Most everyone's lives are lived in the middle; the comfortable space far away from the margins that spill off the map into darkness. Some of us, by misadventure or lot at birth aren't as fortunate, and we try as best as we can to swim against the currents that work despirately to carry us away. Wanting only to live "normal" lives, we wunder if scratching each moment to survive is just a distraction, or if it is the pretense that we are not growing weaker at each stroke, and that the lives we aspire to aren't drifting indefatigably away.
What's worse is that the further one drifts, the more our perspectives bother others. Words begin to fail, and a silent wall grows. But I've learned not to care so much anymore. This is what I see, and value, and I don't care if you appreciate it as I do. Even at midnight, I am surrounded by fearce and wonderful things.
" ...Sometimes the songs we sing, are just songs of our own."
-----Grateful Dead
How Long Have I Got Left?
NYT By PAUL KALANITHI JAN. 24, 2014
"I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live..."
"What patients seek is not scientific knowledge doctors hide, but existential authenticity each must find on her own. Getting too deep into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
"I remember the moment when my overwhelming uneasiness yielded. Seven words from Samuel Beckett, a writer I’ve not even read that well, learned long ago as an undergraduate, began to repeat in my head, and the seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” I took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” And then, at some point, I was through..."
Before I go,
By PAUL KALANITHI
Stanford Medicine SPRING 2015,
“...Our daughter was born days after I was released from the hospital....I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters — but what would they really say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is 15; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing...”
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Ozymandias.
I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
