Above: Me, walking on a pedestrian sign.
The paths around the lakes are clearly marked, with the bike paths being One Way. People will chide you if you go the wrong way or are in the wrong lane.
When I went to Italy for the first time, I was shocked to see people STANDING in walking paths, talking to one another. Other Italians walked around them without concern.
I liked it.
Here, walkers would disapprovingly tell you to stand aside.
As I walked home along the lake path last night, I photographed people's feet and legs--fun to do, but the results were mostly not worth sharing.
Well, this one... It looks like I saturated the colors in iPhoto, but it was the low angle of the sun at 8 p.m. that made them glow.
Below: the swimming beach. Adding to the glow, smoke from Canadian wildfires again.
Below: Me, reflected in the window of the Greek Orthodox Church, with an icon on the other side of the window.
I took this with Marz in mind because she likes this church.
She'll likely not be online in Spain--there used to be pay computers in pilgrim hostels, but not now most people have smartphones (not Marz tho'). But Marz--if you see this--the Theotokos here says hello!
The "One Way" mentality--even in parks--is good for traffic safety. I think we have far fewer accidents among Things in Motion than Rome does.
Our tidy-mindedness can also mask or corral things we want to keep out of sight, which can be good (garbage cans!), and not so good (inconvenient truths--they're in play whether we see them or not)...
Is risk our business? The Giver
What's the best relationship between conformity, risk, and freedom?
The original Star Trek (1966-69) was always asking this, and over and over it plumped for risk. Captain Kirk makes a speech to the crew, when asking for volunteers for a dangerous exploration:
"Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her."The children's novel The Giver (1993) asks the same question. Have you read it? That book was mentioned in an adult novel I liked, The Borrower (2011), by Rebecca Makkai, about a librarian who "borrows" her favorite ten-year-old patron, Ian, when she finds him hiding in the library because his mother has enrolled him in anti-gay classes.
But, he adds, "You may dissent without prejudice."
The novel mentions lots of kids books--here's a list of them.
Rebecca Makkai said:
"Of this list, there are a few I’d certainly recommend more than others.
If you were ten years old and I had three minutes to fill your backpack with books, the ones I’d pick would be
The Westing Game, The Giver, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Egypt Game, The Twenty-One Balloons,
and The Princess Bride.
Oh, and The Pushcart War. (It’s hard to stop.)"
I'd looked that list up recently because of my plan to (re)read children's books. I haven't read half those books.
The next day The Giver was donated at work and I decided to read it because it makes so many "Best of" lists.
I'd have loved it when I was ten!
It's about a boy, Jonas, who lives in a peaceful community of the future, where no one would walk on a bike path or bike in the wrong direction. Or, if they did too many times, they'd be "released" from the community. An adult reader can guess right away that that's a euphemism.
Jonas discovers that long ago the community's founders chose "Sameness" as a way to ensure social harmony. He thinks it is a good choice––"if people choose their spouses and their jobs, they might choose wrongly"––and then he discovers the price.
The Giver is fairly simplistic, fitting for ten year olds, but it raises complicated questions with big extension---like, does "don't say gay" make gayness go away? *
The book's been banned in some places.
Its author, Lois Lowry, says of bannings and challenges:
“I think banning books is a very, very dangerous thing. It takes away an important freedom. Any time there is an attempt to ban a book, you should fight it as hard as you can.
It’s okay for a parent to say, ‘I don’t want my child to read this book.’ But it is not okay for anyone to try to make that decision for other people.
The world portrayed in The Giver is a world where choice has been taken away. It is a frightening world. Let’s work hard to keep it from truly happening.”
--from The Banned Books Project at Carnegie Mellon U [spoilers]
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* Side note about "don't say gay".
I was just
reading about puppy pregnancy syndrome (< that links to Wikipedia--here's an article in Scientific America)--an example of a "culture-bound syndrome": in a certain areas in West Bengal, India, people, including men, believe they can be impregnated
with puppies via dog bite.
This is not an eternal verity. Don’t say puppy pregnancy.