When you choose your own way, you lose your happiness

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?' she asked. 'Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more pain¬ful?''Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteris¬tic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I'd come to understand that the easiest death wasn't necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living, instead of dying.

Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers _ tulips, lilies, carnations _ to find the heads eaten by deer. It__ just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture__nd his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.