Joshua Prager uses his journalistic eye to tell his own story at TED2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Almost twenty-three years ago, Joshua Prager experienced a moment that could only be described as “a great hinge in my life,” one that divided it “like the spine of an open book.” Just 19 years old then, Prager was in Israel for a year after high school. He was sitting in the backseat of a minibus bound for Jerusalem when a truck behind him lost control and slammed into the corner where he sat. His neck broke and, in a second, he went from an athletic teen to a hemiplegic. It would be weeks before he could breathe on his own, four months before he would leave the hospital. For the next four years, he navigated the world in a wheelchair, then a cane and braces – and embarked on a career as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal.

Joshua Prager: In search of the man who broke my neckIn today’s talk, given at TED2013, Prager tells the story of going back to Jerusalem to try to find the man who had been driving that truck: Abed.

“[He was] a man I never met, but who had changed my life,” says Prager in this wrenching talk. “So on an overcast morning in January, I headed north in a silver Chevy to find a man – and some peace.”

Prager had returned to live in Jerusalem once before, after college. While there, he’d read Abed’s testimony from the morning after the accident and felt an intense wave of emotion.

“It was the first time I’d felt anger toward this man and it came from magical thinking. On this Xeroxed sheet of paper the crash had not yet happened,” says Prager. “Abed could still turn his wheel left so I would see him whoosh by out my window … and I would remain whole.”

He contacted Abed on that trip, but the two didn’t meet. It was only last year — as Prager wrote a book about his experience — that he realized he needed to meet Abed face-to face. “Finally I understood why,” says Prager. “To hear this man say two words: I’m sorry.”

To hear how Prager found Abed, watch this talk. In it, he shares the unexpected trajectories this meeting took — and the lessons this unpredictable encounter taught him about human nature and the core of our identities.

Of course, Prager was only able to tell a sliver of his story in an18-minute talk. He shares much, much more in his book Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. Below, two excerpts from this recently released book – one from the prologue and one short selection from later.

Through the faded blue metal frame of my open window, I watch the morning light approach. It crests the skinny cypress trees atop the hill just over the valley, rolls down the bone rooftops of Jabal Mukabbir, rises to ripen the red-yellow nectarines on my sill three stories above Naomi Street. My floor, tiles of salmon and olive, brightens, and my glass tabletop reflects the worn copy of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly upon it.

The light reminds me that I have just come back to Jerusalem and I smile at a thought: “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” I appropriated the sentence long ago from the Psalmist and I slide my left foot into my plastic brace, calf-high and erect in an empty brown shoe. I take hold of my wooden cane and walk to the staircase. There is no handrail on my right so I descend the three flights slowly, right forearm pressed against the powdery concrete wall, left hand unable to grasp the banister available to it, left leg — hard to bend–preceding the right down each of 55 steps.

I turn right on Naomi Street, right again on Hebron. My left foot is closer to the street than my right. Sidewalks the world over slant down toward the gutter and I am careful to give the extra smidgeon of clearance the slope affords to the half of me that swings forward from the hip. I have now done so for half my life.

Before May 16, 1990, I had not noticed the slant underfoot. Nor, as I ran over rise and fall, had I contemplated much what made me me, or that unfairness has theological implications, or that life might end each and every day.

But right now, because my neck broke, I am carrying a question to a windmill aware not only of the topography of the stone molars below but also, as every day, of these higher burdens.

And yet, I am lucky. Twenty-two years ago, at the base of the hill that rises to Jerusalem, a careless truck driver almost killed me as I sat in the back of a minibus. He would have but for the machines and people and tubes that saw to it that my body breathed and fed and pissed. A medical jet flew me home to New York where at age 19, I quietly observed the goings-on; I could not speak or move or feel anything below my neck save one well placed prick of a needle.

Improbably, the swelling in my neck receded. I would walk in the land of the living! But imbalanced. My right side moved freely. My left, restrained by spasticity, a neurological tightness of sorts, did not; it furled and shook. A doctor explained that I was further divided: I had Brown-Séquard syndrome which roughly meant that one half of me could move better, the other half feel.

