ButWhatFor Four for Friday | No. 028

If such a man is wise, he will gladly do the thing that is next, when the time and the need come together, without asking what the future holds for him. Let the half-god play his part well and manfully, and then be content to draw aside when the god appears. Nor should he feel vain regrets that to another it is given to render greater services and reap a greater reward.

Let it be enough for him that he too has served, and that by doing well he has prepared the way for the other man who can do better.

— Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography

“I thought your side disapproved of guns,” said Crowley. He took the gun from the angel’s plump hand and sighted along the stubby barrel.

“Current thinking favors them,” said Aziraphale. “They lend weight to moral argument. In the right hands, of course.”

…

But he liked seeing nuns around, in the same way that he liked seeing the Salvation Army. It made you feel that it was all all right, that people somewhere were keeping the world on its axis.

…

“You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof of an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion.”

Crowly considered this. “Nah,” he said at last. “For my money, it was just average incompetence.”

…

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

…

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

…

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds – from 5 percent to 15 percent – albeit with a poor quality of life.

Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us…

What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.