Day 227: The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846731.

Some of the characters (I won't say who or why to avoid spoilers) visit the "suburb of the dead."  In this world, people can see their deaths and consider them companions.  They like having them close and always knowing that they are there.  This is obviously a strange and nearly abhorrent idea for most people in our world, since we spend so much of our lives not wanting to die.  But I think people like me can understand it.

For those of you who don't know, I suffer from a mild case of depression which gets kicked up to a less than mild case of depression during times of extreme stress (like being unemployed) or difficult times of the year (such as the anniversary of my room mate's death).  The truth is, I find a great deal of comfort in knowing that my death is nearby.  I also find comfort in knowing that I could easily reach out and grab its hand and just be done with it.  In fact, having that comfort is the only thing that keeps me going some days.  On particularly bad days I will say to myself, "Today is a bad day, and if tomorrow is a bad day and the day after that and the day after that is a bad day, I can have no more days."

Some of you who are shaking your head and saying the ever-so-popular "suicide is a permanent solution" line, I have something to say about that.  Sometimes death is the only solution and the only reason you say that line is because you do not fully understand what people with truly debilitating mental illness are going through.  Even as a mild sufferer there is always a looming worry that I will once again be caught up in a bout of depression, and there is always a fear that it will be deeper and darker and last longer than the one before it.

People who are unfortunate enough to have much more severe cases of depression than mine also have to worry about when their medical cocktails don't work anymore.  I am not talking about people who are on a small dose of Zoloft for their postpartum or because Dad passed away, I am talking about people who have to be medicated and have been medicated ever since they were diagnosed.  I think it is more difficult for them because, sure, they feel good now, but what about next year?  They know bad times are coming again and sometimes there's that urge to go out when you're on top of your game, when you feel good, knowing that you will at least die happy.

These are obviously things that I have thought about at my most depressed.  I don't regret continuing to live, but on some level I do wonder if maybe it would have been the right thing to do.  There are certainly people who care about me in this world, and I would feel bad about leaving them behind, but if it came to a point where I was in so much emotional anguish and pain that I could not stand it anymore and could not conceive a way out for myself, even with the support of my family and friends and doctors and medicine, I would hope that the people closest to me would have the compassion to forgive me and realize that it really was the only way out for me.

I am happy to say that I am not currently depressed.  My life is going pretty well and I'm doing creative things while job hunting.  In fact I try not to think about the job hunting part at all if I can help it, because not thinking about does help to some degree.  If you are concerned about me, please don't be, I have no intention of committing suicide and I doubt that I would be able to go through with it even if I did.  I am not currently medicated and I am about 95% sure that I am afflicted enough for it to actually be helpful.

I'm not advocating suicide.  Not at.  But I do think it is and should be recognized as a last option for people who have long term illnesses, and mental illness in most cases is a lifelong illness.  I think if we openly recognize it as an option, it will remove the stigma of saying, "I want to die and I need help so that I don't want to die."  Telling people that they are weak and taking the coward's way out for wanting to die, does the exact opposite of preventing deaths and does absolutely nothing to relieve the anguish associated with the disease. 

A fabulous summary of the book is over at Book Dweeb and a micro-review over at Books for Breakfast.

Day 226: The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846731.

I love this book for so many reasons.  In fact, I think this is probably the strongest in the series, although a lot of people disagree with me about that.  But this has an incredible amount of world building, and one world in particular made my little nerd heart beat with joy.

That world was the world of the mulefas, which are sentient creatures with strange physiology and a penchant for riding around on giant seedpods.  I won't say much more than that, but Pullman really developed these people in a way that made me want to go out and read as much sci-fi as possible again.  I recognize that this particular work is closer to fantasy, but in this case it was everything that I absolutely love about science fiction, it is what originally drew me to the genre, and what made me start avoiding it as sci-fi writers stopped writing about it so much.  In the cases where sci-fi writers did focus on really truly creating aliens, they often did so only to point out the differences so that the reader would cheer the hero on through the xenomorphic slaughter.