I told myself to work now and think later. And so I pushed myself, learned to eat and dress and steady a suppository in spastic fingers, to sit and stand and walk. Walking, however gratifying, was at any real length an impractical exhaustion, and I used a wheelchair for four years until, back in Israel after college, I put in another year of exercise and rose from the chair for good. I returned to New York and became a journalist, walking through six continents with an ankle brace and cane, typing articles and a book with one finger.

I tried to write of the crash but failed. Instead, for a decade, I wrote of secrets. There was the reclusive boy who inherited the royalties to the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. There was the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment, The Shot Heard Round the World. There was the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a photographer in Iran. There were the unknown suicides of the parents of the most famous missing person in World War II.

It took a friend to point out to me the obvious: all of these stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that changed in an instant — owing if not to a crash than to an inheritance, a swing of a bat, a click of a shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I had been working through my lot after all.

A second friend helped me to see that I was, in effect, forcing my subjects — one solved secret at a time — to live with their altering moment just as I did: openly. Whereas a depressed person can choose to conceal her disability, to meet me is to see that I use a cane.

But as I continue now on my walk and turn left onto King David, I am less sure of what I, not others, see in me and my broken neck.

I have returned to Jerusalem to find this out, to become again whole where I was once divided.

I cross to the right side of the street so that my left leg is to the curb and I see the windmill ahead amidst cypress and carob and olive trees. It is beautiful, a narrowing white stone cylinder with an iron cap and sail. A wealthy Brit named Moses Montefiore had it built in 1857 to encourage Jews to leave the safe but confined walled city just over the valley and support themselves milling flour. Though a community rooted about the mill, the mill was not used for long.

I turn into the park, step onto its stone path and walk between puffs of rosemary toward the windmill. I have walked a mile and my back is tight–all that swinging of a leg–and I put my right hand on my hip and lean back quickly at the waist. I hear the familiar crack deep in my back, my left leg stiffens and kicks forward, my left arm bends and shakes in spastic confusion. I balance flamingo-like a few seconds on my right leg, then sit.

I reach the windmill and look up. And then I, who once ran about it, asks my question: with no wind and no mill, are you still a windmill?

***

I am standing on a rooftop in the old walled city of Jerusalem when at 4:04 on a Friday afternoon a siren sounds as it does here every week. It stops and the Sabbath, silent, begins. And I remember another silence that followed another great sound not far away. For the crash blew out my eardrum and for a time, I heard nothing.

And then the world was full of noise — beeps and alarms and intercoms and voices — and I was silent. And the absence of my voice was audible. So I listened and heard what I had not before — the wee squeak of a first sneeze, the echo of smacked lips, the soft click of my thumb pressing a blue square button embossed with the white silhouette of a nurse.

In the quiet of my first night at Sinai, I heard a scream. It was a sustained, bloodcurdling scream, a woman in a horror film. My body jerked. The scream stopped, then returned, words articulated but incomprehensible. Then more screams descending into a frantic cough.

Then I saw her — a girl, maybe 16, skinny and tall, with half her head shaved and long dark scraggly hair falling from the other. She looked like a demon and ran screaming from my door.

My heart pounded. I began to sweat. My call bell was clipped to the railing on the right of my bed and I put my thumb on it and pressed. No one came. The screaming continued. Sweat wet my face and I pressed the button repeatedly. Where was help?! I felt dizzy. It occurred to me that perhaps there had been a mistake: I had been sent to a mental institution! Minutes passed. I was dizzy, drenched and bewildered when the nurse entered my room and told me that the girl had been in a car accident and could not speak.

I calmed. I listened. I thought of the girl. Wrote William Carlos Williams: “The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients….”

Time passed and I readied for bed one night when a man I could not see began to moan. Minutes passed and still he moaned and then an hour passed and I was exhausted and began to count the moans and time the moans, their metronomic parabolic rise and fall. The nurses did not make the moans stop and the moans continued for nights until the man was gone and I did not care to where.

There was more noise too. Margaret was loud. Tufts of black and white hair did not conceal a scar on her scalp and she blurted out unpleasant words and glowered at all. And one Saturday night as my father recited a prayer to mark the end of the Sabbath and I held a forbidden candle, middle-aged Margaret pushed open my door with her foot and wheeled in.

My father stopped. We closed the door. Margaret looked at the flame and we looked at Margaret. Her expression contorted. “You can’t have fire,” she said.

“Hi Margaret,” I said.

“Hi sunshine.”

