[sic], by Joshua Cody

Being a doctor, which makes me deal with chronic illness and death all too often, and having lost someone close after a battle with chronic illness, makes me interested in other people's experiences with disease and the prospect of death from illness. As a young and romantically naif adolescent, I used to think of these extreme experiences as enriching and "interesting", until I stumbled on a passage in Thomas Mann's wonderful Magic Mountain, where Setttembrini says to Hans Castorp there's nothing "romantic" or "spiritual" about illness, and then my own experience - quite extended by now - has always confirmed his wise words.

But of course illness and the prospect of imminent death are a kind of cathartics, catalysts, that bring out the best and the worst in us, as other extreme experiences / ordeals. And that's why I always find it fascinating to know how intelligent people live through it, and tell their experiences.

I first heard of [sic] through a review in The Guardian, it caught my attention and I ordered it from Amazon. It's a very good book. Joshua Cody is sometimes too wordy, expatiating too much on not that relevant cultural details, often bordering on pretentiousness, trying to put too much in his narrative; one sometimes feel there are lots of thing that could have been left out, that are unduly cluttering the story. But still it's a powerful and moving memoir, of someone who survived an extremely dire situation, and one can read that very excess of details as the need to express "everything", because he was on the verge of death and managed somehow to survive and tell the tale.

The writing is mostly very good, and he is very insightful and observant. And his frequent cultural asides à la Chatwin, even if somewhat overused, are a joy to read to a pretentious dilletante like myself. All in all, I liked it, and I leave a few excerpts that struck me the most. Anyway, the book speaks for itself.

What do I mean by "happiness"? I don't mean exultant, radiant, manic joy - although there's nothing wrong with that. And I knew I would have those moments again. If I made it out of all this alive, for example. That would be exciting, ecstatic even. What I had the sense I would miss, forever - and I think I may even have been right - are those sudden, uncued moments of inexplicable, profound, unexcited contentment.

The guilt of the ill - especially the guilt of those who have done nothing to help create their state - is a theme on which we've touched, and on which we're sure to touch again, but for now consider the interesting notion that if a person finds himself or herself in a situation for no reason, he or she will go to quite extraordinary lengths to create a reason. [...] I am not responsible for my illness, nor was I ever responsible; rape victims are not responsible for being raped; civilians whoa are captured and tortured by despots as a show of power are not responsible for being captured and tortured; we should have learned this by now.

The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that "some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane".

And here this text was intended as a riposte to the literature of disease, so many of those books I read at the beginning of the whole thing and none of them any help, pure dreck, pale pastel book after book, each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there's more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe. If there are some who require disease to teach them such things then fine, but I am not, was not, one of those, thank you very much. I loved life and found beauty and sources of pleasure in things on the outside and on the inside, and illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace, it was a harrowing, a descensus: and then went down. The principle emotions were terror and above all rage.

So yes there is a rebirth and I'm not saying the whole thing was worth it, but of course, to be alive again, to at least not be probably dying in this present moment for two years, to have reacquired the resources of the senses and just the pleasures provided by perception, all of this regained: of course there is some sort of renewal.

The Torch in My Ear, by Elias Canetti

The second volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography, after The Tongue Set Free. I liked it very much, more than the first. The author writes extremely well, and we can understand his intellectual growth as a man and a writer. The depiction of the Vienna and Berlin of the 20s is excellent, seen through his keen sense of observation, and I find extremely interesting the way in which he describes the genesis of his book.

Pietá

She doesn’t look like a Mater Dolorosa, and certainly not like a Michelangelo Pietá. She’s a short and plump woman in her sixties, with a wart on her chin and a slight limp. And yet, every time I meet her at a coffee stall at the boat terminal, I see motherly love, and pain. She always greets me warmly, sends her regards to all the hospital staff, and shrugs with a short sentence, like “It’s been over a year already!” or “I remember him every day!”.

I first met her son, let’s call him Oscar, when he walked into my office with his fiancée, a twenty-something type 1 diabetic clerk, average looking, with the usual vascular and renal complications of his disease. In spite of good compliance with his therapy, his disease progressed rapidly and in a few months he was on dialysis. I only saw him again about 2 years later, when serious complications got him into the hospital ward. He looked much older then, and that’s when I met his mother. He had already lost his job and his fiancée. And from that time on, he embarked on an all too familiar downward spiral, that we see so many times, just not usually on such young people. He suffered infection after infection, gangrene, amputation, bowel ischemia… He spent weeks in the hospital, that turned into months. In spite of all the medication, surgery, etc, he got steadily worse. When I watched him by the time he was on parenteral nutrition, I was really impressed, he looked like an old man, or a victim of progeria. And he was a really kind and stoic patient through it all, it made us all in his care heartbroken to look at him. We knew he would die soon, and there was not much we could do to ease his suffering.

And through all those months, this little woman was there beside him. She became a familiar figure at the ward, we all knew her, and felt guilty for not being able to help her son more. There came a time when we were all – including her – wishing he would die quickly to put an end to his sufferings, but his body was young and he put a lot of a fight. Eventually, he died.

I know she has another son, a healthy man with children. But I know that Oscar was unique to her, and she couldn’t have been more supportive. We witnessed her suffering, and I still feel uneasy every time I meet her – couldn’t we have done more for Oscar? Probably not. He was one of those cases in which everything goes wrong. But I can’t help to admire his endurance, and his mother’s love and courage, through all his pains.