“The house is special,” said the Chief. “Part of its being special is its affiliation with the BMS [Best Medical School]. I want to tell you a story about the BMS, that showed me how special the BMS and the House are. It’s a story about a BMS doctor and a BMS nurse named Peg. It showed me what it is like to be affiliated with the …”

My mind wandered. The Leggo was a less chubby version of the Fish, as if, given the fact that the Leggo had published rather than perished to become Chief, all the human juice had been sucked out of him, and he had been left drained, dehydrated, even uremic. So this was the top of the cone, when finally, and with all men, as Chief, one was perpetually more slurped against than slurping.

“… and so Peg came up to me with a surprised look on her face and said ‘Doctor Leggo, how could you wonder whether that order had been done? When a BMS doctor tells a BMS nurse to do something, you can be sure it will be done, and it will be done right.’”

He paused, as if expecting applause. He was met with silence. I yawned, and realized that my mind had gone straight to f***ing.

And this one is my favorite in the whole book:

I sat in the E.W. nursing station thinking about how the Leggo and the Fish had blessed our ward with “the toughies,” the dying young, like Jimmy, like my friend Dr. Sanders, out there on his last fishing trip before his last autumn-

“That’s tough to do, to face the dying and the dead.”

I looked up. It was one of the policemen, the fat one, Gilheeny.

“Strength of character,” said the other one, Quick, “it doesn’t grow on trees.”

“Nor can one buy it in any store,” said the redhead. “It’s the toilet training that does it, I do believe. So said Freud and Cohen.”

“Where did an Irish cop learn about Freud?” I asked.

“Where? Why, here, man, here, from spending the last twenty years here, five nights a week; in trialogues of discussion with fine young overeducated men like you. Better than night school, more broad and useful. And we get paid to attend.”

“Not only that,” said Quick, “but all the different viewpoints contribute. Over twenty years one learns a good deal. Currently a surgeon named Gath brings the news from the Southern Rim, and with Cohen we are in the middle of a gold mine of psychoanalytical thought.”

“Who is Cohen?”

“A sophisticated, jocular, and unrestrained resident in psychiatry,” said Quick. “A textbook in himself.”

“You must make his acquaintance,” said Gilheeng. Twitching his red eyebrows so that they coerced the rest of his fat face into a gap-toothed smile, he went on, “We can hardly wait to hear from a Rhodes Scholar like yourself, a man with high qualities of body and mind, with experience gleaned from corners of the round globe, like England, France, and the Emerald Isle, which I have visited only twice.”

“A textbook in yourself,” said Quick.

A farm, or chacra, near Huaraz.

This passage is from Sarity Colonia Comes Flying by Eduardo Gonazález Viaña and found in The Peru Reader. A group of friends attempt to rid themselves of a snake that is at the command of an evil sorcerer.

* * *

Don Guillermo’s remedy for scaring away the snake consisted of boiling heavily salted water in twenty cans. To know if there was enough salt, one had to put a potato in the water and see if it floated. Then we were supposed to dump the salty water on the land around the house. That way, the snake would think he was at sea. Being a land animal, he would never return.

I guess the snake didn’t buy this little ruse, maybe because he already knew about the trick. As you know, Don Guillermo is a journalist in Huancayo and writes a famous column on home remedies. I’m not trying to say that snakes can read, but that at least some of them know how to float.

Maggie, Dad, and me

Me and Paul and our disgust of our high school parking lot

Reading before catching a bus in L.A.

A stunningly beautiful day in Gent, Belgium

My name in matches by a friend in Quito, Ecuador

I was just going through some old photographs with a friend here in Lima. The photos brought back many vivid memories, memories I probably wouldn’t have been able to mentally summon without the assistance of an image. The photos transported me into the past, but also emphasized how much life has changed. I was reminded of a passage in John Berger’s book A Seventh Man: Migrant workers in Europe:.

A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: ‘Did you come by photograph or by train? All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence.

“All photographs are a form of transport.” I think that line encapsulates why I love taking photographs so much: The resulting pictures allow others to transport into my moments, and they allow me to transport into my own previous moments.

I hope my time in Peru offers me many rich opportunities to create images that serve these goals.

John Berger's A Fortunate Man

Is time linear? I am 24 years old. How much of my life has passed?

Reflecting on these questions and the relative “oldness” I have felt recently, I have found the following passage — from John Berger’s little book A Fortunate Man: The story of a country doctor — useful and thought-provoking:

It is a platitude that as we grow older time seems to pass more quickly. The remark is usually made nostalgically. But we seldom consider the contrary effect of the same process – the elongation of time as it must affect the young and very young. The young themselves can say little about it, because they only have a standard of judgement when they become aware of time changing its pace and by then it’s too late for any direct evidence. If we knew how long a night or a day was to a child, we might understand a great deal more about childhood. Could it not be that the deeply formative nature of early childhood experience is due not only to the force of its impact (a force measured by the child’s relative weakness) but also to the fact that by the child’s own reckoning the experiences continue for so long? It may be that, subjectively, a childhood is at least equal in length to the rest of a lifetime. The phenomenon of old people, when their daily practical preoccupations are reduced to a minimum, remembering more and more clearly more and more about their childhood may confirm this; subjectively, their childhood was perhaps most of their life.

Dr. Paul Farmer. (Source.)

—Paul Farmer, doctor for the poor, via Aids and Accusation

—Aracoun, Wikipedia extroadinaire, courtesy of The New Yorker

—Virginia Woolf, British novelist and essayist

1. At the end of his second term in 1961, Eisenhower was the oldest President to serve, at 70 years and 98 days — a record later broken by Ronald Reagan.
2. Eisenhower was the first President affected by the 22nd Amendment, which limited presidential terms.
3. Eisenhower was the last U.S. president who was born in the 19th century.
4. Gerald Ford considered the best presidents in the “last 50 years” to be Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, according to the Grand Rapids Press.
5. And, most importantly, Eisenhower has been portrayed by several actors, including Tom Selleck (emphasis mine; it’s fricken Tom Selleck! What a moustache!).

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower: American servant

]]> http://davidcflood.com/weblog/2007/01/19/quote-times-the-general/feed/ 0 http://davidcflood.com/weblog/2007/01/13/quote-times-from-mars/ http://davidcflood.com/weblog/2007/01/13/quote-times-from-mars/#comments Sat, 13 Jan 2007 08:17:26 +0000 David http://davidcflood.com/weblog/2007/01/13/quote-times-from-mars/ (Note: This quote comes from one of my heroes, Nobel Prize laureate and curious character, Richard Feynman (1918-1988). I’d like to write more about him in the future.)


If a martian (who, we’ll imagine never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come—it would look to him like a terrible problem of pyschology to live under these cirumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans some how figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.

—Richard Feyman: scientist, teacher, raconteur, and musician

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