🔝 What’s going on, Cat Daddy?

So many books still to read and re-read. I position the magnifying glass above the page in the haze of failing eyesight. The magnifying glasses are getting larger. It’s a race between blindness and death.

When death comes, all reading ends. There would be nothing I would want to read then anyway. I have no interest in reading ‘The Eternal Darkness’ by that extraordinarily clever, universally known but notoriously reclusive trickster, G. Od.

Mark Twain once wrote, ‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’

If the politicians and barbarians of the world would read that quote and take it to heart, maybe they would stop trying to annihilate this imperceptible flicker of life that comes but once in an eon.

On his deathbed, on April 21, 1910, with his daughter Clara and a few others by his side, Mark Twain was too weak to speak clearly. Next to him on the bed was one of his favorite books, Thomas Carlyle’s ‘French Revolution.’ On top of the book were his glasses, which he had put down a few hours earlier. Now, he wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Give me my glasses.’

They were his last words.

He read briefly and again lay the glasses aside. He closed his eyes and drifted off into eternal unconsciousness. He was 74.

I will be a few years older and I hope my last words will be, ‘Give me my magnifying glass,’ with which I will attempt to finish re-reading Erich Maria Remarque’s ‘All Quiet on the Western Front.’ I make it to the last page:

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still the army report confined itself to a single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

I will then put my magnifying glass down and drift off into eternal unconsciousness. 

🔝