100, WG69, F33, E98, / NG31, M67, MF0, D2, Frz0, NA0, B4, C1

Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways

Das Buch war wirklich schon lange überfällig für ein Wiederlesen und ich konnte es dabei kaum zur Seite legen, weil es so fesselnd war - nicht nur wegen der vertrackten und irreführenden Konstruktion (weniger verwirrend als beim ersten Lesen, aber immer noch schwer zu durchschauen), sondern auch wegen der vielen Informationen und Einblicken in die Welten der altägyptischen Totenkulte und der Arbeit und Erfahrung einer Death Doula. Mittlerweile habe ich so schon unzählige Marker gesetzt um besonders schöne Textstellen, wo Picoult es so typisch genau auf den Punkt bringt, leichter zu finden, daß die Liste schon unübersichtlich wird. Aber beim nächsten Mal finde ich bestimmt noch mehr.

The mummy room in the Cairo Museum is always the most crowded. There are tons of pharaohs there - from Ramesses II, to Hatshepsut, to Seti I, whose body is in such good shape that he looks like he's taking a nap. There's a mummified king who died in battle, who has a hole above his eye that matches a foreign ax blade. The whole thing always felt creepy to me - a stream of tourists who were basically Peeping Toms.
"So much about Egyptian tombs was meant for people to explore and to celebrate their lives - but they never intended for us to see their mummified bodies," I say. "That was private."
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I did not realize at that time that when you plant seeds, you also get roots.
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The thing about death is that we're all terrified of it happening, and we're devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.
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I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it's not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.
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I was thinking how odd it was that the things our parents do for us when we are young are what we do for them when they are old.
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It's because of this belief that Egyptian religion uses the concept of syncretism. Two deities who appear as separate gods in temples can be taken back a generation, before they split. Amun-Re is the hidden Amun and his visible form, Re, together. You start with a unified whole, and then as time passes, you differentiate and organize and divide. Creation, by definition, is separation. Moving forward means being split apart.
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(Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways, 2020)