Thinking Thoughts

One of my favorite things about living in Philadelphia is the Rodin Museum, the second largest collection in the world (behind only Paris) of the sculptor’s works. Outside the museum, in front of a beautiful stone gateway, sits a caste of The Thinker, Rodin’s best-known piece that depicts a man hunched over in deep thought.

There is a small but lovely garden between The Thinker and the entrance to the museum, a garden that is truly a wonderful place to sit and think. I’ve often found myself there on quiet afternoons, looking at the trees, peering at the fountain, and letting my thoughts wonder. What could The Thinker be thinking about for all these years? What was so important? Has he got it figured out already? I’ve just spent the last hour reading on hemodynamics and the oxygen carrying capacity of blood – do you think he thought about any of that? Or was there something more important, more pressing?

Eventually, in the garden, I find my eyes drifting towards the main entrance to the museum. It is adorned by Rodin’s largest – and final – project, The Gates of Hell. It is 6 meters high and contains 180 figures; it is meant to depict a scene from Dante; it is terrifying. It is the only sculpture I can imagine that somehow, despite its location in a dark entrance to a museum, can completely captivate the mind of someone who is trying to get some peace and quiet in a lovely garden in the middle of a city. It screams at you. It shrieks. You have to take notice. And sitting there, nearly at the top of it, amidst all the demons and souls, is a miniature The Thinker. And he’s still thinking.

I guess one of the scariest things about death is the eternal loss of consciousness. Of course, on one hand this is silly – you can’t be aware of a loss of consciousness, so how can there be anything to actually fear? Yet in another sense it is nauseatingly horrifying to imagine just how long eternity is. Some have written that hell might not be so bad, given the choice, since at least there is a presumed level of consciousness. And with consciousness comes hope. Of course, Dante thought of all this – his gate of hell carries the inscription “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

At the burn center – as in any ICU – we have a lot of patients who are on “life support.” That is to say, they are so sick that we are breathing for them (mechanical ventilation), feeding them (via percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tubes) and assisting their heart (with inotropic agents, vassopressors, or aortic balloon pumps). All of them are heavily sedated – they have to be, otherwise they will fight the ventilator and be in agonizing pain. I have no idea what their level of consciousness is. I do know that for some of them there is great hope of recovery, while for others there is practically none.

Just recently, The Thinker was temporarily moved to inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while some construction takes place at the Rodin Museum. There now sites just an empty pedicle where the statue usually sits. It’s like he finally figured it out, and quickly got up to do something. And so maybe it’s time to take a break from these eternal questions and just focus on living actions. To just do. It’s worth a try.