Paul Cézanne is one of the greatest artists of all time. One could say that good art speaks in a language we know: we get the message and then move on. Great art seems to speak in a foreign language we imagine we’ll get with long enough immersion. However, there’s Cézanne, who is like the sound of water dripping or the clank of a train. It’s just there to be known, full of meaning and pleasure, somehow, but without a hope of translation. 

With most of Cézanne’s rivals, however superb, there are certain banalities we utter that also happen to be true: Michelangelo is about cosmic drama and heroic bodies; Monet is about light and brushwork and modern French life. With Cézanne, we don’t have the backup of truisms. Or rather, the ones that do get trotted out are all simply wrong. “Cézanne reduces the world to a few geometric solids”—ludicrous to anyone who really looks at his stew of shapes. “Cézanne simply stared harder at the world than other artists”—absurd to anyone who recognizes how little looking at a Cézanne apple is like looking at a real one. “Cézanne is only about composition and color”—impossible, given how much he labors over getting his card players right as humans. 

There are other great artists who will puzzle us forever—James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg—but that puzzlement seems to come from their willful complexity. Whereas it seems as though Cézanne wants to keep things simple but then can’t. Tapping his head, he once said, “Painting . . . it’s inside here.” The glory of his art is that, no matter how hard we try, we can never quite see it.

Hospitals and surgery can be especially frightening for children, and to help lessen young patients’ anxiety, one drug company has been experimenting with sedative “lollipops.” Recently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved further testing of sweet-tasting fentanyl suckers on children, despite protests from a consumer health group that the lollipop form will give kids the idea that drugs are candy. Fentanyl, a widely used narcotic anesthetic agent, is 200 times more potent than morphine. Fentanyl lollipops can ease kids’ separation from their parents and make the administration of anesthesia go more smoothly, according to a member of the team that tested them. But the Public Citizen Health Research Group, alarmed by what it believes is a danger to children and a new opportunity for drug abuse, urged the FDA to call a halt to the experiments.

 Fentanyl is so addictive, according to the Group’s director, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, that its widespread availability could cause drug-abuse problems. He suggests that hospitals develop other ways to calm young patients, such as making greater use of play therapy and allowing parents to accompany children into the operating room. 

Dr. Gary Henderson, a pharmacologist and an authority on fentanyl abuse, doubts that carefully controlled use of the drug in a hospital setting would pose a danger or suggest to kids that drugs are like candy. “Children will associate few things in the hospital with a pleasant experience,” he says.