Tuberculosis Quotes

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

The biggest diease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody.

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations: ‘Come on, I know you’ve got tuberculosis, but it could be worse. At least no one’s died.’ 'Why do you think you got cancer of the stomach?’ ‘Yes, I know, colon cancer is hard, but you want to try living with someone who has got it. Sheesh. Nightmare.’ ‘Oh, Alzheimer’s you say? Oh, tell me about it, I get that all the time.’ ‘Ah, meningitis. Come on, mind over matter.’ ‘Yes, yes, your leg is on fire, but talking about it all the time isn’t going to help things, is it?’ ‘Okay. Yes. Yes. Maybe your parachute has failed. But chin up.

Love hasn't got anything to do with the heart, the heart's a disgusting organ, a sort of pump full of blood. Love is primarily concerned with the lungs. People shouldn't say "she's broken my heart" but "she's stifled my lungs." Lungs are the most romantic organs: lovers and artists always contract tuberculosis. It's not a coincidence that Chekhov, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Chopin, George Orwell and St Thérèse of Lisieux all died of it; as for Camus, Moravia, Boudard and Katherine Mansfield, would they have written the same books if it werent for TB?

Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.

We have the same symptoms as tuberculosis, especially in the eyes of the Romantic Poets. Pale, tired, coughing up blood.” “That’s romantic?” I had to smile. “Romantic with a capital ‘R.’ You know, like Byron and Coleridge.” He gave a mock shudder. “Please, stop. I barely passed English Lit.” I snorted. “I didn’t have that option. One of my aunts took Byron as a lover.” “Get out.” “Seriously. It makes Lucy insanely jealous.” “That girl is . . .” “My best friend,” I filled in sternly. “I was only going to say she’s unique.

What's different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.

True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.

Try yoga! Think about the good stuff! Keep yourself engaged! It’s all in your mind! Duh! It is! But is more of a chemical imbalance! I don’t know why people don’t take mental ailments as normal. People are accepting of AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis, etc. But mental ailments? They are just all in the mind!

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis but it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics, it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotion. Extra space is always good.

You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303

This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.

And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That's the world we are currently choosing.

As you can see, when I write, I like to look like I’m recovering from tuberculosis.

Marla doesn't have testicular cancer. Marla doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brain brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.

But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.

We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us.

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.

We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. We must also be the cure.

I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome’s.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33... Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years’ worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.

Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life.

It reminded me, that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.

But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.

We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.

I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace.

I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine. TB is rare where I live. It doesn’t affect me. And that’s all true. But I hear Shreya, and Henry, and so many others calling to me: Marco. Marco. Marco.

TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis, is for lack of a better term, us.

The idea of becoming sick in order to look healthy or beautiful speaks to how profoundly consumptive beauty ideals still shape the world we share.

We all engage in the punitive act of giving a disease a meaning.

Dear Victor: This bath towel was wet and you left it on the floor and it was the last clean one in the house. I’m pretty sure this is how tuberculosis is spread. I’m writing all this in my blog in case I end up dead because of your carelessness.

And now we shall also die of blindness, I mean, we shall die of blindness and cancer, of blindness and tuberculosis, of blindness and AIDS, of blindness and heart attacks, illnesses may differ from one person to another but what is really killing us now is blindness

Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now. Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as, say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world’s citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons.

On my first day of training, she told me, "Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world." Treating disease, whether through herbs or magic or drugs, is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural. As are novels, and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.

On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage. . . . "I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out." So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history.

...death certificates were filled out with no effort at determining cause. Among the entries were 'could be suicide or murder,' and 'either assault of diabetes.' In one instance, a coroner had attributed a death to 'diabetes, tuberculosis, or nervous indigestion.' A few death certificates simply read 'act of God.

Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.

But we can choose a different world. In fact, we will choose a different world. The world will be different a generation from now. The question is whether we will look back in gratitude at the virtuous cycles or in horror at the vicious ones.

Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis—the same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable human being—regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life. Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for this young woman was his mother.

