“The first bite of the day should be almond to set the full strength of hydrochloric acid for all-day protein digestion.”

Jane: “What happened?”

Joe: “Oh, after the first two I felt better.”

“Inasmuch as man is like God, gifted with a soul, with reason, love and freedom, he is not subject to time or death. But inasmuch as man is an animal, with a body subject to the laws of nature, he is a slave to time and death. The Babylonians sought to appease the lord of time by self-castigation. The Bible in its Sabbath concept makes an entirely new attempt to solve the problem: by stopping interference with nature for one day you eliminate time; time is suspended, Saturn is dethroned on his very day, Saturn’s-day.”

“Another argument against the direct role of genes in programming the aging process is that animals do not age at the same rate, even when inbred, nor are the patterns of age changes identical in each identical twin or other identical multiple births. When the random events characteristic of aging are compared with the orderly, virtually lock-step, changes that occur during genetically driven embryogenesis and development, that orderliness and precision stands out in stark contrast to the quantitative and qualitative disorder of age changes. The variability in the manifestations of aging differs greatly from animal to animal within a species but the variability in developmental changes differs trivially. Humans from conception to adulthood are virtually identical in respect to the timing of the stages involved in biological development but from about thirty on, age changes produce profound biological heterogeneity.”

“Many anthropologists, less familiar with the complex workings of the autonomic nervous system, have considered voodoo death as a psychological process, emphasizing the power of suggestion. If faith can heal, they argue, fear can kill. Psychologists have studied, for example, something that most of us take for granted — that the likelihood of becoming ill or even dying depends to a large extent on our frame of mind. Feelings of depression, hopelessness, or despair do not cause diseases, but somehow they make us vulnerable. Loneliness would seem hardly a fatal affliction, yet a disproportionate number of spouses die in the first year after the death of their mates. Psychologists label this the ‘giving up/given up complex.’ According to this view, the victim of voodoo death becomes caught in a vicious cycle of belief that indirectly kills him, perhaps, as some suggest, by making his body susceptible to pathogenic disease. His psychological state can be imagined. He is doomed to die by a malevolent curse that both he and all those around him deeply believe in. He becomes despondent, anxious, and fearful. His resignation is both recognized and expected by other members of his society. They join him in speculating how long he may survive, or who is the source of the curse. And then a strange thing happens. A consensus is reached that the end is near, and his friends and family retreat as from the smell of death.They return, but only to wail and to chant over the body of this person they consider already dead. Physically the victim still lives; psychologically he is dying; socially he is already dead.”