Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face.

Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

But it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”)

it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear,

No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.

You left me, sweet, two legacies,— A legacy of love A Heavenly Father would content, Had he the offer of; You left me boundaries of pain Capacious as the sea, Between eternity and time,

death’s

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.