The words “gene”, “genetics” and “hereditary” had once been “firing words”.
There are some words for which a person is simply suddenly shot. There are other words for which they might pin a nice little bronze medal on his chest or do some other such pleasant thing. But for these words… Everything is fine, everything is quite in order, it’s just that no one should say them. After all, would any respectable soul let such words pass his lips? They shouldn’t even enter anyone’s head! It’s only some vicious followers of Weismann or Morgan* who want to cause a little stir.
We pay a high price for youth: our childhood. But then youth is bartered cut price, exchanged for bitter experience, disappointment, estrangement, a hopeless longing for warmth and an eternal, ineradicable dampness of the so