I explained that this was a special candle and the fire was a secret. Margaret listened as my father resumed the prayer. She left and never told.

Years passed and I thought of Margaret and the moaning man and the screaming girl and their half-spoken words and my own words that were whole. And I appreciated the words I spoke more for having once not been able to speak them. Wrote Melville: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”

Contrast. It is the short sentence that stands out in contradistinction to the long, the sound to the silence. You are mindful of what you do not have and so are truly mindful of what you do have. And if the gods are kind, you truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive when you live in a hospital or break your neck or are sick or lose someone you love or suffer in any existential way. You know death and so may wake each morning pulsing with ruddy life. Some part of you is cold and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm. And even to be cold. When one winter morning years after the crash, I stepped onto a tile floor and the underside of my left foot felt a flash of cold stone, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow.

The excerpt above comes from the new Byliner Original by Joshua Prager, Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. It’s available for $3.99 at Amazon’s Kindle Store and Apple’s iBookstore. It is also a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and a Short Read at Kobo.

So how did Prager come to TED? He spoke at the New York stop of our worldwide talent search. There he gave a shorter talk, about reaching his “half-life” – the exact moment when he had lived as long after the crash as he had before. Below, hear what he spent this moment, which calls “a looming uber-anniversary.”

And here, read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Prager after his talent search talk »

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

When Joshua Prager was young, he dreamt he would grow up to play baseball. Or be a doctor. He never imagined that at the age of 19 he would find himself paralyzed in the hospital, and that he’d have to reteach his body to move, to relearn to breathe and speak. In his new book Half-life, Prager returns to Jerusalem, where a truck hit the bus he was riding in and broke his neck.

On stage today Prager tells the story of his return to Jerusalem and the challenge of facing the man who had so radically altered his fate: the driver of that truck. One year ago, he recalls, he set out to find this man. He didn’t have a phone number or address, but he knew his name — Abed — and the town outside Jerusalem where he lived. Twenty-one years before outside this city Prager broke his neck when he was hit by a speeding truck. Now he was off in a silver Chevy, “to find a man and some peace.”

That night 21 years ago, Prager was 19 and reveling in his newfound strength. He had just grown 5 inches and was playing basketball with his friends. He was sitting in a mini-bus off to get pizza he had won on the court when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb. Prager’s head snapped back, his shoes flew off, and he flew, too.

When he landed he was a quadriplegic. Over the next few months he learned to breathe, sit and walk, and back home he was in a wheelchair for the next four years in college. After college he went back to Jerusalem. As he reflects, “I rose from my chair for good, leaned on my cane and looked back.” He contacted other victims and looked at old photographs, mourning all he had lost and not yet done and which was now impossible. On that trip Prager sought out Abed, not mentioning his condition or the fact that he knew Abed had had 27 driving violations by the age of 25. He said he wanted to meet with Abed, but later when he called back the number had been disconnected. Then, he said, “I let Abed and the crash go.”

Prager returned to New York and began his life as a journalist, typing hundreds of thousands of words with just one finger. His friend pointed out that all his stories mirrored his own: an entire life changed in one instant. His book was almost complete when he realized he still wanted to meet Abed: “I wanted to hear this man say two words: I’m sorry. People apologize for less.”

Prager went back to Jerusalem to search for Abed. He was carrying yellow flowers as a gift when he realized how ridiculous it seemed. “But what to get a man who broke your fucking neck?” (He settled on Turkish delight.) A torrent of questions filled Prager’s mind: What would Abed say and do? Who had he become since the accident? Who was he? Was he who he was before the crash? Are all of us the result of things done to us? And done for us? As Prager says, “It seemed we could be nothing more than gene and experience.” He looked back on the road and imagined that had the accident not happened he would have been a doctor, a husband, a father. And a little less mindful of time and death.

With help from a man he met in the street, Prager arrived at Abed’s house. Abed’s wife said her husband would be home in four hours. (Her Hebrew wasn’t very good and she later confessed she thought Prager was there to install the Internet.) Abed arrived home. The two men shook hands and smiled, and Prager gave Abed his gift.