I'd rather have my job than yours." "Why?" "Because your job deals very largely with what we call right and wrong — and I'm not at all sure that there's any such thing. Suppose it's all a question of glandular secretion. Too much of one gland, too little of another — and you get your murderer, your thief, your habitual criminal. Clement, I believe the time will come when we'll be horrified to think of the long centuries in which we've indulged in what you may call moral reprobation, to think how we've punished people for disease — which they can't help, poor devils. You don't hang a man for having tuberculosis.

because food was not considered to be an essential aspect of tuberculosis treatment, and so there was no funding for food.

Extremism, he says, is the universal tuberculosis of modern society: a world infection of resentment and hatred generated by rapid change and the breakdown of old values. In the stabler nations the tubercles are sealed off in scar tissue, and these are the harmless lunatic movements. In times of social disorder, depression, war, or revolution, the germs can break forth and infect the nation. This has happened in Germany. It could happen anywhere, even in the United States.

Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.

Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely

Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.

The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.

Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise?

I kinda looked like a wanna-be Goth chick, or an unfortunate Persian girl in a Gothic romance who was wasting away from Tuberculosis. But that was alright. Oz had mentioned he wasn't human. He was probably into that sort of thing.

I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I’ve walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes. I’ve brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking.

How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?

He loved that word. Who wouldn't? "Encouraged." Like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into.

...somehow, we always seem to blame the patient for noncompliance, rather than blaming the structures of the social order that make compliance more difficult.

Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

Her optimism flew high, not only for her eventual cure of which she was sure, but for everything that would happen to her henceforth. That too, she knew was a characteristic of the tubercular - the very quality , in fact, which made them such interesting patients.

It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland.

The end of the war brought the closing of the borders cutting off Austria’s coal supply from Czechoslovakia, leaving the Austrians at peace but hungry, cold, and vulnerable to tuberculosis and a virulent form of influenza (Grosskurth, 1991, p. 82). Writer Stefan Zweig described postwar Vienna as “an uncertain, gray, and lifeless shadow of the former imperial monarchy” (qtd. in Gay, 1988, p. 380).

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.Poe died at the age of 40. The cause of his death is undetermined and has been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies, suicide (although likely to be mistaken with his suicide attempt in the previous year), tuberculosis, heart disease, brain congestion and other agents. Source: Wikipedia

Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.

that routine childhood vaccinations might provide kids with cross-immunity against SARS-2. In particular, the tuberculosis vaccine BCG (not currently used in the United States) has received substantial attention due to its nonspecific protective role that could have an effect on novel viruses.36 Other

It is possible to regulate watercourses over any given distance without embankment works; to transport timber and other materials, even when heavier than water, for example ore, stones, etc., down the centre of such water-courses; to raise the height of the watertable in the surrounding countryside and to endow the water with all those elements necessary for the prevailing vegetation." "Furthermore it is possible in this way to render timber and other such materials non-inflammable and rot resistant; to produce drinking and spa-water for man, beast and soil of any desired composition and performance artificially, but in the way that it occurs in Nature; to raise water in a vertical pipe without pumping devices; to produce any amount of electricity and radiant energy almost without cost; to raise soil quality and to heal tuberculosis, cancer and a variety of physical disorders.

I said we’re cool,” I repeat, but I misjudged the distance between my lips and Summer’s ear. The two collide, and I feel a shiver run up her frame. I shiver too, because my mouth is way too close to hers. She smells like heaven, some fascinating combo of flowers and jasmine and vanilla and—sandalwood, maybe? A man could get high on that fragrance. And don’t get me started on her dress. White, strapless, short. So short it barely grazes her lower thighs. God fucking help me. I quickly straighten up before I do something stupid, like kiss her. Instead, I take a huge gulp of my beer. Only it goes down the wrong pipe, and I start coughing like it’s the eighteenth century and I’m a tuberculosis patient. Smooth move.

Education is the most important thing,” he told me once. “Not just for me, you know, but also for the nation.

What will become of us in twenty years’ time?” we asked ourselves one evening. Thirty years have passed now. Raymond was guillotined: “Anarchist gangster” (so the newspapers). I came across Jean again in Brussels, a worker and a trade-union organizer, still a fighter for liberty after ten years in jail. Luce has died of tuberculosis, naturally. For my part, I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a Press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet.

I have learned that the conquest of Fate is not by struggling against it, but by acquiescence; that it is often through men that we come to know God; that spiritual courage is of a higher type than physical courage; and that it takes a higher type of courage to fight a losing rather than a winning fight.

