Frailty. It’s a thing capable of stirring many emotions. Revulsion, disgust, pity, worry, anger, wonder, even adoration. Also, it’s where we’re all headed; old age, illness, debility; the myriad maladies that await us around blind bends. It is our starting point and our ending, birth and death.
As children, it grants us the adoration of family and friends. Fumbling in swaddled cotton, arms flailing like excited wobbling windmills, our small grasping hands strive to make meaning of the world around us. An infant innocence invites love; it charms those that have aged, those that know the indiscriminate sharpness of pain. Then, when we grow up and have children of our own, the experience of childbirth instills a sense of magic and wonder, informing us of what we once were. How frail and delicate and soft, like florets to a lion’s tooth.
In adolescence we see another face of frailty, manifested in mockery and derision. For the perpetrator it is a weakness of character, an insecure need to assert strength and attempt dominance by exploiting the deficiency of another. For the recepient of the attack there is an outward anger directed at the accuser, and then an inward infliction of self loathing. We begin to shape our sense of identity through the perceived limitations brought to our attention by others. They become imaginary handicaps made real by reflection and reinforced by repetition.
We pity those dejected, those who’ve been ostracized and maimed by others; sometimes it’s us — the shunned or the shunning. We pity the homeless, the disabled, the hungry, the sick and dying. Partly because we know what it is to feel, but more importantly, it is fear. The only thing separating us from them, is one not-yet-born calamity. It is the admission and acknowledgement of our own fragility. Then pity slowly turns to disgust as we try to distance ourselves from the haunting realization, shutting down our faculties for empathy and boarding up our doors to prevent contamination.
Soon our futile self-imposed quarantine from frailty results in a metastisizing state of fretting and worry. Our minds become preoccupied with all the potential known and unknowns intent on undoing our health and happiness. We become beset by beguiling fears and phobias, caught up and ensnared inside webs of waiting; expecting to be executed or impaired by a malevolent cell or a mutinous strand of DNA, a thief in the street or a fall in the shower, a plane crash or a car accident, a rare difficult-to-detect and not-yet-known virus, meningitis, pneumonia or the flu. We become disgusted by the prospect of our old age, reviled more each second it approaches.
Where with our nascent frailty there was once the promise of prowess, there is now only the promise of death deterioration and decay. It is the heart of horror.
As children, it grants us the adoration of family and friends. Fumbling in swaddled cotton, arms flailing like excited wobbling windmills, our small grasping hands strive to make meaning of the world around us. An infant innocence invites love; it charms those that have aged, those that know the indiscriminate sharpness of pain. Then, when we grow up and have children of our own, the experience of childbirth instills a sense of magic and wonder, informing us of what we once were. How frail and delicate and soft, like florets to a lion’s tooth.
In adolescence we see another face of frailty, manifested in mockery and derision. For the perpetrator it is a weakness of character, an insecure need to assert strength and attempt dominance by exploiting the deficiency of another. For the recepient of the attack there is an outward anger directed at the accuser, and then an inward infliction of self loathing. We begin to shape our sense of identity through the perceived limitations brought to our attention by others. They become imaginary handicaps made real by reflection and reinforced by repetition.
We pity those dejected, those who’ve been ostracized and maimed by others; sometimes it’s us — the shunned or the shunning. We pity the homeless, the disabled, the hungry, the sick and dying. Partly because we know what it is to feel, but more importantly, it is fear. The only thing separating us from them, is one not-yet-born calamity. It is the admission and acknowledgement of our own fragility. Then pity slowly turns to disgust as we try to distance ourselves from the haunting realization, shutting down our faculties for empathy and boarding up our doors to prevent contamination.
Soon our futile self-imposed quarantine from frailty results in a metastisizing state of fretting and worry. Our minds become preoccupied with all the potential known and unknowns intent on undoing our health and happiness. We become beset by beguiling fears and phobias, caught up and ensnared inside webs of waiting; expecting to be executed or impaired by a malevolent cell or a mutinous strand of DNA, a thief in the street or a fall in the shower, a plane crash or a car accident, a rare difficult-to-detect and not-yet-known virus, meningitis, pneumonia or the flu. We become disgusted by the prospect of our old age, reviled more each second it approaches.
Where with our nascent frailty there was once the promise of prowess, there is now only the promise of death deterioration and decay. It is the heart of horror.
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