All my life wherever I have been, in whatever places I have found myself, I have felt like an outsider. And who hasn’t? Every home is temporary and we are only transients. But I was not prepared for the irony I encountered now, that even as a patient in a cancer ward I would feel myself an outsider too. I looked at the women in their kerchiefs and wigs, and the men in the watch caps they donned to hide their baldness; I took in their gray pallor and the dark looks of the family members who came to support them, and felt, “I am not one of them.”
It was the false consciousness that had accompanied me my entire life. These tragedies happen to others. I am not one of them. Even as I entertained these thoughts, I recognized how self-denying and ultimately absurd they were. None of us are outsiders. We are all going to the same destination. Though my recent ordeal was over and I could walk back into the sunlight and resume my interrupted life, I was not really out of there. I had been lucky, but I had not been given a pardon, only a reprieve. My father was right. Life is a cancer ward, and death is in our cells metastasizing every day
It was the false consciousness that had accompanied me my entire life. These tragedies happen to others. I am not one of them. Even as I entertained these thoughts, I recognized how self-denying and ultimately absurd they were. None of us are outsiders. We are all going to the same destination. Though my recent ordeal was over and I could walk back into the sunlight and resume my interrupted life, I was not really out of there. I had been lucky, but I had not been given a pardon, only a reprieve. My father was right. Life is a cancer ward, and death is in our cells metastasizing every day
( David Horowitz )
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