Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom is a memoir of the author’s visits with his favorite college professor, Morris Schwartz, during the professor’s last year of life. Morris Schwartz had ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). “ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body of pile of wax…imprisoned inside a limp husk…the man frozen inside his own flesh.”
“Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas. …He wrote bite-sized philosophies (aphorisms) about living with death’s shadow.”
Mitch visits on Tuesdays and records these ideas.
The book contains some biographical glimpses of Morrie’s life. During the Vietnam war, he convinced the Sociology faculty at Brandeis University, where he taught, to give all male students As, so they would not lose their draft deferments. He regularly went to a church dance, mostly attended by much younger students, and danced solo as the spirit moved him.
Most of the book was aphorisms.
“Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
The lesson here is to make peace and forgive today, to treat each day and person as precious.
“Whenever people ask me about having children or not having children, I never tell them what to do. I simply say, ‘There is no experience like having children.’”
“It is impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are…now is my time to be seventy-eight.”
“Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.”
“As his body rotted, his character shone even more brightly.”
“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
“Morrie borrowed freely from all religions.”
This is a book of love and release and death and aphorisms. A short book of wisdom.
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