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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| A horse walks into a bar. Bartender says: hey, buddy, Why the Long Face?  Sadness makes us seem nobler, more elegant, more adult. Which is pretty weird, when you think about it. Now, this article, from aeon, is over 10 years old. I doubt the human expression of emotion has changed much since then, though. Surely what people want is to be happy. Whole philosophies (I’m looking at you, utilitarianism) rest on the premise that more happiness is always and everywhere a good thing. I've been railing against this for years now. I almost wish I'd seen this article back when it first came out; I might have saved a lot of typing. It’s good to be happy sometimes, of course. Yet the strange truth is that we don’t wish to be happy all the time. You know who's happy all the time? Idiots, dogs, and idiot dogs. Perhaps there’s a sense in which emotional variety is better than monotony, even if the monotone is a happy one. But there’s more to it than that, I think. We value sadness in ways that make happiness look a bit simple-minded. Like I said. There's a dialogue from the popular episode "Blink," from Doctor Who. The one with the Weeping Angels, if you're wondering. It predated this article by about seven years, so I don't know, maybe the author was thinking about it, too. Most people, if they remember it at all, know some Doctor quotes from it: "Don't blink," and "timey-wimey." But the one that stuck out to me was: SALLY: I love old things. They make me feel sad. KATHY: What's good about sad? SALLY: It's happy for deep people. And that's the part that really stayed with me, because that's me. Sadness inspires great art in a way that grinningly eating ice cream in your underpants cannot. In his essay ‘Atrabilious Reflections upon Melancholy’ (1823), Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor) praised melancholy as a more refined state of mind than happiness. Okay, sure, fine, but... "atrabilious?" Apparently it means bad-tempered. Maybe someone else already knew that. I didn't. I'll have to start describing myself that way. Melancholy, Coleridge is arguing, is more dignified than happiness. I suspect this is a sense that most people have – that joy is, at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped. Which is what I've been trying to say. It takes more muscles to frown than smile, and maybe that’s the point. It signals ones capacity to squander a resource precisely by squandering it. Any fool can live and be happy. It takes greater strength to live and be sad. Why bother expending the energy at all? Unless I'm responding to someone, my face stays neutral. No muscles involved, except maybe the occasional involuntary eyetwitch when I see some idiot touting the pursuit of happiness. So, in summary, this article made me happy. Briefly. |
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