Letter from the Other Shore
“Beyond right and wrong there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
They’ve constructed tent hospitals in Central Park across Fifth Avenue from Mt. Sinai Hospital and the foreboding is so palpable to me, the sense that what’s coming can’t be prepared for so visceral, that I can barely stand to consider it. New York used to be home, at least for the better part of most weeks when I’d commute in from small-town northeastern Pennsylvania to stay with my now wife while she was completing a residency in the city.
Every decent person loves New York, and some indecent too, but that it stands as the greatest of American cities is so axiomatic that I care not to even make an argument on behalf of it. Central Park is the great lung of Manhattan; when my wife was at work I’d wander the paths, the ramble, the Great Meadow were now medics work. There are few places—for many of us—as evocative of what a better world could look like. Think of it, unlike all of those royal pleasure palaces in the world of old, ’s lush urban garden is free and open to all. And now the dying too. All I will say is that I’ve heard from those who still live in the city (for anyone in publishing knows a lot of New Yorkers) that right now the sirens are deafening, that there are refrigerated trucks parked outside the hospitals because of the morgue overflow, and that EMS is working longer and harder hours than they did during 9/11. Speaking of that seminal event that inaugurated adulthood for those of my generation—for that was a disquieting year to be an 18-year-old man—sometime this week our nation will
