Monday, February 04, 2002
I slept seven whole hours last night, with only moderate nightmares. And another 1,250+ words of Chapter Two of Low Red Moon today. I expect to be finished with Chapter Two on Wednesday, at the latest.
Our brief, pretend spring has passed and it's cold again.
Sometimes I try to remember my life before computers. Before the internet. When I wrote everything on a rusty old Royal typewriter that had belonged to my grandmother.
Perhaps my grandmother sometimes thinks, Sometimes I try to remember my life before television . . .
Ann Radcliffe. A great difference between terror and horror.
When I was in college, I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture on chimpanzees by Dr. Jane Goodall. She described a group of chimps that she'd watched reacting to an enormous waterfall. Clearly it disturbed them greatly. They seemed terrified. They would cower and peer out at it from between their fingers. But again and again, they would return to see that damned waterfall. And "I began to suspect," said Dr. Goodall, "that I was watching the origins of religion."
Those things unimaginably more powerful, more grand, more beautiful, more terrible than a chimp. Or ourselves.
"Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakes the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them."
I watched a tornado once, from a mountaintop.
I think I'll go to bed and read. It's not quite as good as sleeping, but at least there are no computer screens, no dpi, no html. The bedroom is the one part of the apartment that I insist remains absolutely computer free. The clock winds. The telephone is vintage '30s Bakelite - not microchips, not even a transistor. I haven't yet banned electricity from the bedroom, but the thought has crossed my mind on more than one occassion. It's not an easy thing, being a Luddite and a geek.
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