{"id":356,"date":"2009-06-10T19:54:19","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T00:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=356"},"modified":"2011-01-20T18:32:05","modified_gmt":"2011-01-20T23:32:05","slug":"the-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=356","title":{"rendered":"The Hunter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now his wars on God begin;
\nAt stroke of midnight God shall win.<\/em><\/p>\n

W. B. Yeats, The Four Ages of Man<\/em>, last stanza<\/p>\n

\"tristan-mikkelsen\"Two years ago, cancer struck me out of the clear blue sky at a moment in my life when I was gathering my strength for relaunching my research. I had just received two very hard-won grants after a lapse in funding that had essentially closed down my lab. The disease was at its early stages and I was spared the agony of chemotherapy, although some after-effects of the surgery (most prominently, severe fibromyalgia) are still with me.<\/p>\n

I now know the paralyzing fear and the overwhelming anger as the disease takes over not only your body but your mind, the once wide-open life turning suddenly into a prison, the horrifying sense of being alone, the excruciating pain and discomfort from the treatments, the abject humiliation of not being able to control even basic functions of your once perfectly-allied body, the guilt of becoming a burden to those who love you.<\/p>\n

We all die in the end, and we all hope that we will act well when our moment comes. But such heroic stances may only be possible if we die in a manner of our own choosing and if we die quickly. The lingering diseases that our lengthened lifespan has brought us — diabetes, neurodegeneration, cancer — don’t lend themselves to such treatment. They require even greater stoicism and a different kind of bravery.<\/p>\n

\"footprint-on-sand\"I don’t believe in gods or an afterlife. Yet perhaps the only myth that can sustain us in such circumstances is Poul Anderson’s of the Ythrian Hunter God, a story that the medieval Greeks also told in their folksongs of Dighen\u00eds Akr\u00edtas: The Hunter will always prevail. The only thing you can do is give him a good hunt, for your own honor if not for his. Keep as much of your self and your life intact as long as you can. And do what you can to be long remembered, to leave that tiny footprint in the sand that will eventually get filled and smoothed away by the tide.<\/p>\n

‘I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself; unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’<\/em><\/p>\n

The waves broke on the shore.<\/em><\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf, The Waves<\/em>, final sentences<\/p>\n

Top: Mads Mikkelsen as Tristan in Antoine Fuqua\u2019s King Arthur;<\/em> Bottom: Plaka Sands, Naxos, Greece (John Block)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now his wars on God begin; At stroke of midnight God shall win. W. B. Yeats, The Four Ages of Man, last stanza Two years ago, cancer struck me out of the clear blue sky at a moment in my life when I was gathering my strength for relaunching my research. I had just received […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-biology-and-culture","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}