“Apocalypse,” Sontag writes, “is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse From Now On.’ Apocalypse has become an event that is happening and not happening.” In this era of uncertain apocalypse, my father has taken to reading the Stoics, which is not an entirely surprising interest for an oncologist. What he is drawn to in their philosophy, he tells me, is the idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
