{"id":136,"date":"2005-05-28T05:03:44","date_gmt":"2005-05-28T09:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/28\/dorothy\/"},"modified":"2005-05-28T05:03:44","modified_gmt":"2005-05-28T09:03:44","slug":"dorothy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/28\/dorothy\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorothy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a902'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An old friend from another life died last month; brilliant, brave, full of remarkable dreams. <i>Unrealized<\/i> dreams.  I hardly knew what to think at the time; we hadn&#8217;t been in touch for years.  But in the weeks since I have despaired of it; I have lost myself.  It has preyed on my thoughts, in a way my grandfather&#8217;s death, and even my <b>father&#8217;s<\/b>, have not.  <\/p>\n<p>I am not a person afraid of <b>mortality<\/b>.  Death is a beautiful part of life; without constraints, freedom and art cannot flourish and  find expression; without the <b>stricture<\/b> of language, we would have no <b>spaceships<\/b>.  Yet there are shades of death&#8230; Recently I have slept dreamlessly, eight hours at a time, something I rarely do.  There are those who might say this is healthy for anyone.  I wake up each morning feeling refreshed; but as soon as I open my eyes, I feel a twinge of senseless fear which only exercise can suppress.<\/p>\n<p>It is <b>too strong<\/b> and insistent to be simply fear for myself &#8212; for who am I? &#8212; but fear for continuity, for those I love, for the dreams I cherish.  Or is it something beyond that?  All I know is that for a while I had to resort to external hints to distinguish one day from the next; I held onto receipts, reviwed my posting and edit histories, sorted my papers and problemsets by last edit, simply to remember what I had been thinking the day (the meal!) before.<\/p>\n<p>In the process I discovered two things:  Wikaddiction is stronger than dirt (surely tapping the same primal urges that fuel <b>Verant<\/b>&#8216;s success), and memorization is successful even when done as a background process.  The last point I knew, but had all but forgotten.<\/p>\n<p>I have neglected posting, and many of you.  If I owe you apologies or regrets, please trust that I will send them.  I have a small list of names here, and am working through them in roughly alphabetical order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An old friend from another life died last month; brilliant, brave, full of remarkable dreams. Unrealized dreams. I hardly knew what to think at the time; we hadn&#8217;t been in touch for years. But in the weeks since I have despaired of it; I have lost myself. It has preyed on my thoughts, in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-null"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}