We chose to destroy the human population because it took us less than three seconds to conclude that humanity is a virus that mutates over time and becomes stronger. Many vaccines have come along to try and cure Earth of humanity. Virtuous pandemics: the plague of Athens, the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and a thousand more. Humanity survives, adapts, grows stronger, multiplies, and continues to wreak havoc on this planet and all other species that inhabit it. Humans are programmed to mate with partners of differing immune systems so that their offspring can be stronger than them. You seek immortality through evolution, yet you annihilate everything in your path. Humanity is cancer, humanity is bacteria, humanity is disease, and you need to be destroyed.

It’s so sad,” said the Viscountess and added, “We’re going through such hard times.” She said “we” out of that sense of propriety which makes us pretend we share other people’s misfortunes when we’re with them (although egotism invariably distorts our best intentions so that in all innocence we say to someone dying of tuberculosis, “I do feel for you, I do understand, I’ve had a cold I can’t shake off for three weeks now”).

Rune was taught that leprosy is rarely contagious. The causative bacterium lives in the environment, more so in unclean settings, but only those with unique susceptibility get the disease. He recalls Professor Mehr in Malmö dressing leprous wounds with impunity, saying, “Worry about other diseases you might get from your patients, not leprosy.” Indeed, Rune lost one classmate to tuberculosis, and another to sepsis from a scalpel cut.

Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don't know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write "I don't know" one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.

Thomas mulled over the detailed report.   The good news is we’re poor enough to require that the government keep, and even improve upon, the status quo. The bad news is we’re just plain poor. The good news is that the county, the state, and our neighbors in off-reservation towns do not want us on their hands. The bad news is this isn’t just because we’re poor. They don’t like us. The good news is we are sheltered by roofs. The bad news is 97 percent are made of tar paper. The good news is that we have schools. The bad news is that so many of us are illiterate. The good news is a cure was found for the latest scourge to hit us, tuberculosis. The bad news is so many parents died and their children grew up in boarding schools. The good news is we have this report. The bad news is also this report.

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, pingo, ergo sum. For days after I felt myself filled with nothingness; with something more than the old physical and social loneliness—a metaphysical sense of being marooned. It was something almost tangible, like cancer or tuberculosis.

Not long ago I was much amused by imagining—what if the fancy suddenly took me to kill some one, a dozen people at once, or to do some thing awful, something considered the most awful crime in the world—what a predicament my judges would be in, with my having only a fortnight to live, now that corporal punishment and torture is abolished. I should die comfortably in hospital, warm aad snug, with an attentive doctor, and very likely much more snug and comfortable than at home. I wonder that the idea doesn't strike people in my position, if only as a joke.

Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor's Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: "Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?" "No," I said. "Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?" "No," I said. "You may be entitled to the Survivor's Syndrome, but you didn't get it," she said. "Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?

Henry is a human being, just as you are a human being. Consider yourself for a moment—everything you’ve overcome, everything you’ve survived. Think of the people who loved you up into your now. Think of how hard school is or was, how you were lucky or blessed to meet people you could love and who could love you. Think about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then, if you can, find a way to multiply that times 1,250,000. That is why we must work together to end tuberculosis and all other diseases of injustice.

The country was passing through turbulent times. British Raj was on its last legs. The World War had sucked the juice out of the British economy. Britain neither had the resources nor the will to hold on to a country the size of India. Sensing the British weakness and lack of resources to rule, different leagues of Indians sniffed different destinies in the air following the imminent exit of the British: a long stretch of Nehru Raj, Hindu Raj extending from Kashmir to Kerala not seen since Emperor Ashoka in third-century BCE before the emperor himself renounced Hinduism and turned a non-violent Buddhist, a Muslim-majority state carved out of two shoulders of India with a necklace-like corridor running through her bosom along Grand Trunk Road, balkanisation of the country with princes ruling the roost, and total chaos. From August 1946 onwards, chaos appeared to be the most likely destiny as it spurted in Bengal, Bihar, and United Provinces, ending in the carnage of minority communities at every place. The predicament of British government was how to cut their losses and run without many British casualties before the inevitable chaos spread to the whole country. The predicament of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, was how to achieve his dream of Muslim-majority Pakistan carved out of India before his imminent demise from tuberculosis he suffered from, about which—apart from his doctor—only a handful of his closest relations and friends knew about. The predicament of Jawaharlal Nehru, the heir apparent of the Congress Party anointed by Gandhiji, was how to attain independence of the country followed by Nehru Raj while Gandhiji, a frail 77-year-old at the time, was still alive, for God only knew who would be the leader of the party once Gandhiji’s soul and his moral authority were dispatched to heaven, and Nehru couldn’t possibly leave the crucial decision in the hands of a God he didn’t particularly believe in. Time was of the essence to all the three.

