Body and Mind
Lather That we are imprisoned by our well-earned routines has never been a question. After I s…
I wish I could make the argument that a river and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego a…
Helplessness makes monsters of people. He’s seen chairs thrown, exam tables kicked. The rooms pathologists speak to patients in now have everything bolted down.
This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy — one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.
In the country of cancer everyone is simultaneously a have and a have-not. In this land no citizens are protected by property, job description, prestige, and pretensions; they are not even protected by their prejudices. Neither money nor education, greed nor ambition, can alter the facts. You are all simply cancer citizens, bargaining for more life.
The cancer he wanted to cut out of my back somehow disappeared in the month since the b…
One can die in cleanliness, or one can die in filth. I’m not talking about your soul. At the Prince Hotel — an old Bowery flophouse — the men paid a few dollars a night to live in stalls, four feet wide and six feet deep, with chicken-wire ceilings.
Recently I was invited to give a special lecture at the university where I teach. I accepted the invitation though, contrary to what my sons might tell you, I don’t really like to lecture.
Throughout it all, I put one foot in front of the other, watching the gray ribbon of road unspool beneath me.
In those cold rooms with the blue plastic chairs, sometimes the human condition is an old Tex…
