Subvert the Paradigm

"'Subvert the paradigm'; so goes the bumper sticker, which has passed now into cultural cliche. In so many ways, though, he has showed me how to do exactly that: to question received wisdom, to insist on my own angle, to view language as a playground, and a playground as bliss. He showed me how to love the words from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being in my own body, how to love being in my own skin and not some other skin."

David Shields writing about his father. The book, called The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, is worth reading in its entirety. It manages to be both perversely informative (it provides biological data for every stage of human life) and intermittently beautiful (it mingles narrative memoir in with the science).