Beautiful, strange, and paradoxical

Lying in bed, savoring the foul taste of paxlovid, I ponder a bit Bill Watterson and John Kascht's The Mysteries. Their visually stunning fable takes a misanthropic view of human progress, human science, human obliviousness. 

It's hard to fault the general theme. The little book is a visual tour de force. I got it from the library and urge you to do the same. (Watterson might be known to you as the creator of "Calvin and Hobbes".)

But right this minute, I'm taking another view. As much as I know the dark side, I'm also inspired by the human ingenuity and determination which gave us vaccines for a novel virus within a year. And now there are also drugs that mitigate COVID. I remember the terror of 2020 -- if you got the disease, you might be a goner. But somehow we had to live (too often dependent on risks to those who could not afford to hunker down at home). So we did, most of us. Here in the Mission, we were organized by community leaders to help each other.

That too is a Mystery. It's a strange and paradoxical universe and humans are a strange and paradoxical part of it.