Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary

by Timothy Snyder

The rage was pure me, my wish to be a sound not an echo, to compose not decompose. It was not against anything, except the entire universe and its laws of unlife. For a night or two I could shine in my own light. Yet, slowly and softly, a second mood impinged, one that sustained me in a different way: a feeling that life was only truly life insofar as it was not only about me. Like the rage, this mood visited me when I was alone, when I could do little for myself, when my whole sense of motion came from visions in my mind. In this mood I felt myself to be in a cluster of something with other people, tumbling through time. When I tried to draw the feeling in my journal, I came up with an uneven, floating conveyance. It looked a bit like a raft. A raft can be built over time from bits and pieces. I was a part of a raft, and others were, too; we were floating and jostling together in the same water, sometimes effortlessly, sometimes against the rocks. If my plank fell into the deep, the raft might lose its way or capsize. Some planks of the raft were further from mine, and some were closer. I recited to myself the ways my children’s lives were bound to my own. What mattered was not that I was distinct, but that I was theirs: their father. Every bit of their existence involved the expectation of my presence. They had never not touched me. Their planks had always been bound to mine. I imagined what would change without me, beginning with the daily details that mark the mental c...