"Skip it." He looked sorrowfully at me. "You win that one."
"All I want," I said, "is for people to be truly humane. Truly loving. But, to gain that, we'd be obliged to give up a great deal we now cherish dearly."
We had lemon ice.
Later, we walked into the Park and sat down....
The people on the newspapers on the grass, the silo smell of trees at night in heat waves, lamplight and music—as I have said....
"Cruelty in doctors," Tom repeated musingly, after we found a bench on the Mall, where we could feel the breeze if one came.
"Last night," I responded, when he didn't go on, "I was reading a book that suggested the whole philosophy of medicine was cruel. Saving babies—increasing the life span—only so people will go hungry by millions."
"Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know—except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"
"What about them?"
He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the Island—I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance—in a high percentage—of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot—ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on—year after year after year."