Lots of stuff dealing with the aftermath of Vera seeing Miss MacIntosh in her bedroom at night.

Warning: there are a lot of links and pictures with explanations for what’s going on in the text. I decided to get more in-depth with the Bible verses because I thought they were more strategic than I noticed before.

Young is specifically saying DO NOT TRUST YOUR LEADERS! You will only be disappointed if you hold them up as the end all and be all of everything. That includes ALL leaders. The Founding Fathers, yep. The “sayings” for what constitutes a good life and how to live, yep. Christianity especially, because I really feel she is against this kind of indoctrination where you live by beliefs and never question them. Vera also acknowledges that her mother’s dreams are madness. Not her mother per se but her dreams which also represent some kind of after life.

Young is critical of everything. The sin of the suffrage movement is that it didn’t include ALL women. Even philosophy, religious philosophy especially, as we shall see because of Mr. Spitzer and Catherine’s ending scene.

I can’t wait to spend more time dissecting Esther and what Vera perceives the answer is. I’m still amassing clues but it is funny that Esther is my least remembered part of the book even though it’s the last.

Something else that has free rent in my brain from reading these chapters is the description of Catherine being “horizontal” and Miss MacIntosh “vertical” and if we put those two lines together we get this -

What is at the crossroads? What is the middle way? The “middle-west”?

Diagoras of Melos - There is no God

What is it with women and horses?

Life is a Dream

To rob Peter to pay Paul

“Age is the most difficult thing to achieve.” page 286 from MMMD

Life expectancy from the 1900 was 47 and 1950 rose to 68. I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson say this, “…not enough of us spend time celebrating the fact that we were alive at all. You are lucky that you get to die. Most humans who could ever exist never will… The fact that you exist at all is against stupefying odds of who gets born and who does not.”

I’m including the Mental Hygiene Movement in the US because of the time frame that would have been relevant to when Young wrote the book, she was interested in psychology, and I have my own pet theory which I am not willing to part with is all these people are in an asylum and MacIntosh is the nurse. XD

There was a long list of things in Chapter 20 that I thought I included in To All My Darlings Volume 1 and realized I didn’t so here they are.

There is no God there is no free will and am including Tyson and Sapolsky.

Pi-HahiRoth

Wadi Feiran

Tiyaha

Frederick Stewart - El Tih

My take away from this being in MMMD is something that Young has said in different ways previously - nature does it better.

King James Only Movement

King James Project