Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom Summary (Question and Answer)

Chapter Six (Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom)

CHAPTER SIX – The Classroom
29	32	Morrie tells Albom that people see him as a ‘bridge’. What does he mean by this?	Morrie means that, whilst he is not dead, he is no longer truly alive. Instead he is in-between the two poles and can thus tell people about the transition from life to death.
30	32-34	‘What happened to me’? Albom kept asking himself this question as he spoke with his professor. Why was this question consuming him?	As he spoke to Morrie, Albom realised that he had changed a great deal from his university days. He was no longer the freedom loving young man he had once been; instead he had traded that and a good deal more for a ‘big pay check’.
31	35	Morrie seems to think that it is worse to live unhappily than it is to die happily. Why does he think that so many people who come to visit him are unhappy?	Morrie believes that one of the main reasons that people are unhappy is a culture which doesn’t make them feel good about themselves.
32	37	At the end of their meeting, Morrie did something which Albom claims still haunts him to this day. What was this?	Morrie demonstrated the extent of his illness by comparing his lung capacity with Albom’s. He did this by asking Albom to exhale whilst counting to the highest number he could. Albom reached 70 but Morrie only reached 18. When he first did this test when he was taught it by his doctor he could reach 23.
33	40	When Morrie was Albom’s student, the professor told him about something he called ‘the tension of opposites’. What was this?	‘The tension of opposites’ describes how people live their lives as a series of pulls and pushes. You want to do one thing and yet feel duty bound to do something else. As a consequence, most people end up living somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, Morrie told his student, love will always win in this ‘tug of war’.