laptop.
He got to Harvard Square at 9:35 and parked on Massachusetts Avenue, half a mile from the Snow’s house. He opened the envelope, took out the hundred or so sheets of paper.
The first thing that struck him was the heading on the first page: Renaissance, French for rebirth. The second was Snow’s handwriting: The printed characters were so small they were barely legible. There had to be a thousand words to a page. Some were circled, some boxed, some underlined. Sentences blew past the margin, climbed to the top of the page, flipped upside-down and streaked across the top, continuing down the other side, as though Snow’s thoughts met no resistance.
Clevenger fanned the pages, saw the text interrupted in places by schematic drawings and mathematical calculations.
Then Clevenger noticed something else: There were no mistakes — not a single word crossed out or written over. Each and every tiny letter was perfectly inked. Amidst what looked like chaos there was absolute order, like a puzzle of a hundred-thousand pieces fitting together to from a perfect maze.
He started reading, sometimes turning the page sideways or upside-down to follow the text.
RENAISSANCE
We exist inside our bodies, but separate from them.
By law, a person of sound mind is allowed to let his body die, to refuse medical care that would sustain it, in accordance with his or her religious beliefs. Because that person’s religion asserts that the survival of the soul is paramount .
We exist inside our bodies, but separate from them.
A fetus lives inside a woman. But by the law of the land, that woman can decide to remove that part of her biology as inconsistent with her life story .
One step further. What if the spirit residing inside the body of a man or a woman wishes to be rid of the particular biology binding him to all relationships from the past ? For biology and nothing more does so, nests of neurons in the cingulated gyrus, temporal lobe and hippocampus. What if the memories encoded there are no longer consistent with his sense of self? What if he knows this spiritually with the same fervor that a woman can know she is not compatible with the life stirring inside her womb?
The man knows his spirit could still soar if not shackled to the past. He suffers greatly for his bondage, unable to move in the direction of his dreams. Why is that man worthy of less concern than the others? Why should his soul not be set free? Why should his spirit age and die in lock step with the body, when in truth it can be reborn by simply removing the appropriate obstacles in the nervous system?
I am this man, strangled by tethers that bind me to a loveless marriage, to children I am no father to, to friends and a business partner who are those things in name only. I wish to be free of them all.
My story has gone wrong, and I long to write another.
Let them have their lives and let me have mine. But let me truly begin anew, unencumbered by even a distant memory of them. Because then they will have no claim on me.
The man they knew will be dead .
And I will be reborn .
The medical science to achieve this personal renaissance is at hand. Do I have the right to use it? Is it moral to cleave myself from the past, to move cleanly on from my current life story to begin another?
Snow had stopped writing there, filling the next few pages with drawings and calculations. The drawings were three-dimensional and highly detailed, depicting a cylinder in various positions — lying flat, at a thirty-degree angle, a forty-five degree angle, upright. In one rendering Snow had drawn arrows to indicate the cylinder spinning counterclockwise, in another clockwise. In still others, it tumbled end-over-end.
The calculations looked like lengthy solutions to physics equations. Beneath them, Snow had written, ‘Every Action Causes an UNEQUAL and Opposite Reaction.’
Clevenger flipped the page and
He got to Harvard Square at 9:35 and parked on Massachusetts Avenue, half a mile from the Snow’s house. He opened the envelope, took out the hundred or so sheets of paper.
The first thing that struck him was the heading on the first page: Renaissance, French for rebirth. The second was Snow’s handwriting: The printed characters were so small they were barely legible. There had to be a thousand words to a page. Some were circled, some boxed, some underlined. Sentences blew past the margin, climbed to the top of the page, flipped upside-down and streaked across the top, continuing down the other side, as though Snow’s thoughts met no resistance.
Clevenger fanned the pages, saw the text interrupted in places by schematic drawings and mathematical calculations.
Then Clevenger noticed something else: There were no mistakes — not a single word crossed out or written over. Each and every tiny letter was perfectly inked. Amidst what looked like chaos there was absolute order, like a puzzle of a hundred-thousand pieces fitting together to from a perfect maze.
He started reading, sometimes turning the page sideways or upside-down to follow the text.
RENAISSANCE
We exist inside our bodies, but separate from them.
By law, a person of sound mind is allowed to let his body die, to refuse medical care that would sustain it, in accordance with his or her religious beliefs. Because that person’s religion asserts that the survival of the soul is paramount .
We exist inside our bodies, but separate from them.
A fetus lives inside a woman. But by the law of the land, that woman can decide to remove that part of her biology as inconsistent with her life story .
One step further. What if the spirit residing inside the body of a man or a woman wishes to be rid of the particular biology binding him to all relationships from the past ? For biology and nothing more does so, nests of neurons in the cingulated gyrus, temporal lobe and hippocampus. What if the memories encoded there are no longer consistent with his sense of self? What if he knows this spiritually with the same fervor that a woman can know she is not compatible with the life stirring inside her womb?
The man knows his spirit could still soar if not shackled to the past. He suffers greatly for his bondage, unable to move in the direction of his dreams. Why is that man worthy of less concern than the others? Why should his soul not be set free? Why should his spirit age and die in lock step with the body, when in truth it can be reborn by simply removing the appropriate obstacles in the nervous system?
I am this man, strangled by tethers that bind me to a loveless marriage, to children I am no father to, to friends and a business partner who are those things in name only. I wish to be free of them all.
My story has gone wrong, and I long to write another.
Let them have their lives and let me have mine. But let me truly begin anew, unencumbered by even a distant memory of them. Because then they will have no claim on me.
The man they knew will be dead .
And I will be reborn .
The medical science to achieve this personal renaissance is at hand. Do I have the right to use it? Is it moral to cleave myself from the past, to move cleanly on from my current life story to begin another?
Snow had stopped writing there, filling the next few pages with drawings and calculations. The drawings were three-dimensional and highly detailed, depicting a cylinder in various positions — lying flat, at a thirty-degree angle, a forty-five degree angle, upright. In one rendering Snow had drawn arrows to indicate the cylinder spinning counterclockwise, in another clockwise. In still others, it tumbled end-over-end.
The calculations looked like lengthy solutions to physics equations. Beneath them, Snow had written, ‘Every Action Causes an UNEQUAL and Opposite Reaction.’
Clevenger flipped the page and
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