Nietzsche was right: what is best and what is worst in us are often inseparable. The artist whose aesthetic gift and sensitivity make her impractical and unambitious; the lawyer whose intense drive and gift for dialectic make him single-minded and ungenerous; the man of wealth and power whose vast resources have come at the price of inner cultivation and spirituality; the doctor whose commitment and devotion to her patients has turned her social life into a wasteland; the caretaker whose gentleness and compassion have bled into servility. There isn’t a tree in the world, however tall and luxuriant, that doesn’t somewhere contain a bit of deadwood.
