Sublime

If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

Endless books and authors followed, as we worked our way methodically down the list: The Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe, Gogol, The Last of the Mohicans, Dickens, Twain, Austen, Billy Budd … By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college

Palin kept looking for a second act that never came. She suffered the pathetic fate of being a celebrity ahead of her time. For with her candidacy something new came into our national life that was also traditional. She was a western populist who embodied white identity politics. In her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt chart a dramatic decrease in young people’s resilience and ability to cope with difficult ideas and hurt feelings. The authors do not belittle these struggles, but emphasize that they are a painful consequence of the acceptance of three “Great Untruths.” These are the belief that people are

The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.

The medical uncertainty compounds patients’ own uncertainty.

Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Mo