Into the Black

  2023 has been a wonderful year for Beatle fans around the world. The year saw the release of what was dubbed “the last Beatles song.” Aptly entitled “Now and Then,” the track was originally written and recorded in demo form by ex-Beatle John Lennon in the late 1970s. More than a decade later, in the early 1990s, Yoko Ono gave a copy of that demo, along with two other unfinished Lennon songs—“Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”—to the three surviving Beatles—Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. At the time, the three were planning to embark on a major Beatles-related project that would later be known as The Beatles Anthology—a collection of unreleased demos, outtakes, and live performances of the band during its heyday— and they intended to release three “new” Beatles songs to accompany this collection by recording new instruments and vocals over some of Lennon’s unfinished demos. While the surviving Beatles succeeded in transforming “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”...

This remark hurts me not so much for the suggestion that I and my wife are silly or childish for grieving over the death of a cat as for the implication that Yoda’s life was insignificant. I thought, “What if Yoda could hear and actually understand the insensitive remarks from where he is at present?” Whenever I imagine the hurt in Yoda’s innocent big blue eyes occasioned by these hurtful words, it was all I could to do to keep myself from crying. But whence came the idea about the insignificance of the life of an animal compared to that of a human being? I think there are three possible explanations for the prevalence of this distorted, mistaken belief in the supremacy of human life over those of the other creatures. First, it may be traced to the Judeo-Christian belief that God created man after His own image, and that He bestowed on him the power and authority to do with all other living creatures as he pleased. This belief places human beings at the center of the grand scheme o...