My Mother...

Books. When I think of my Mother, I think of nothing so much as her devotion to books. Books not for their own sake, but for their function as the storehouse of ideas. For her, human thought was all that was truly holy about us, and books were the repository of those thoughts. She read vociferously, carnivorously, anything and everything that interested her. She did not read for recreation, she read as she breathed, for her very survival. I often think of the old woman of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", who immolates herself and her library, rather than submit to the state's "firemen", and think how easily, cheerfully, my Mother would have done the same.

You see, my Mother's reverence for thought, unexpurgated and unsullied by intellectual cowardice and conformity, was matched only by her loathing of the latter. Independence and freedom of the mind and conscience of the individual, were as inviolate to her as any sanctified space is to the most religious of souls. Anything and everything must always be open to question, nothing must ever be permitted to exist free of criticism, analysis, or contest. No question is ever "settled", but merely sidelined until better evidence or a more elegant hypothesis comes along. No individual or collective opinion must ever be regarded as infallible, as nothing human can ever be so. Acquire the evidence, consider it, weigh it, and draw your own conclusions. Trust no "authority", no intellectual "knight in shining armor" come to rescue you from ignorance, for only you can do that.

My Mother passed away this Tuesday, the 8th of December 2009. In the end, death came for her, as he comes to us all, but carried away only her life, which was the least significant of her possessions. He could not take her freedom, her independence, her dignity, her courage, or her spirit. Nor could he take the love of her sons, her family, or of all those who knew, admired, and loved her.