ᚩ ᛭ ᛉ ᛭ ᛟ

i ask for very little and receive even less

The line between what he wanted to do and what he should do was so fragile that any small thing could tip the scale and decide it for him.

“Jews have six senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing, and memory… for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain—that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”

"But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills. Well, I was young..."

It was around this time that the venerable institution of the pharmakos was discontinued in ancient Greece. As late as 600 B.C., every sizable city maintained on the municipal budget an assortment of crippled, imbecilic, leprous, or otherwise useless wretches in a shed by the main gate. Whenever a great common affliction arose, like a plague or famine, one of these degraded souls was selected as the pharmakos, to be stoned to death in the marketplace by able-bodied citizens. From this sacrificial cure for plague, peril and pestilence our own word pharmacology—the science of drugs, their preparation, uses and effects—was derived.