Day 90

Frankenburg, R.J.

... the only really effective way of changing health patterns is to change the cultural norms of behaviour. The reaction of health promoters to this difficulty is saturation with oversimplified messages which distort academic epidemiological findings by converting statistical risks into individual possibilities stated as qualitative probabilities and interpreted as certainties, even null hypotheses. The result is that the more widespread the awareness of risk factors, the more they are seen as being daily refuted by the anomalous life of ‘Uncle Norman’ and others.

The impact of HIV/AIDS on concepts relating to risk and culture within British community epidemiology: candidates or targets for prevention Social Science in Medicine 38 (1994) 1325–1335.

Day 89

Forster, E.M. (1879—1970)

Information is true if it is accurate. A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute.

In Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing edited by Hoffman.

Day 88

Márquez, G. G. (1928—)

We not only believed in poetry, and would have died for it, but we also knew with certainty—as Luids Cardoza y Aragon wrote—that “poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man”.

Living to Tell the Tale (Vintage Books, Ransom House, New York, 2004) p. 277.

Day 87

Hanley, G.

True solitude is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace. In solitude, once the taste has settled, a man can think upon death with as much pleasure as upon life, and it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, and that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.

Thousands of days and nights spent in the wilderness taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying. A man can never convey fully what it is that so strangely disturbs him, the uneasy unrest in him that nothing material can properly satisfy. It is a fear of accepting this which makes a man most fear what he thinks to be loneliness, a being alone, without other people…

Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis (Eland, London, 1993)