During his first year at Harvard Medical School, Charles Krauthammer dived too-deep into a too-shallow swimming pool, hit the bottom with his head at the exact wrong angle, and severed his spinal cord at the fifth cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed instantly.

Two of his books sat poolside as paramedics pulled him from the water: a medical text on the anatomy of the spinal cord and a novel by Andre Malraux the French author who famously observed that “art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man’s fate.”