create a world in our minds that's like no one else’s world. It is our memories and interpretation of our experience. The three threads of thought are linked with individuals born with the instinct to survive with memory as the instrument that allows learning endurance, and enhancement.

Life is a gift with the bow on the inside of the box that we untie to find what was there all the time waiting to be opened. What is out in the world, we take in. Everything that matters is inside us. We take it in, form it, and it becomes us and our world. For all of us the universal surprise is the creation within our own minds—the coming of understanding the surprise—the metaphor of our existence, that gives us the gift of our own individual world, our essence, what gives our life meaning. That gift is ours alone. It is like no one else’s gift and there will never be another one like it. It is the measure of the value of our life. That is what matters.