Sunshine on Scotland Street
Alexander McCall Smith in Sunshine on Scotland Street wrote, "The
human body, we are occasionally reminded, consists largely of water.
Many find that fact strangely reassuring; water, as Auden observed, is
nowhere disliked; our company, he insisted, coarsens roses and dogs, but
evokes from water only an innocent outcry when we force it through
turbines or fountains. Others may find the idea of being mostly water a
vaguely depressing thought; they would prefer to be made of firmer
stuff, of substances with a more solid ring to them: iron, potassium,
calcium; water for them is too... well, too liquid. At the heart of
their unease, though, may be a simple rejection of this reductionist
view: to reduce the human body to its constituents is a painful reminder
that we are nothing much really, in spite of our pretensions; that all
of our grand notions of self-importance will never overcome the simple
biological limitations of our existence -- a sobering thought, and an
important one. To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but
particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and
institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims
to special status for our practices and beliefs above those of others."
This was submitted by Gia Cob and Connie Midey
