Deaconess
“Teach us to care and not to care.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday“
Related material:
Beth Israel Deaconess,
The House of God,
and, from Is Nothing Sacred?,
the following quotations–
“I know what ‘nothing’ means.”
— Joan Didion in
Play It As It Lays
“Nothing is random.”
— Mark Helprin in
Winter’s Tale
“692” — Pennsylvania lottery,
Ash Wednesday, 2000;
“hole” — Page 692,
Webster’s New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960
“This hospital, like every other,
is a hole in the universe
through which holiness
issues in blasts.
It blows both ways,
in and out of time.”
— Annie Dillard in
For the Time Being
(1999)