LITTLE ROCK — “. . . it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

— Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby

The sick and well each live in separate if parallel universes. They may understand each other, but not really. For they don’t share the same world. Only the extraordinary patient or physician can see things through the other’s eyes, experience the world as the other does, Which requires not only knowledge but something far beyond, something beyond even empathy. Something like identity.

I can remember visiting Florence one drizzly spring with a lady who wanted to see it once more before she was gone, It was her favorite city and there was no gainsaying her taste—or determination to visit it again, walk its streets, explore its chapels, discover its frescoes, cross its bridges across the Arno, each with its own character and history . . . She woke up each morning with a zest for the day ahead. She was back in Florence!

The city, so full of Renaissance art, is a work of art itself. Not grand and imposing like Rome, a great world capital full of the spectacular and dramatic, but everything in proportion, as befits the classical reborn in another time. It’s a lesson not to be forgotten:

Beauty doesn’t require drama, but rather a perfection of scale. Preferably a human and humane scale. As in Florence.

Even then the lady’s appetite had not deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t appreciate the Tuscan cuisine, or the pride and charm with which it was prepared and served. This being Italy, we never had a bad meal.

The waiters seemed to have a sixth sense that told them she was special, or perhaps they could tell the lady was paying not just her last visit to Florence but to life in full. And where else to go but Florence to see life in all its arcaded grace? Maybe they were familiar with last-time visitors and could tell them at a glance. Was it a certain telltale wistfulness about the signora, an aura, that gave her away? Who knows?

Then again, I never met anyone who did not respond to Carolyn Greenberg with what seemed special affection, perhaps because she had a gift for affection herself. She needed only her broad, welcoming smile to express it. People tended to remember her. All sorts of people, of all stations in life.

She made it to Florence twice that year before her body gave out, and on the trip with me the city seemed full of wan young men accompanied by their friends and caretakers. It took us only a little while to understand: They were AIDS patients in the last stages of their sickness. They, too, wanted to see Florence one last time. She not only understood, she identified.

Like her, they were ready to let go of life, but not before a last embrace of its simple grace. The ill have much to teach the well. Their taste for all things good in life may be sharpened by an ever increasing awareness of their mortality. They teach us how to appreciate the best by their example. And how to rightly value time.

The ill may only seem to be retreating into a self-conscious world bordered by their symptoms. Instead their hold on the simple, universal gifts of this world may only strengthen as they narrow their focus to the best and most enduring of things, like grace and beauty. Like Florence.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his novel about life in a cancer ward in 1955, much like the one in which he was a patient in Uzbekistan, has one of his characters explain that sickness is not the whole world to the sick, any more than wellness is to the well:

“Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit. Don’t you feel that?”

The deathly ill may not lose their grip on life even as it slips from them, but strengthen their hold on its important things, its enduring gifts, which may be all that matters to them as the distractions are cleared away. They may see the essence of life far more clearly than the rest of us. Their illness has given them a sense of proportion; they no longer have time for the trivial, the distracting, for anything less than the essential, for what makes life worth living, and then leaving in good grace.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:

[email protected]

Perspective, Pages 81 on 11/18/2012