This photo of Paul, one of my favorites, was taken about a
year before he died, seven years ago today.
I’ve been reading about the life/death cycle on earth in its earliest
days---before insects, long before dinosaurs and birds and mammals and flowers---and
clearly from the beginning the main story is life perpetually recreating itself
out of its own dying. It’s consoling, at
least for a moment, to see individual and personal extinction as yet another
example in that grand default scheme. As
Robinson Jeffers says, “If millions are born, millions must die.” Stars do it, even galaxies. Certainly that child born sixty-one years ago
in Urbana, Illinois, never had a chance, along with the rest of us.
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