Life Is A Hospital 1

I was 62 years old when I began these reflections in the spring of 2001, a time fixed in my mind by the events that followed. It was a period when my work required me to travel frequently. In the solitude of planes, high above the clouds, I began to think about the summary lessons of my life, and how I might structure a text in which to set them down. It was undoubtedly the setting that inspired the project. Although air travel has been around long enough to be normal, it still feels like an unnatural exercise of human powers and makes us think of death every time we climb aloft. I jotted the first notes of this book on a yellow notepad in an airport lounge, waiting for the flight to take me home
The idea was this: If you stick around long enough to become familiar with the routines, you get a chance to see around the edges of what’s going on. The passage of time allows you to weigh what people say against what they do, to see through the poses they strike and the alibis they make, and to appreciate how the inattention of others makes all this deviousness work. This is no small matter, because if you look long and hard enough you will find that a lie is at the root of most human wrong
If you last a long time and get to look over collective shoulders and measure the consequences, eventually you achieve life’s most irreversible result, which is the loss of innocence, the illusion that anything can happen and the hope that it will. This is a particularly destructive error. For if anything is possible, then nothing is necessary, and no conclusion follows. Consequently, no consideration can become a caution and no principle a restraint. The desire for more than is possible is the cause of greater human misery than any other
Therefore recognition of consequences is the beginning of wisdom. In Ravelstein, Bellow summarizes in a single image the importance of death in making us wise. “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything,” he wrote. The idea I had in the airport was to view it all from the vantage of the end