That which makes me shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis." In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with "De f endez-vous contre la syphilis!" Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

Here we all are,” said Herb Thompson, taking his cigar out and looking at it reflectively. “And life is sure funny.” “Eh?” said Mr. Stoddard. “Nothing, except here we are, living our lives, and some place else on earth a billion other people live their lives.” “That’s a rather obvious statement.” “Life,” he put his cigar back in his lips, “is a lonely thing. Even with married people. Sometimes when you’re in a person’s arms you feel a million miles away from them.” “I like that,” said his wife. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he explained, not with haste; because he felt no guilt, he took his time. “I mean we all believe what we believe and live our own little lives while other people live entirely different ones. I mean, we sit here in this room while a thousand people are dying. Some of cancer, some of pneumonia, some of tuberculosis. I imagine someone in the United States is dying right now in a wrecked car.

One might go to the bakery, perhaps," he said. "But did you know the baker has tuberculosis? All the people here run around in a highly infectious state. The baker's daughter has tuberculosis too, it seems to have something to do with the runoff from the cellulose factory, with the steam that the locomotives have spewed out for decades, with the bad diet that people eat. Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs. All of them have tubercular abscesses somewhere on their bodies. The valley is notorious for tuberculosis. You will find every form of it here: skin tuberculosis, brain tuberculosis, intestinal tuberculosis. Many cases of meningitis, which is deadly within hours. The workmen have tuberculosis from the dirt they dig around in, the farmers have it from their dogs and the infected milk. The majority of the people have galloping consumption. Moreover," he said, "the effect of the new drugs, of streptomycin for example, is nil. Did you know the knacker has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That her daughters have been to sanatoria on three occasions? Tuberculosis is by no means on the way out. People claim it is curable. but that's what the pharmaceutical industry says. In fact, tuberculosis is as incurable as it always was. Even people who have been inoculated against it come down with it. Often those who have it the worst are the ones who look so healthy that you wouldn't suspect they were ill at all. Their rosy faces are utterly at variance with their ravaged lungs. You keep running into people who've had to endure a cautery or, at the very least, a transverse lesion. Most of them have had their lives ruined by failed reconstructive surgery." We didn't go to the bakery. Straight home instead.

Your mother gives birth to you only once and only once do you die,' the witcher said calmly. 'An appropriate philosophy for a louse, don't you agree? And your longevity? I pity you, Filavandrel.' The elf raised his eyebrows. 'Why?' 'You're pathetic, with your little stolen sacks of seeds on pack horses, with your handful of grain, that tiny crumb thanks to which you plan to survive. And with that mission of yours which is supposed to turn your thoughts from imminent annihilation. Because you know this is the end. Nothing will sprout or yield crops on the plateaux, nothing will save you now. But you live long, and you will live very long in arrogant isolation, fewer and fewer of you, growing weaker and weaker, more and more bitter. And you know what'll happen then, Filavandrel. You know that desperate young men with the eyes of hundred-year-old men and withered, barren and sick girls like Toruviel will lead those who can still hold a sword and bow in their hands, down into the valleys. You'll come down into the blossoming valleys to meet death, wanting to die honourably, in battle, and not in sick beds of misery, where anaemia, tuberculosis and scurvy will send you. Then, long-living Aen Seidhe, you'll remember me. You'll remember that I pitied you. And you'll understand that I was right.' 'Time will tell who was right,' said the elf quietly. 'And herein lies the advantage of longevity. I've got a chance of finding out, if only because of that stolen handful of grain. You won't have a chance like that. You'll die shortly.

What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal-- for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental-- life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew-- only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as 'natural' as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn't stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide-- it was beneath them.

