| Contents |
Section I: Natural Imperfection and Human Longing -- Chapter 1: The search for perfection -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth-Mark -- Ovid, Metamorphoses -- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty -- Lewis Thomas, The Wonderful Mistake -- Andrew M. Niccol, Gattaca -- C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength -- Richard Selzer, Imelda -- Stephen Braun, The Science of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mood -- Chapter 2: Scientific aspirations -- Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans -- René Descartes, Discourse on Method -- E.O. Wilson, Naturalist -- Richard P. Feynman, Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman -- James D. Watson, The Double Helix, A Personal Account -- Chapter 3: To Heal sometimes to Comfort always -- The Hippocratic Oath -- The Book of Sirach -- Albert Camus, The Plague -- Richard Selzer, The Surgeon as Priest -- W. H. Auden, The Art of Healing (In Memoriam David Protech, M. D.) -- Walt Whitman, To One Shortly to Die -- Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Death of the Frau Consul) -- George Eliot, Middlemarch -- Perri Klass, Invasions -- Section II: The Human Being and The Life Cycle -- Chapter 4: Are We our Bodies? -- Galway Kinnell, The Fly -- Plato, The Symposium -- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, What the Body Knows -- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Cannon Fodder and the Operating Tent) -- St. Augustine, Confessions -- Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric -- Delmore Schwartz, The Heavy Bear -- Vladimir Bukovsky, Account of Torture -- Roger Angell, Late Innings -- John Ciardi, Washing your Feet -- Richard Selzer, Whither Thou Goest -- Thomas Lynch, Good Grief: An Undertaker's Reflections -- Chapter 5: Many States, One Life -- The Rhetoric of Aristotle -- Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age -- William Shakespeare, As You Like It -- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan -- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Young Nicholas) -- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Mature Nicholas) -- Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Thomas Buddenbrooks) -- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Countless Rostóva) -- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory -- Robert Louis Stevenson, Ordered South -- Willa Cather, The Professor's House -- Liam O'FLaherty, Life -- Chapter 6: Among the generations -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Childbirth) -- George Eliot, Silas Marner -- Galway Kinnell, After Making Love we hear Footsteps -- Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception -- Sigrid Undset, The Mistress of Husaby -- The Iliad of Homer (Meeting of Glaukos and Diomedes and Meeting of Hektor and Andromache) -- Chapter 7: Why not Immortality? -- The Odyssey of Homer (Odysseus and Kalypso) -- The Book of Revelation, 21:1-22:5 -- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book III -- Francis Bacon, Of Death -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Epistles: On Meeting Death Cheerfully -- The Epic of Gilgamesh -- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels -- Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting -- E.E. Cummings, Two Poems -- Hans Jonas, The Burden and Blessing of Mortality -- Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain -- Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill and Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night -- Murasaki Shikibu, Sôku, and Dogen, Three Japanese Poems -- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 12 -- Section III: Living Well -- Chapter 8: Vulnerability and Suffering -- The Book of Job -- The Iliad of Homer (Meeting of Achilleus and Priam) -- William Shakespeare, King Lear -- W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts -- Mary Webb, Precious Bane -- Francis Bacon, On Deformity -- Richard Selzer, Witness -- Lorrie Moore, People like that are the Only People Here: Canonical Babblings in Peed Onk -- Flannery O'Connor, Introduction to a Memoir of Mary Ann -- Chapter 9: Living Immediately -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Levin Mowing) -- Robert Louis Stevenson, Child's Play -- Emily Dickinson, Pain has an Element of Blank -- Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer -- Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature -- The Odyssey of Homer (The Lotus-Eater) -- Malcolm Gladwell, Drugstore Athlete -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker -- Chapter 10: Human Dignity -- The Book of Genesis, 9:1-9 -- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals -- The Iliad of Homer (Achilleus Abuses the Body of Hektor) -- The Histories of Herodotus -- Willa Cather, My Ántonia -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Village Blacksmith -- The Ballad of John Henry and Paul Kaplan, Henry the Accountant -- John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive -- Isaac Bashevis Singer, In my Father's Court -- O'Henry, Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen -- Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter -- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the LIfe of Frederick Douglass. |
