Another Choice

Be it an effect of hazard or chance, be it the working of fate, a disease may enter the house, an accident may occur, a violence may strike.

***

The very hour of birth is, one may say, presided over by death.

For it is on an underlying substratum of fear, anxiety, doubts and worry that the mother must join to an act of faith and invoke the innate trust in her own body so as to fight off the shadow encircling the scene with images of terrible outcomes, even while every other person present must, according to one’s own nature, push back and dispel these dark formations, or else seek comfort in a variety of superstitious postures. In such instants, those who dare affirm the sovereignty of Life run the risk of being silently cursed or surreptitiously pointed at with the “evil eye” for showing such arrogant temerity in their confidence when in fact, sooner or later, the law of suffering and death shall impose itself.

***

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