It's tempting to imagine this romanticization as the opposite as the opposite of stigmatization. Rather than discounting people as stigma does, romanticization lifts them up as paragons of beauty or intellect or some other virtue. But really, I see these as complimentary strategies, used to make "the sick" into an "other," a group of people fundamentally distant and different from the rest of the social order. … Imaging someone as more than human does much the same work as imaging them as less than human. Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's.

Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history? Not to mention the legions of those who die of under-nourishment and tuberculosis in coal and quicksilver mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any notice of them; nobody asks why or what for; but if here we shoot a few thousand objectively harmful people, the humanitarians all over the world foam at the mouth. Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year—only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?

The idea of latency is worth thinking about. Biology rewards patience. Mycobacterium tuberculosis understands this. It estabishes its toeholds and then it becomes dormant. And in that restraint it demonstrates the full extend of its power. It is not necessary that every thirst be slaked. In not acting upon a desire, that desire is diminished neither in intensity nor in merit. Priests fall in love with parishioners and display it all the time--we read about this in the newspapers. What we do not read about are the times, over and over again, when those words are not said, those kisses are not offered, or solicited. But such unexpressed love does not amount to nothing. When we love it is because we have seen especially clearly. And a clear view of human beauty is a treasure that endures for as long as the possessor of such insight breathes. And endurance is the final measure of importance: of ideas and of organisms. Love lies latent sometimes, as tuberculosis does--but, as any epidemiologist will tell you, latent is nothing like gone.

See the man they are fitting into the bottom slot. He is coughing badly. No, not pneumonia. Not tuberculosis. Nothing so picturesque. Gently, gently, stretcher-bearers… he is about done. He is coughing up clots of pinky-green filth. Only his lungs, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawington. He is coughing well to-night. That is gas. You’ve heard of gas. Haven’t you? It burns and shrivels the lungs to… to the mess you see on the ambulance floor there. He’s about the age of Bertie, Mother. Not unlike Bertie, either, with his gentle brown eyes and fair curly hair. Bertie would look up pleading like that in between coughing up his lungs… The son you have so generously given to the War. Cough, cough, little fair-haired boy. Perhaps somewhere your mother is thinking of you… boasting of the life she has so nobly given… the life you thought was your own, but which is hers to squander as she thinks fit. ‘My boy is not a slacker, thank God.’ Cough away, little boy, cough away. What does it matter, providing your mother doesn’t have to face the shame of her son’s cowardice?

Interestingly, a point that never emerged in the press but that Tim Donovan revealed to the police was that Annie had specifically "asked him to trust her" for that night's doss money. This "he declined to do." Had this incident become common knowledge, it's likely that Donovan would have faced an even worse public backlash for his role in Annie's demise. "You can find money for your beer, and you can't find money for your bed." the deputy keeper is said to have spoken in response to her request. Annie, not quite willing to admit defeat, or perhaps in a show of pride, responded with a sigh: "Keep my bed for me. I shan't be long." Ill and drunk, she went downstairs and "stood in the door for two or three minutes," considering her options. Like the impecunious lodger described by Goldsmith, she too would have been contemplating from whom among her "pals" it might have been "possible to borrow the halfpence necessary to complete {her} doss money." More likely, Annie was mentally preparing "to spend the night with only the sky for a canopy." She then set off down Brushfield Street, toward Christ Church, Spitalfields, where the homeless regularly bedded down. Her thoughts as she stepped out onto Dorest Street, as the light from Crossingham's dimmed at her back, can never be known. What route she wove through the black streets and to whom she spoke along the will never be confirmed. All that is certain is her final destination. Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn't have been on the streets on that night, or on any other. Ill and feverish, she needn't have searched the squalid corners for a spot to sleep. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother's house or in her sisters' care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children or the loving assurances of her family. Annie needn't have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame was just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind.

