We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons

A neighbor was suing my father over some property dispute during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such practical matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” in a silly, quavering falsetto until you gave up. He cared less about things that didn’t matter and more about the things that did. It was during his i

It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the

now that I’m back in the slog of everyday life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgently pressing items on our mental lists—our careers, car repairs, the daily headlines, the goddamned taxes—are just so much noise, that what matters is spending time with the peop

Before a year had gone by, the same everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I was disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night worrying about what was to become of me. I can’t recapture that feeling of euphoric gratitude any more than I can really remember the mortal terror I felt when

You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.

You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through.

don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins

or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.

It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill: a lightening, an amused indiff