Inside Abed began his tale of woe: He had just had surgery on his eyes, he had lost his teeth in the crash. Prager knew the police report said that Abed had come away from the accident unharmed. He brought polaroids and his driver’s license to show Prager what he looked like before. But Prager didn’t want to relive the crash. As he said, “I wanted to exchange Turkish dessert for two words and be on my way. I was quiet because I had not come for truth. I had come for remorse.” He said to Abed, “I understand that the crash wasn’t your fault. But does it make you sad that others suffered?”

“Yes,” said Abed. “I suffered.”

He explained that before the crash he had lived an unholy life, and so God had ordained the crash. Now Abed was religious, and God was happy. Just then on television the news showed a crash in which three people were killed. “It is a pity the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers,” mused Abed. Prager was baffled. “Abed … I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash.” Abed responded, “I once went 60 in a 40.” Thus 27 violations became one. As Prager reflects, “No matter how stark the reality, a human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable.” It was that moment he realized that Abed would not apologize. He was not a particularly bad man, nor a particularly good man. He was a limited man.

“This,” Prager quotes, “is the last of the human freedoms: to choose our attitude in any human circumstance.” The aging and the anxious, the divorced and balding and bankrupt … everyone can choose to rise above bad fortune, to enjoy community, study, work, adventure, friendship, love. The good. Prager quotes Melville: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth some small part of you must be cold.” It’s in the contrats that we find the good. Prager ends his stunning story: “You know death so you may wake each morning pulsing with life.”

Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap of their talk:

Jim Flynn challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence.

Pulling from psychology, evolutionary theory, history and more, Daniel Ogilvie is trying to understand humankind’s deep-seated belief in the soul.

Daniel Reisel searches for the psychological and physical roots of human morality.

Amanda Palmer, whose talk “The art of asking” appeared on TED.com today, came back for a heartbreaking piano performance.

Jared Diamond investigates why cultures prosper or decline. In his latest book, he suggests that technological civilization is only a fraction of the human narrative.

Joshua Prager’s journalism unravels historical secrets — including his own.

Until he was 19, Joshua Prager wanted to play professional baseball or be a doctor. After 19, he was just glad he could walk. For eight years Prager was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for his long-form pieces investigating historical secrets. In his talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 given as part of our TED2013 Talent Search — Prager weaves a personal story around the event which shaped his entire adult life, a bus accident that left him a quadriplegic.

You seem to agree with comments that some of your stories have “the gestation of a llama.” Do you think the pace of your writing has been informed by your injury? How has your accident shaped your writing process?

A few key ways. The first is — it’s striking this didn’t occur to me beforehand — I had just spent a decade writing these long articles about people whose lives had changed in an instant, when someone said to me, “Well, obviously your life changed in an instant.” And I was like, “Oh my god!” This is not some tortured connection; it’s so obvious, and yet it truly was not apparent to me. I wrote an article about a person who swung a baseball bat and his life changed, who clicked a shutter of a camera and his life changed, a person who inherited something, a person who disappeared, and I hadn’t realized the obvious connection.

Another thing is — someone else pointed this out to me — that I have spent all these years writing about secrets and the corrosiveness of secrets. And here is why this is so important to me: I don’t have the luxury to tell someone on our third meeting, “Oh by the way, I have a cane, I’m disabled.” When you meet me, you know instantaneously that I have something wrong with me. And the key is: My openness works for me. I don’t have to bottle things up inside. I tell people what I’m thinking, because there it is. It’s right out in the open. And I have been sort of, one person at a time, helping other people live openly as well. When a person can be honest and open, they feel better.

One last point: Because I can’t run, I actually do stop and smell the roses, in a sense. I really pay attention along the way. I love detail. I really pay attention and look around, and that comes out in my work.

You were 19 when your accident happened. Before that did you have an interest in writing or journalism?

I had no interest in journalism, but I loved writing. I had wanted to be a doctor. Then four months after the accident I got out of the hospital, I had no idea how the fuck I could be a doctor because I didn’t feel anything, I couldn’t move my hands well, I just didn’t see it physically being possible. (Later I wrote about quadriplegic doctors and now I know anything is possible.) And because the real way I expressed myself before, baseball — I was a very good ball player — I couldn’t do that anymore. The thing that was left for me was writing.

And now do you play?

I do. I play softball with my friends every Sunday in the park. I’m the one who organizes the game. Someone runs to first base for me, and I pitch overhand, and I have a great time. And I’m still pretty good.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.