Vigil
“He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for
... See moreIn his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism . . . ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. . . . He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
his life and his family, his social and professional ambitions—each of them might be false. He tried to defend it all to himself, and suddenly the weakness of what he was defending became palpable to him. There was nothing, nothing to defend. But if this is so, he said to himself, and I’m leaving the world knowing I’ve ruined everything I was given
... See moreLeo Tolstoy • The Death of Ivan Ilych (The Art of the Novella)
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under ... See more
Life in the Afternoon | Esquire | FEBRUARY, 1962
“We all die in our time. Why I should begrudge you a little sweat?” Of course what he was saying was that his sweat represented no burden, because it was spent on a dying man, just as he hoped that someone would sweat a little for him when his time came. Apart from the lying, or maybe on account of it, the greatest of Ivan Ilych’s torments was that
... See moreLeo Tolstoy • The Death of Ivan Ilych (The Art of the Novella)
The conversation brought to mind a story that a friend told me about his brother, a young doctor. A thirty-five-year-old man came to see my friend’s brother. The man looked awful. His eyes were hollow and his skin was ashen. The young doctor knew something was wrong, but he could not figure out what, so he brought in an elder colleague to help with
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