Just before coming to Little Rock, I told a friend that my body was recovering, my vitality was returning and I could stand up on my one good leg and get back in the ring. He shouted, “Stay down Rocky! Stay down.” I hope you can laugh with this as I did. I love laughing and find it very appropriate in these situations.
 
While here I have had a lot of time to read and have started War and Peace with the new translation by the people who translated Anna Karenina. I would like to share a paragraph with you from page 281:
 
A young Russian prince, as Napoleon’s troops are routing the Russian army, sees his moment for glory and grabs the company banner and calls to rally the troops as his commander is shot down. He is soon shot down as well and when here gains consciousness, while bleeding to death, he is searching for the battle but only sees the sky.

         

“How quiet, calm and solemn, not at all like when I was running,” thought Prince Andrei, “not at all like when we were running, shouting and fighting – it’s    Eli with Dr. Barlogie of the Myeloma Institute

quite different…how is it I have never seen this before? How happy I am that I’ve finally come to know it. Yes! Everything is empty; everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquility. And thank God!”
 
How wonderful to again discover this depth in Tolstoy writing in the 1860’s, to realize that this truth has been alive in human consciousness back through time. Now my prayer is that everyone realizes it directly before the body dies. Not conceptually or intellectually but as an immediate realization as close as death. Then we can meet what comes in this play we call reality and laugh.