Love in the Time of Numbness (Anton Chekhov)

This is one of my most read essays. It is a keynote address to aspiring writers by oncologist-author, Siddhartha Mukherjee (who wrote The Emperor of all Maladies). It discusses how to write in a time of collective desensitization, and its answer comes from Anton Chekhov’s 1890 trip to Sakhalin Island. If you like Chekhov's writing then you will love learning about his physical and mental journey from doctor to writer (what he witnesses is not for the faint of heart)...

"The opposite of “anesthetic,” we might recall, is “aesthetic”—a word that originally referred to whatever could be perceived or felt but that came to refer to the nature of beauty. Beauty, in all its myriad forms, can only be created in opposition to numbness. That, at least for me, serves as a quiet manifesto for our times."