The Book of Charlie

by David von Drehle

In the grip of depression or anxiety, any affirmative step is better than paralysis. Action promotes more action; decision produces decision; living generates life.

A doctor’s principal contribution, Hertzler wrote, was his demeanor. Having seen a lot of disease, the trained physician could distinguish patients likely to recover from patients likely to die soon. A doctor’s bedside manner could help patients and families speed recovery or prepare for the inevitable.

There is a wonderful image in Les Misérables—Victor Hugo’s sprawling novel, not the wildly successful musical lightly based on it. Hugo compares the soul of a thriving individual to the workings of the human eye, which adjusts to gloom by becoming more open. “The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light,” the author observes, “just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”

There is no living without making mistakes. As Epictetus, that marvelous Stoic, said, “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr had a slightly different spin on the same truth. “An expert,” he declared, “is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

“I just plowed along,” he finally said. In fact, Charlie had adopted his mother’s philosophy, which was “so simple,” and served Charlie so well: “Do the right thing.” This was a very practical philosophy, he continued. “If you do the right thing, it covers a whole raft of situations.” Warming to the question, Charlie went on. “I always say: This will pass.” Whatever the challenge, “you’ve got to work through it, and hold the line, and don’t fall apart. Stick in there. There’s no future in negativism.” And finally: “Nobody’s going to do it for you. You’ve got to do your own paddling. So always keep your daubers up—no matter what.” Could it be that this life, in this tempest of change, through economic depression and prosperity, in wartime and peacetime, youth and age, joy and grief, boiled down to such simplicity?