St Andrew's Day '20

Winter's here. Admittedly, I've seen no snow so far except on pictures, but the temperatures are sub-zero every night, and that certainly isn't my idea of autumn.

I wonder what this winter'll be like. I've some tumour again, this time in my belly, which may mean a long sick leave, something I wouldn't mind at all, as long as I could spend most of it on my own, rather than in a hospital. It may also mean the last winter ever for me. Let's hope not.

Kurt Vonnegut: A Man Without a Country

We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we’re making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. [....] I think the planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberculosis, and so on.

(p 79) 

Of course, it's a metaphor, but that doesn't make it any less true. Acting, as most of us do (although most of us live in denial about it), in the après moi le déluge style, is the surest way of making certain the deluge will come. Sooner rather than later, as they say.

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His principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

(p 85) 

I've read this story of his elsewhere, but it's good enough to bear repeating. Given the short time we have on this earth, and how much of it is bad times, we really should take care to notice, to realise it when the good times happen. (In fact I occasionally do notice, recollect the phrase and actually say or mouth it.)