Perhaps this is a little "girly," but I am interested in both the difference and the similarities.  I want to be able to learn about the cultures and the histories of the alien races I'm reading about, and it is incredibly difficult to do that when some human schmuck is busy torching their libraries and stealing all the artifacts from their museums and eating/buggering their zoo animals.  I think it takes a lot more imagination to create a culture for alien peoples than it does to destroy them, and what's more is it's usually more interesting as it forces human characters to look at their own culture, history, and identities in a different way.  If this is something that appeals to you, The Amber Spyglass, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Speaker for the Dead are good places to start.

Can anyone else help a librarian out and recommend good Xeno-centric books?  I'd love to get back into reading sci-fi, but not if I have to keep reading the same old war stories.

A fabulous summary of the book is over at Book Dweeb and a micro-review over at Books for Breakfast.

Day 225: The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846731.

Those of you who remember your Western European (i.e. "world" history) will be familiar with the concept of Indulgences.  These were basically Get Out of Hell Free cards from the Catholic Church, that you could purchase during the Middle Ages.  Ah, apparently someone in the Catholic Church forgot that whole scripture about the camel and the needle and the rich guy not getting into heaven.*  Well, in The Amber Spyglass, apparently you can have your sins forgiven by doing penance in advance through scourging and self-flagellation.  As a side note I love that word because it comes from flagella, which is the tail of a sperm, among other things.  How's that for an image?  Priests whipping themselves with sperm tails, oh yeah, I'm not irreverent at all.

So enough with the potty humor (never!), I hate the idea that any kind of penance can account for the bad things a person has done.  I don't think you can or necessarily should be forgiven for your sins, because that might give you the brilliant idea to go out and do more.  What is the point of stopping if you can just pop into the local Papal Palace of Penance and come out with a supposedly shiny and pine scented soul?  And let's be honest here: giving up some money, even a large portion of it, or hitting yourself (because you damn well know you'll go easy on yourself), is in no way equal to inflicting suffering on someone else, and the very idea that you can erase it is entirely misguided and kind of disgusting.

I am not saying that you should live forever in shame and guilt for the major screw ups you had when you slept with your sister's boyfriend or stole candy from a baby, but you should feel bad about it and it should be on your permanent record.  The more serious the crime, the worse you should feel about it and the longer you should feel bad about it, but having a church absolve a murderer or a rapist or an arsonist or other violent criminal of their sins seems like perpetuation and perhaps even acceptance that people just do these things and we should move on with our lives.

Well, no, that's not right.  Wouldn't the better thing be to say, "If you do this really bad thing you cannot get into heaven, never ever ever ever, no matter how much you wish you hadn't done it."  Maybe it's harsh, but if evil is as black and white as God versus Satan, shouldn't the rules for getting into heaven be as black and white?  Shouldn't it be just as wrong to kill someone drunk driving as it is to kill someone through premeditated murder as it is to kill someone for invading your home as it is to kill someone for defending yourself?** 

It just seems a little too calculated to be able to go and buy or store up your penance, or even in some ways to go to confessional and have someone wave away all the bad things and say, "there, there, do better next time and remember to give to the church."  I do think that confessionals are very useful for people who have done things that they truly regret and want to talk about, but taking the burden from them is like telling a teenager they have a curfew and then saying it's okay when they break it as long as they don't do it again (after they've done it for the fifth time in a row).

If religions are about making us into better people, I cannot see how this is possibly a good thing for our moral and/or spiritual health.  I am sure the Catholic Church is not the only one religion that is guilty of this behavior, but it has such a long history that it's easy for the finger to get pointed that way.

*Matthew 19:23-24 and Mark 10:24-25 (they say it twice, bitches).
**Those last two are merely for the sake of argument; if someone is invading your home (and refuses to leave/is threatening you) or attacking you, by all means kill them.
***Believe it or not, I am not anti-religion, but I do think that logic ought to be applied equally across all aspects of our lives.

A fabulous summary of the book is over at Book Dweeb and a micro-review over at Books for Breakfast.