1 result for (book:nome AND session:840 AND stemmed:whatev)
[... 7 paragraphs ...]
(“What,” I wrote for the 836th session, “is the real relationship between the host organism and disease?” Recently Jane and I talked about the evident worldwide eradication of smallpox, as announced earlier this month by WHO — the World Health Organization — and wondered if the disease has truly been eliminated. [WHO won’t officially declare smallpox done away with for a year or so, while waiting to see if any new cases surface.] Or would smallpox appear again, say 10 years from now? Obviously, I said to Jane more than once, if as an entity smallpox could “think” as we do, it would hardly consider itself bad, or such an awful disease or scourge. If it was so terrible, why did it ever exist within nature’s framework to begin with? What was its role in the whole panoply of life forms? Could the “disease” ever move from whatever probability it now occupies back into our own reality some day, thus appearing to have regenerated itself? What would we humans say if that happened? Smallpox’s reappearance would undoubtedly be rationalized: It had lain hidden or dormant in some uninvestigated pocket of humanity; or it was a mutation, somehow “evolving” into smallpox from one of the closely related animal poxes.
[... 24 paragraphs ...]
I might add here another insight into the relationship between Jane and Seth — the kind of information we continue to search for. Before holding the 836th session, Jane had found herself mourning the possibility that Billy might die. From Seth she then picked up material to the effect that “time was in the present to the cat … in a way its life was eternal to it, whether it lived 10 months or 10 years, or whatever.” At the time (she wrote later for me) emotionally she objected strenuously to that message of Seth’s, since “it seemed too easy a way to sign off a cat’s life — or any other life — even if it was true. And I did accept that it was true, or as close to the truth as we could get….
[... 18 paragraphs ...]