Clean Air: Leaked

As promised, I will be leaking other projects that I have been doing. For less than a year, I have been working on a novel, currently called Clean Air. Picking on themes of science fiction, neuroscience and survival, the book has also been the center of some conference projects (semester or year-long projects at Sarah Lawrence, which spans around 20-40 pages long). Last semester, I wondered of the possibility to introduce the world of neuroscience via fiction. Perhaps, stories would help readers, primarily students, to understand topics, research, and even findings in the field of neuroscience. The work lead me to explore other blogs, such as http://www.onfiction.ca. Moreover, I became interested in the neuroscience and psychology of reading.

Attached

So much can come out of a work in progress that I thought I would share it with you. Here's an excerpt from Clean Air. Enjoy!

What is life spent alone? To have to do everything by yourself and be engulfed by your own needs sounds disappointing. The independence that olden society fought for and strove to maintain came tumbling down when society became ever more isolating. People stopped talking, stopped reproducing, stopped loving, and stopped caring. The ones who did find one another were lucky, even if it were just for a short while.

As a child, I was chastised for having such unusual parents, ones who stuck together for years on end, whilst others fell to ruins, leaving behind normal children. I, on the other hand, was different and still am. I remember comparing my mom and dad with the other couples I knew, once that lasted only a few years, at best. I remember questioning the motivation behind them sticking around for one another. Were they afraid that my sister and I weren’t strong enough to make it through the crash? I almost always blamed it on their opinion of us, children. We didn’t need protecting, did we?

But, seeing [her] look up to the sky as she recalls the last memories of her husband, I wondered if love could only be about two people. Could it act as a strong enough glue to stick two people together for decades? Or does it all still come down to the individual? Perhaps, there’s some truth in her voice, as she questions whether she had acted selfishly. Maybe the point of being in a loving relationship is to gain certain things that fulfills you as an individual. In caring for the other person, you are gaining some level of personal satisfaction. In retrospect, these questions that I have about life, the world, and relationships really boils down to a much more carnal question, are we beings simply egotistical? 

*Author owns the rights to the photo above