Of Love and Other Demons

I came back from the anatomy and physiology class and I have to say I found it super interesting. Today we were talking about how energy is made and used in the body in detail and watched an incredible movie about the various organelles of the cell. Cell biology was quite boring so I think a lot has to do with how the subject is presented and how much of her own energy the instructor spends on presenting it. Linda loves her subject and seems to have a lot of energy to make it fascinating. What I also like about this class is that Linda is also studying acupuncture at our school part-time and always makes connection between Eastern and Western perspective on how the body functions. Next week I am going to list a few books which Linda told us about and which have this connection in them or which, apart from the purely Western scientific take, discuss the spiritual or not-so-scientific explanation of the issues. The thing that hugely cought my attention today was the fact that the mitochondria in the cell can be grown or produced. Mitochondria is the part, or organelle, in the cell which deal with production of energy which then is used for various functions within the cell (and some of that energy is made into heat which keeps our bodies warm) so basically how your mitochondria works and the number of it determines how good your metabolism is (how well you transform things: sugars, fats, etc.). The better the metabolism, the better the body functions: things are transformed fast and eliminated fast. So through the exercise (of body and mind) you give your body a signal that it needs more energy and so more mitochondria is needed, and consequently produced. We were talking about body functions (and staying fit and lean) and also the mind. At one point Linda said that if you exercise your mind and exercise your concentration, your body can preserve the life of brain cells and possibly build new ones. Exercising concentration is meditation so I guess for those Westerners who think meditation is silly stuff which should not be taken seriously, there's basically evidence in the Western science that it does work, on cellular level.

And now about Love... I didn't take any book with me to Colombia because I was so tired of reading textbooks, and also I didn't want to worry about the inside of my backpack getting wet or dirty, so for the first two weeks I didn't put my eyes on the printed word. However, on the third week I noticed a book exchange in the little store adjecent to the only one little restaurant in Cabo and I borrowed Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Nobody Writes to the Colonel" - a collection of stories - which I read with pleasure, as all the other books by this author I read before (especially "One Hundred Years of Solitude"). And when I came back I spotted on Katarina's book shelf his "Of Love and Other Demons." It is a very beautiful book. Everything is beautiful about it. Life's eternal truths are vailed in a way that they are there for everyone to discover on their own, or not. And I especially like the two different takes on illness: one of the doctor Abrenuncio (a mix of Western and Eastern, I would say, perspective) and the other of the Bishop (a spiritual view, however, distorteded by misinterpreted reading of the Christian bible, done by the Holy Office - Inquisition). I think my favorite line in that book is such: "No medicine can cure what happiness cannot." It is my firm belief, indeed. And the love story which is part of the book is, of course, beautiful. I always said that the story of Romeo and Juliet's love is nothing in comparison to the love between Balthasar and Blimunda ("Balthasar and Blimunda" by Jose Saramago) and now I add to the greatest love stories the love story of the priest and Sierva Maria. I become to love Marquez' books even more after I have travelled to Colombia. He very vividly describes the heat, the rainy season, the laziness, hammock siestas, and all this which is part of tropical climates and which is part of life in Colombia. I was reading "Nobody is Writing to the Colonel" swinging in the hammock in the heat of midday, experiencing all that... Part of "Of Love and Other Demons" takes place in the Convent of Santa Clara in Cartagena de Indias which was later turned into a hotel, which fact the author mentions in the beginning of the book, and which I visited when I went to the city two years ago. I remember how beautiful the Convent/hotel was, the courtyard and the beach nearby. I feel I am there when I read the book, transported in time a few hundred years ago when it was populated by nuns and demons...