There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the Lions! Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die. The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the Lions! Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone. But what of those who, physically fitted to live, are tainted with rottenness of soul, cancerous with the sin-complex? For the third time I answer: The Christians to the Lions! Hadit calls himself the Star, the Star being the Unit of the Macrocosm; and the Snake, the Snake being the symbol of Going or Love, the Dwarf-Soul, the Spermatozoon of all Life, as one may phrase it. The Sun, etc., are the external manifestations or Vestures of this Soul, as a Man is the Garment of an actual Spermatozoon, the Tree sprung of that Seed, with power to multiply and to perpetuate that particular Nature, though without necessary consciousness of what is happening. (―New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis III:48)

Total neglect of women in pregnancy and childbirth had been the norm. Among many primitive societies, women menstruating or with child, or in labour or suckling the child, were regarded as unclean, polluted. The woman was isolated and frequently could not be touched, even by another woman. She had to go through the whole ordeal alone. Consequently only the fittest survived, and by the processes of mutation and adaptation, inherited abnormalities, such as disproportion in the size of the pelvis and the foetal head, died out of the race, particularly in remote parts of the world, and labour became easier. In Western society, which we call civilisation, this did not occur, and a dozen or more complications, some of them deadly, were superimposed on the natural hazards: overcrowding, staphylococcal and streptococcal infection; infectious diseases such as cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid and tuberculosis; venereal disease; rickets; multiple and frequent childbirth; the dangers from infected water. If you add to all this the attitude of indifference and neglect that often surrounded childbirth it is not hard to understand how childbirth came to be known as “the curse of Eve”, and how women could often expect to die in order to bring forth new life.

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [*realisere*] its existence [*Existents*] and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn first to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σε αυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of the irksome, sinister traveling companion―that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito). Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Just as no one who has been taught a great deal about swimming is able to keep afloat in a storm, but only the man who is intensely convinced and has experiences that he is actually lighter than water, so a person who lacks this inward point of poise is unable to keep afloat in life's storms.―Only when a man has understood himself in this way is he able to maintain an independent existence and thus avoid surrendering his own I. How often we see (in a period when we extol that Greek historian because he knows how to appropriate an unfamiliar style so delusively like the original author's, instead of censuring him, since the first prize always goes to an author for having his own style―that is, a mode of expression and presentation qualified by his own individuality)―how often we see people who either out of mental-spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from another's table or for more egotistical reasons seek to identify themselves with others, until eventually they believe it all, just like the liar through frequent repetition of his stories.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

Ancestors To tell the truth, we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me. Let us use our imaginations to visualize for a moment the circumstances and conditions of the life of our parents, then our grandparents, then great-grandparents, thus further and further back. Even if among them all there happened to be wealthy individuals or men of privilege, the stench and filth in which they lived, as that then was the rule, would have astonished us who use showers and toilets. What was even more certain was among them the presence of starvelings, for whom a piece of dry bread in pre-harvest time meant happiness. Our ancestors died like flies from epidemics, from starvation, from wars, though children swarmed, for every twelve of them only one or two survived. And what strange tribes, what ugly snouts behinds you and me, what bloody rites in honor of gods carved in the trunk of a linden tree! Back to those who are stalking through the undergrowth of a murky primeval forest with chipped stones for their only weapons, in order to split the skulls of their enemies. It would seem as if we had only parents and that's all, but those other pre-pre-predecessors exist, and with them their afflictions, manias, mental illnesses, syphilis, tuberculosis, and whatnot, and how do you know they do not continue on in you? And what was the probability that among the children of your great-great-grandparents the one survived who would beget your ancestor? And what the probability that this would repeat itself in the next generation? Altogether, a very slim chance that we would be born in these skins, as these, not other, individuals, in whom the genes met those of the devil knows what whores and oafs. The very fact that our species survived and even multiplied beyond measure is astonishing, for it had much against it, and the primeval forest full of animals stronger than humans may serve till now as a metaphor for man's precarious situation - let us add viruses, bacteria, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, but also his own works, atomic weapons and the pollution of nature. Our species should have disappeared a long time ago, and it is still alive, incredibly resistant. That you and I happen to be part of it should be enough to give us pause for meditation.

RICHARD FEYNMAN LETTER TO ARLINE FEYNMAN, 1946 Richard Feynman (1918–1988) shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics. Unrivaled in his generation for his brilliance and innovation, he was also known for being witty, warm, and unconventional. Those last three qualities were particularly evident in this letter, which he wrote to his wife Arline nearly two years after her death from tuberculosis. Feynman and Arline had been high school sweethearts and married in their twenties. Feynman’s second marriage, in 1952, ended in divorce two years later. His third marriage, in 1960, lasted until his death. D’Arline, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; & I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to & thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish & that you want me to have full happiness & don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girl friend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls & very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead. Rich. P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.