【推荐1】As Connie took the plates away, I noticed a stack of newspapers that had obviously been read before I got there.

“You bother keeping up with the news?” I asked.

“Yes,” Morrie said. “Do you think that’s strange? Do you think because I’m dying, I shouldn’t care what happens in this world?”

Maybe.

He sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t care. After all, I won’t be around to see how it all turns out. But it’s hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I’m suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims…and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don’t know any of these people. But—how can I put this?—I’m almost…drawn to them.”

His eyes got moist, and I tried to change the subject, but he dabbed his face and waved me off.

“I cry all the time now,” he said. “Never mind.”

“Amazing,” I thought. I worked in the news business. I covered stories where people died. I interviewed sad family members. I even attended the funerals. I never cried. Morrie, for the suffering of people half a world away, was shedding tears. “Is this what comes at the end?” I wondered. Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers cry for one another.

Morrie honked loudly into the tissue. “This is okay with you, isn’t it? Men crying?”

“Sure,” I said, too quickly.

He grinned. “Ah, Mitch, I’m gonna loosen you up. One day, I’m gonna show you it’s okay to cry.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

We laughed because he used to say the same thing nearly twenty years earlier. Mostly on Tuesdays. In fact, Tuesday had always been our day together. Most of my courses with Morrie were on Tuesdays. He had office hours on Tuesdays, and when I wrote my senior thesis(论文)which was pretty much Morrie’s suggestion, right from the start—it was on Tuesdays that we sat together, by his desk, or in the cafeteria, or on the steps of Pearlman Hall, going over the work.

So it seemed only fitting that we were back together on a Tuesday, here in the house with the Japanese maple out front. As I readied to go, I mentioned this to Morrie.

“We’re Tuesday people,” he said.

“Tuesday people,” I repeated.

Morrie smiled.

“Mitch, you asked about caring for people I don’t even know. But can I tell you the thing I’m learning most with this disease?”

“What’s that?”

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love; we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational(理性的)act.”

He repeated it carefully, pausing for effect. “Love is the only rational act.”

I nodded, like a good student, and he exhaled weakly. I leaned over to give him a hug. And then, although it is not really like me, I kissed him on the cheek. I felt his weakened hands on my arms, the thin stubble of his whiskers brushing my face.

“So you will come back next Tuesday?” he whispered.