Long Time, no Blog

Hi people... I'm back. I know, I know, it's been a really long time... so long some of you must have thought I'd given up blogging or else died. Happily, neither of these alarming scenarios was in the vicinity of the truth. This is a lot more mundane- due to an intense attack of relaxophilia, I have been extremely reluctant to begin the lengthy process involved in typing 'www.blogspot.com' and then navigating all the way to the page I am at now, just to type a few lines out in this textbox, especially since most of this is too boring to read anyway.

In simple terms, I was lazy.

I suppose I should probably apologize to my loyal readership. No- wait a minute- I don't have a loyal readership (sigh!). In any case, considering that this blog is meant to be maintained by me alone, I see no good reason to apologize. So, I'm sorry, but I am not apologizing. No, sorry, I don't have to apologize for not apologizing either. Dammit. Take it that this blog contains no apologies whatsoever.

Now, to business. The thing that woke me out of blog-ibernation was the poem "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost. For those fans of literature, who want to read the entire poem before they have a look at my penny'orth of pennings, here's the link: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html
(I provide it here on the condition that I have your word I'll return to this page once you're done. I grant you Frost may be wiser than I am, but I did put some effort into this post, and am not going to be sidetracked, not even by old Bob.)

For those among you who are not particularly inclined to Frost's brand of poetry (which, let's face it, can be frosty at times) or are too impatient to go all the way to the website of the University of Pennsylvania to read poetry (my friend "of the" family of Something, name changed to protect his privacy, springs to mind), here's a synopsis: basically, Bobby doesn't like walls. He feels they're unnatural and thinks there's something out there that wants them down. He puts this thought to his neighbor, who disagrees. This latter gentleman feels that walls actually promote neighborliness. This causes Frost to put him down as some relic of the stone age. The long and short of this is that Robert Frost dislikes walls.

I got a contrary opinion to this some little time ago, from another piece of literature. Okay, a novel- literature is actually stretching things a little far. This is called "The Life of Pi". Now, I never did see how the novel turned out, for which I have my comrade of left-handed virtues to thank. The refused to lend it to me. However, I was reading a section of it, in which the author criticizes the critics of zoos. His argument fundamentally states that a zoo-cage is essentially a "house" to an animal. And they will apparently defend their zoo territory just as fiercely as they would natural territory. As long as their enclosure fulfills all their needs, animals in a zoo will be happiest there, despite all the noise made about "freedom in the wild."

This, I must admit, was a bit of an eye-opener to me, a self- professed animal-lover who was much against zoos. I used to buy into the freedom theory too. Be that as it may, though, the point made sense. After all, how would one of us feel if we were suddenly thrown out of our homes, and told that it was for our freedom? And let's face it, despite all the "higher thinking" rhetoric, we are first and last animals. So perhaps what's good for the goose is good for the gander. (And again, I will not apologize for the cliche, keeping in mind my resolve not to say sorry during this post.)

Which brings me back to walls. Let's look at this thing in reverse perspective. If an animal can at some level think of walls as marking their natural territory, it stands to reason that we should, too, subconsciously, do something like that. Perhaps, to us too, the wall is a reflection of our natural desire to possess a territory. It might explain a lot- why the first thing most people do when they buy some property, is put a fence up around it. A kind of territorial marking. (At least, thank heavens, we don't resort to the most common means of doing this in the wild. Saves us some bad smells at least.)

And it would mean that, for once Robert Frost got it wrong. Walls aren't unnatural, quite the contrary. For those who will say that he referred to metaphorical walls, inter-personal barriers to borrow a phrase from communication classes, I would reply that sometimes that, too comes into the category of territorial boundaries. In other words, each person needs his space, and an infringement of this amounts to trespassing. It's the fence in the mind that should never be vaulted.

So much for psychology, and the history of walls. Perhaps each one of these observations has been wrong. But in the end, it boils down to this- be willing to give everyone the space they demand to grow in and develop in. A tolerance toward everyone's ideas, a freedom for everyone to live in the territory they have marked (hopefully by slightly sophisticated methods!) - are critical for the progress of the human mind. Any infringement on this inalienable right of the individual is tantamount to trespassing.

And trespassers will be prosecuted.