Popular Reading and the Failure to Confront Suffering

My exposure to Tuesdays with Morrie came two years ago after a colleague's brush with death. In relating the aftermath of the experience, he mentioned that he had at the time of his heart attack been reading a remarkable book that helped him through his recovery, that it had given him a new outlook on his illness, and that he was recommending it highly to all of his friends, especially those who because of illness, age, or the loss of loved ones, were confronting in a personal way the fact of their own mortality. I eagerly reached for a copy, but much to my disappointment, while I found a touching, somewhat sentimental story about a restored relationship between a student and his dying professor, I did not find that the book took on in any satisfying way the real subject the one subject that authors from Sophocles to Dostoevsky to Flannery O'Connor have been tackling throughout human history, the one subject that draws the line between the amateurs and the pros: the problem of suffering.

Having inspired a made-for-TV movie this past winter, Tuesdays with Morrie, after 136 weeks on the New York Times Book Review list, is still the number one, nonfiction best seller. This immense popularity indicates that Mitch Albom offers Americans something they hunger for, but as any dieter can tell you, what one wants is not necessarily what one needs. Any truth- claims this book offers should be weighed carefully before consumption.

A sociology professor at Brandeis, Morrie Schwartz, diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig's disease, had already appeared once on Ted Koppel's "Nightline" by the time his former student caught up with him. Albom then began what he called his professor's last class: every Tuesday he flew from Detroit to Boston to meet with Morrie, to hear from him what it was like to die, to glean last bits of wisdom from his teacher, who was not at all reluctant to discuss his fears, his joys, his hopes, the progress of his disease and its indignities. What Morrie offers him is, primarily, a series of aphorisms which encapsulate his philosophy. "Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent," he says at one point. "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live," he offers at another. We must learn "to be fully human." "There is no foundation. . . upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family." "If you really want it, then you'll make your dreams happen." And, finally, the most frequently used clich of the self-help generation: We are unhappy because our culture "does not make people feel good about themselves." What begins to emerge after a mind-numbing series of these statements is a picture of a sweet old man, a Mr. Chips, whose vague theological thinking is not strong enough for his shattering encounter with death but who takes the opportunity of his own approaching death to try to create meaning ex nihilo, or at least from the self alone an activity which creates a distraction from the meaninglessness and horror of his suffering. The only philosophy of suffering, dying, and death he can offer, finally, is a series of cultural clichs, which evade the question and force the responsibility for creating meaning upon the individual alone. In fact, for Morrie all meaning seems to reside in the self. Both he and Albom fail to see that this philosophical position leads inexorably to a philosophy of selfishness in which the statement, "There is no such thing as a selfless act" is celebrated, its ironies invisible, any potential for self-criticism neglected. "You play cards with a lonely older man," Morrie says at one point," and you find new respect for yourself, because you are needed." In other words, it's all about "me."

Although Morrie indicates that he has low moments of doubt and grief, he doesn't allow these to surface during his visits with Albom. In fact, the narrator's presence and the persona he creates for himself dilute Morrie's own story and arouse the suspicion in the reader that perhaps the deficiencies of the book are related to the deafness of the narrator, who seems most eager to show how terribly good-natured Morrie is about dying and how dedicated he is to being Morrie's faithful scribe. Let no one misunderstand. This is Mitch Albom's book even more than it is Morrie Schwartz's.

Moments of authenticity do occasionally surface in this book. At one point, for example, Albom complains that there often appear to be no clear answers. But it is one thing to conclude there are no answers and then to accept the challenge to probe the questions more deeply, and it is quite another to leave the questions unexplored in effect to have nothing to say about them beyond noting their existence. Another initially promising insight occurs when Morrie tells Albom that life is a "tension of opposites." Maybe, the reader hopes, he will now be ready to explore the knotty issue of the ambiguity of suffering. But when asked which side finally wins, Morrie concludes, "Love wins." Morrie, an agnostic who believes in humankind's inherent goodness, does not in this statement refer to God's love, but rather to a vague, feel-good, sentimentalized love which is convenient to espouse but difficult to grasp, primarily because it is not anchored in anything other than the individual will.

A revealing moment occurs just as Morrie explains to Albom his philosophy of detachment. He is at that instant wracked by a violent coughing spell after which he says to Albom that he wants to "die serenely. Peacefully. Not like what just happened. And this is where detachment comes in. If I die in the middle of a coughing spell like I just had, I need to be able to detach from the horror, I need to say, 'This is my moment.'" The horror of death and suffering, the Good Friday reality we must all confront in order to make the Easter Resurrection meaningful, is simply pushed away. Because the confidence Easter gives the dying is unavailable to Morrie, he must do what he can to avoid being caught up in the horror of his predicament. And the only thing he can do is once again identify the primacy of the individual will against obliterating forces in the universe.

Only once, thirty pages from the end of the book, does Morrie say anything at all about God, and then it is a rather flip comment about bargaining with God for an after-death position as one of the angels. Omitted is the question which philosophers and theologians have been grappling with forever: why God allows suffering. If one lives in a universe untouched by God, if one lives in a universe devoid of the redemptive suffering the Cross offers, if one's only way to encounter suffering is to preach a controlled "detachment" dependent entirely on the human will, then any discussion of God's role in the suffering is simply irrelevant. God doesn't allow suffering, Morrie would conclude. Suffering just is. And it is up to the suffering individual to figure out a way to endure without panicking.

Why is this book so popular? It is popular because it embraces American individualistic ideals and makes no philosophical or theological demands on the reader. It poses no truly challenging questions. It shies away from confronting ambiguity, but also, in fact, evades embracing any absolutes. To the question, what happens after death? Morrie can utter only this, "You live on in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here." To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor responding to a Protestant friend's explanation of the Eucharist as "symbolic": "If that's all there is to it, then to hell with it." If confronting death leads only to a series of hackneyed dicta, well, as Peggy Lee would croon, "Then let's go dancing."