...scarecely visible trace of beauty...

I said, "You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother".

As gorgeous as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is, and as much as Ira from Fiction will berate me for saying so, "Immortality" is one of the most perfect novels ever written and clearly the jem in Milan Kundera's work. A comprehensive, all-encompassing story that is completely beguiling in itself, but that also draws together all the themes of our lives in a way you never thought, but once it is vocalized, makes perfect sense.

The quote at the beginning instantaneously reminded me of someone in my life. More or less in my life. And I was about to contact him and tell him of that fact when I decided that today I feel rather less than more, and so I didn't. But it is a rather fitting line, regardless.

Some human beings are not people, and there may well be people who are not human beings. A man or woman whose consciousness has been permanently obliterated but who remains alive is a human being which is no longer a person; defective human beings, with no appreciable mental capacity, are not and presumably never will be people; and a fetus is a human being which is snot yet a person, and which therefore cannot coherently be said to have full moral rights.

Mary Ann Warren, on abortion, why it should be legal and the extension of her arguments to other cases of "non-personhood". This lends itself to a frightening justification of involuntary euthanasia, or infanticide, or any other manifestation of ranking personhood. Incidentally, her argument is wrought with inconsistency, as when she objects to the killings of dolphins and chimpanzees who possess person-like characteristics. Well, a human infant certainly possesses more person-like characteristics than a dolphin. Do you want to explain that please?

Apparently she doesn't want to explain that. The article ends with a pretentious account of it being "a philosopher's task to criticize mistaken beliefs which stand in the way of moral understanding". And that's all she wrote...

*Le sigh*. Bed now, class in the morning. Class with a minorly awkwardness-inducing TA in the morning. This will be unprecedented, I shall keep thee abreast of developments.