La Peste

My oldest daughter Arwynn was sick with swine flu on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week. She had a high fever, the shakes and vomiting. It's funny how it takes something like that to throw everything into a proper perspective. Nothing else mattered to me but that she got better. And slowly as her fever broke and we held her hand she did get better.
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Life is so tenuous. My mum is a cancer survivor, my little brother right now is serving with the British forces in Afghanistan. I don't have these problems. The writer's life is easy by comparison. I'll be the first to admit that things are pretty bad out there at the moment, the economy sucks, no one's buying books and much of the time the work of the mediocre and the connected gets the attention of the mediocre and the connected; but death is long - as Stanley Kubrick has Private Joker say in Full Metal Jacket "the dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive." We are all lucky to be here, the odds were stacked against every one of us being born. Some day of course we are all going to die and our sun is going to die and all the suns are going to die. Given enough time matter itself breaks down into its component particles so that eventually nothing of humanity will be left. The whole history of our civilization's rise and fall and rise and fall and all of its characters good and evil won't even be a rumour. Shelly's Ozymandias at least had something left in the desert, we won't have anything, there won't even be a desert. Which is why living itself in Camus' phrase is "heroic" - we struggle and fail and struggle again but we, like Sisyphus, should consider ourselves happy - in the face of eternal darkness, life is a brief, defiant flickering candle. To live at all is miracle enough.