the simplest law of nature | Hudson River State Hospital

Updated 2010 | By Matthew Christopher

Gravity tries to break you, to wear you down.

It's so much easier to sink away into oblivion than to constantly fight, to hold it together and defy the winds, the rains, the weight of your own existence, of time itself. A floor caves in, a fire breaks out, another day passes and you find yourself further and further from where you started and what you envisioned yourself as being. What goes up must come back down again - but the reverse isn't true at all.

What goes down often stays there.

It's hard to imagine why Hudson River State Hospital obstinately resists the inevitable, why it refuses to acquiesce and with one heaving sigh rejoin the earth, to let go of its quixotic quest to remind the world of what it once was, what it could have and should have been.

No one wants to hear anyway. No one wants to look at this gaping wound, this real-life parable that clearly shows in irrefutable terms that many times the Good Samaritan never arrives, that glorious ambitions are sometimes left to bleed out and rot away, exposed to the elements, without even the decency of a burial, let alone a memorial.

For a brief time Hudson River State Hospital took flight, buoyed by the belief in the Kirkbride ideal and the hope that society could and would care for those who had been stricken with some of the most cruel and baffling illnesses ever known: those diseases that contort the soul, poison the heart and mind, and cripple even geniuses and saints. Think what you will of what came of the way these goals were approached - this is what happens when those ideals crash back into the ground.

What goes up always comes down. It's the simplest law of nature.