When Joan Anderson appeared on Oprah’s show nearly seven years ago to tout her new book, A Year by the Sea, I didn’t rush to the bookstore. It sounded like a fairy tale: a woman trying to find herself by taking a year off to live in the family’s cottage on Cape Cod. But when my doctor recommended the book recently, even offering her copy, I decided to open my mind and give it a second chance.
     When a work interests me, I take notes like a student. A Year by the Sea had that effect. It didn’t make me want to swim with seals, spend a night alone in a tent on an island, or eke out a living in a fish market; but in learning about herself, the author came up with universal insights and observations that I want to think about again and again.
     Towards the end of her year, Anderson takes a solitary bike ride. She stops in front of a Methodist Church. On the sign outside was a saying that keeps popping into my head, one I have turned inside out and backwards. The sign said, "The opposite of love is indifference."
     Some would disagree and say hatred is the opposite of love but hate and love are both strong emotions. Indifference lacks feeling. Frankly, in the words of Rhett Butler, it means you don’t give a damn, Scarlet. How many marriages have gone stale or failed because one person has grown indifferent to the other? More than saying, I hate you, indifference says I do not care about you.
     The only thing I was ever indifferent to was high school. I would have gladly skipped the whole four years. In fact, towards the end of my freshman year at a girls’ boarding school, I was suspended for not caring enough about the rules to tuck my shirt into my skirt. My father picked me up on a Sunday morning, the beginning of my two week banishment. All the way home, he never said one word. Didn’t ask what happened. Didn’t care about my side of the story. Didn’t yell at me and say I had brought disgrace to the family. Dad’s complete silence and lack of interest was the worst punishment he could have doled out.
     In his 1999 speech, The Perils of Indifference, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel said, "Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger or hatred." Wiesel went on to say that indifference is not only a sin but a punishment.
     Of course, Mr. Wiesel was speaking about indifference far worse than my father ignoring me on our drive home. Wiesel had been referring to those who were indifferent to the Holocaust. Bystanders, was the word he used. Today, we see indifference by government to the plight of people displaced by a hurricane. To those unable to afford adequate medical insurance. What writer Jack Kerouac may have meant when he likened indifference to a crime.
     Maybe it would be a good idea for more doctors to prescribe books to their patients. Daily doses to make us think and feel. Rx: read two chapters and call me in the morning.