A message from the other side.

Part of the misery of losing someone is divvying their remaining material items. My brother left a book that found it's way to me. It is called the "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton. It's a fun little read. Interesting concepts but there was one page that seemed to be left specifically for me from my brother. It is both funny and interesting how we will find and feel these things after some one has passed. But for me I will embrace it what ever "it" may be and share it with you.

"Like many intelligent men, Stone took a rather suspicious attitude toward his own brain, which he saw as a precise and skilled but temperamental machine. He was never surprised when the machine failed to perform, though he feared those moments, and hated them. In his blackest hours, Stone doubted the utility of all thought, and all intelligence. There were times when he envied the laboratory rats he worked with; their brains were so simple. Certainly they did not have the intelligence to destroy themselves; that was a peculiar invention of man.

He often argued that human intelligence was more trouble then it was worth. It was more destructive then creative, more confusing then revealing, more discouraging then satisfying, more spiteful then charitable.

There were times when he saw man, with his giant brain, as the equivalent to dinosaurs. Every schoolboy knew that dinosaurs had outgrown themselves, had become too large and ponderous to be viable. No one ever thought to consider whether the human brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, making fantastic demands on the human body in terms of nourishment and blood, was not analogous. Perhaps the human brain had become a kind of dinosaur for man and perhaps, in the end, would provide his downfall.

Already, the brain consumed one quarter of the body's blood supply. A fourth of all blood pumped from the heart went to the brain, an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more-perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun there hosts and kill the bodies that transported them.

Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he saw nothing more then a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table. No flesh and blood, no hands, no eyes, no finger. No mouths, no sex organs-all these were superfluous.

Just brains. Sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.

Idiotic.

He shook his head, thinking he was becoming like Leavitt, conjuring up wild and improbable schemes.

Yet, there was a sort of logical consequence to Stone's ideas. If you really feared and hated your brain, you would attempt to destroy it. Destroy your own or destroy others.

'I', tired,' he said aloud..."

Hmmm.... Interesting.