Jean-Paul Sartre’s view of hell is not instruments of torture but other people: “L’enfers, c’est les autres.” He wrote a play to that effect in 1944 called No Exit. Three not-so-dearly departed souls find themselves locked in a nondescript waiting room together for all eternity: Joseph Garcin, callous and cowardly former adulterer; Estelle Rigault, shallow high-society gold digger; Inès Serrano, cruel and self-aware manipulative lesbian.

The travel guides hype Washington Square or Bryant Park as the best places to people-watch in New York City, but I’m going to give you a big tip: For my money, the best people-watching happens in the 10-block radius New Yorkers call “bedpan alley.” There Memorial Sloan Kettering’s renowned cancer center abuts four other big-name medical facilities along leafy avenues near the East River.

The Bible says poverty comes upon you like a robber (Proverbs 6:11), but so does old age. Turn around and you lose your hair, you lose your balance, you lose your bladder control. Your sneakered foot sticks for a split second on the macadam of the bank parking lot, and the next thing you know home health nurses and physical therapists are ringing the doorbell and changing your decor: extra grab bar for the shower, extension on the stair railing, “transfer handle” on the bed, kitchen chair with arms and glide tips.

Maybe only in heaven will we know what music was. “What was that back there?” we’ll say. “And what witchcraft did it work on me, that it broke my heart, and I loved to have it so?”

Take “Autumn in New York,” by Vernon Duke: “Autumn in New York / Why does it seem so inviting? / Autumn in New York / It spells the thrill of first-nighting. / Glittering crowds / And shimmering clouds / In canyons of steel / Are making me feel / I’m home.”

When a world crisis erupts, when President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un trade verbal threats, we worry over a looming, future nuclear Armageddon, and we look to past behavior as a guide to confrontation.

The church, meanwhile, as pastor-theologian Tim Keller points out, carries on its work in the present progressive tense: “You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5).

The photo that accompanies this story is of my father and aunt. I sent it with this story because it is the last picture in the album before you close it and put it away, and you can see that it is a happy one.

You have heard of being in love. Have you heard of being in hate? People who are in love generally know they are in love. People who are in hate, not so.

People in love are emotional and realize it. People in hate think they have never been so rational.

We speak of being in love as a state. One can often identify the onset of the condition (and sometimes the expiration of it). We say of a starry-eyed couple, “They are in love.” It is an acknowledgment that something real has overtaken their brains.