Bøger af David Ollier Weber

In a remote cabin above California's Big Sur coast, Roger Nall lights a candle and kneels before his paperback copy of the I Ching. His potter girlfriend Sharon, slumbering nearby, is pregnant. They've talked about having their baby here in the cabin-alone, without electricity, unassisted. It occurs to Roger to consult the ancient Chinese Book of Change for a Confucian augury. The year is 1968. Roger writes poetry while living on savings from his pre-Vietnam Navy service. To him, "natural" childbirth is a romantic and philosophical choice. In his own eyes he's "a bearded recluse with his hippie woman resolutely scorning all the frou-frou of civilization, determinedly celebrating the joys of rusticity according to the great American transcendentalist tradition." When it comes to childbirth, he maintains, millennia of human history prove "Nature is perfectly capable of blipping a baby out of the womb without any fourth-party interference." Sharon agrees. She's been encouraged by a Berkeley friend who gave birth at home using only an emergent breathing technique for pain control called the Lamaze method. Sharon is young, vigorous, healthy and brave. She is as committed as Roger to the organic life. Roger tosses the coins to derive the fateful l Ching symbol. It's a set of six broken and unbroken lines-yin and yang-labeled CHUN. This hexagram, he reads to his dismay, stands for "DIFFICULTY." But he finds a hopeful coda in the explanatory text. "If we heed the omens," it promises-and there will be no lack of them when Sharon goes into labor-"our success is assured...."

So there I sat, bare as a baby in a diaper under my swaddling cloths, nearly three-quarters of a century of experiences embodied in the sack of wrinkled gooseflesh uncomfortably enclosed... reviewing the table of contents for my "Apologia Pro Vita Sua." My "Scenes from the Seven Ages of Man"... or rather, of "A man".... Only why seven? Far be it from me to question Shakespeare or his source, apparently Ecclesiastes. But that seems an odd divisor, doesn't it? In more than the numerical sense? You could just as easily use three, say, like the periods in ice hockey and lacrosse. Childhood, vigorous adulthood, senility. Or five, like the sets in men's tennis. Or nine, for that matter, like the innings in baseball... even fifteen, the rounds in a championship boxing match, if you're into really fine-grained detail. Granted, the World Series can go to seven games. But four strikes me as the most à propos segmentation-like the quarters in football and basketball. Childhood, young adulthood, middle age, old age. "My Life in Four Quarters." Obvious sports metaphor. I like that title....