A beginning: I reflect on where I am in life. I am 38 years old. If I had been born one hundred, or even fifty, years earlier, I would have probably only lived to be half as old. With the spontaneous collapse of my lung at age seventeen, and the subsequent years of pneumonia and bronchitis, I would have likely died in my late teens. Or, perhaps contracted tuberculosis.
Therefore, when I romanticize earlier ages, with their lack of modern medicine, with their very real barbarisms of war and squalor and violence, with their absence of modern conveniences, I need to remember that where I am and what I am and when I am makes me who I am.
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