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 of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
- 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 Stages, 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 Countess RostÛva)
- 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, SÙku, 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-Eaters)
- 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 ¡ntonia
- 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
Copyright © 2005, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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