so I was wrong. some years ago when I was questioning the boundaries of a life, as separate from those of the lives that produced it. there is a dividing line, I think I understand better now... every individual life has its own inherited genome, a mixture from those of it's parents. even before the umbilical cord is cut, the child is a person different from it's mother. the more I learn, the cooler it all gets. fascinating really.

fame, popularity, impact, influence, and then memory.

the first two are not perfectly correlated with the latter two. and of course, memory is fallible. and trends.

its amazing how many important people were barely known for what they were doing while they were alive. their works went ignored or forgotten until after their deaths. and posthumously they become legends.

and their stories of the stories they unraveled are brought to you and me across eons by some third person. inherited tales.

I'm reading a fascinating book
https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/147673352X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510146369&sr=8-1&keywords=the+gene

I've almost just begun, so its too early to attempt anything like a review. but I'm glued, even in a yellow green auto in delhi's poisonous (so-claimed) november air; it keeps me reading on my kindle, and i smile while i take in the interwoven stories, the images created of the people who brought meaning to the idea of heredity. and i shuffle through the contents of my bag because i must write down some words from it. in a scribbly scrawly hand as i jump over potholes and careen dangerously close to other honking unruly automobiles...

"one's imagination must fill very wide blanks" - Charles Darwin

"how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life" - Ludwig Wittgenstein

... inspiration. perspective. meaning in the trivial. i look at people around me. what fills their lives? as they seem oblivious to the question.