on delayed gratification …
W.H. Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening … among other themes, Auden is speaking to delayed gratification … seemingly epidemic among physicians … ‘O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time …
Spirituality
Simone Weil on attentive presence …
The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. In the first legend of the Grail, it is …
Ilyich … lessons on covid
Tolstoy in the Time of Covid … … lessons from reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Ikiru …
Inspired by a Tolstoy novella, Kurosawa produces a masterpiece dealing with a topic which every human grapples with at one time or another, but which we all choose to ignore. Set in the times of the aftermath of the second world war, the movie chronicles the journey of a Japanese civic clerk coming to terms …
to stand in front of one dying … I must first do my own work
“Through a Time of Darkness … I Found the Solid Point of a Restart” I cannot look at the countless events that happened in the past year but with a great gratitude which moves me to tears. It has, paradoxically, been the toughest year and at the same time the most revolutionary one because of …
to stand in front of one dying … I must first do my own work Read More »
giving thanks for pain …
… John Tavener died this past fall … Plough obituary … NYT obituary … For the last six years of his life, Tavener was crippled and in constant pain. Already suffering from Marfan syndrome, a congenital disease that affected his heart, eyes, and muscles, he suffered a series of heart attacks which he barely survived. …
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night …
… or “How to cure yourself of road rage.” Thoracic surgeon Jeffrey Piehler builds his own coffin … with profound effects in his relationships with family, friends and himself.
weaned from our bodies …
We sicken before we die so that we will be weaned from our body. The milk that nourished us grows thin and sour; turning away from the breast, we begin to be restless for a separate life. Yet this first life, this life on earth, on the body of earth – will there, can there …
the moral face of caregiving …
… acknowledgment of the personhood of sufferers and affirmation of their condition and struggle have long been recognized as the most basic and sustaining of moral acts, whether among the friendship and kin network or in patient—physician and other professional relationships. The laying on of hands, empathic witnessing, listening to the illness narrative, and providing …
… openings to a deeper identity
Widows and widowers know the wrenching grief the death of a spouse brings, and the great gaping wound it leaves in one’s life. Anna, the prophetess, experienced this at much too young an age. She could not have been much older than twenty-one or twenty-two when she lost her husband, and may have been a …