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Sunbeams

You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

Jean Cocteau

Graduation

It was a perfect day, the sky clear, as blue and true as a pledge of love. On the campus, the magnolias were in bloom, the huge, creamy-white flowers richly fragrant. Spring was everywhere, shamelessly beautiful, wet lips laughing, hair unpinned.

From A Distance, Paradise

The children grew rapidly after birth, until they were weaned from the breast, and then never grew again. We never saw any cases of diaper rash because nobody could afford diapers. I had never before thought of diaper rash as a disease of affluence.

On Being Unable To Breathe

Something was drastically wrong with my lungs: every night, they made sounds like a basketful of squealing kittens. I was always coughing, had pains under the sternum, and could not push a car or even run up a flight of stairs without gasping like an old melodeon full of holes.

Martha

Martha is talking to me quickly: she needs another doctor. This one won’t give her the proper medication. She has not been eating well; it is too difficult for her to get out in the snow with her broken foot.

Jack And The Beanstalk

Some Thoughts On The Mixing Of Psychology And Religion

To a student with years of experience in spiritual discipline, the suggestion that psychotherapy might be a useful adjunct can seem awful, backward, and possibly traitorous.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Inside The Modern Hospital

Every little odd ache, cramp, tension; each sore throat, swollen gland, headache; a sudden pain when you reach for something on a shelf, a morning lethargy, an unexpected reluctance: all these whisper cancer.

Why I Like Dead People

I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.

The Compassionate Heart

The philosopher Gurdjieff pointed out that if we wish to escape from prison, the first thing we must acknowledge is that we are in prison. Without that acknowledgment, no escape is possible.

Emergency

It is, in a phrase aptly supplied by a nurse, like five hundred hells. Apparently the whole town has converged upon the hospital, all migrating to the Emergency Rooms.