Mortal Wounds
This is not a reading for pandemic. I don’t know what that is. And if I ever do, I don’t know whether I’d write about it. I spent days trying to title this piece anyway. I almost shelved it until I could find a title I didn’t cringe at.
“Reading for Illness”
Gross.
“Reading for Sickness”
Woof.
There’s nothing lyrical about illness. There aren’t any words for it, at least not of my crafting. And again, I’m not trying to write about pandemic—2020 variety or bubonic plague.
Still, essays about illness endure. And some of them capture so much. For me, things I didn’t know were capturable or in need of capture. I don’t enjoy reading about illness when in the throes of one. Or maybe it depends on the illness and its duration. But the readings I have in mind are about humanness, the embodied reality of illness, the fact that illness is real life, sometimes the realest sort.
I’d intended to read B.D. McClay’s celebrated essay “The Ills That Flesh Is Heir To” in a coffee shop. I’d been saving it for nearly a year, preparing to savor it this spring in a coffee shop which possessed the specific view I wanted for the reflective pauses I expected the essay to necessitate.
The essay struck me as a likely coda to The Hedgehog Review’s remarkably good issue “The Evening of Life,” which immediately preceded its publishing. There are so few truly excellent essays. And you get to read them for the first time only once, as they reveal… something, somethings—it’s the experience of the revealing that matters. Later reads are oft interrupted by knowledge of where it leads, and questions of how they get the reader there so well. You can still get immersed in it, absorbed, but it’s rarely the same way. The first read of an essay that grips you—hurls you along—won’t leave you alone after you’ve finished, this is sensation indescribable.
Like most everyone else, I have found my reading and life largely displaced, even if my dwelling is mercifully steady. (And this is indeed a tender mercy. I know too many displaced, and know of more beyond.) My tan leather couch instead hosted my reading of McClay’s essay. And since I’d already planned the theme of today’s newsletter before I read that piece—and I very much guessed it’d be included—it turned into a must-read.
More of a religious reflection than I imagined—including an enjoyable historical jaunt—this is a moving piece on illness and in a specific sense, viruses. The subtitle says it all, but the remaining reflection takes us through illness, the author’s illness, human illness. The memoir frames the general. The specific draws us into humanity: “What if our weakness were the best part of us?”
The first pieces I ever read on illness that hit me with force were Christopher Hitchens’s, when he wrote about his cancer diagnosis in Vanity Fair. I’d never read Hitchens before. A famous conversationalist and essayist, Hitchens had even carried on correspondence with some of my more enterprising college friends who sent him letters—he was apparently absurdly generous in responding to letters, even if their authors were in staunch disagreement with him.
Hitchens’ reflections carry no trace of religiosity, except, perhaps, as a suitable counterpoint to where he was firmly rooted in atheism. No bedside Pascal’s wager would tempt him. Hitchens was known as a master polemicist. But polemics have less common place in the land of illness. Somehow, though, his Vanity Fair essays combine the fierceness of a polemicist with the relative impotence of the truly ill.
Just look at these opening lines: “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.”
Inhale.
The essay goes on to do a lot more, bound by lines like, “This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.” Such lines generate a tremendous amount of work from demonstrative pronouns like “This,” which point to a collection of previously mentioned things that no reader is confused about. This is how Hitchens moves his readers through his individual experience into the collective.
For a while, these essays were pulled from the internet. In fact, the one I link to above is the only readily available one even now. They have been collected, edited, and recast in a fascinating book called Mortality. If you follow that link, you’ll find my praise pales next to the deservedly approving reviews it received.
The absence of these essays online annoyed me to no little end, simply because I wished to share them. Repeatedly. There was just so much humanness in them. I don’t recall ever tearing up, but the writing just rips at you. Read the piece I linked to. And then you might consider the book.
It isn’t just our own illnesses that matter. Reflections on illness are not merely the province of the ill. Anyone who has suffered from a chronic illness knows only too well how much their illness is an imposition on others. That is, others experience the illness, too. It’s not the same experience. It’s not in sympathy. The experience of another’s illness—particularly someone dear to us—is of a different kind.
I’m not equipped as either essayist or intellectual to attempt that territory. Yet in the aforementioned issue of The Hedgehog Review, “The Evening of Life,” one essay does. And perhaps it’ll serve well enough as an example of the experience of another’s illness.
It definitely serves as an outstanding essay in its own right. If anything, “Being There,” gets at a whole lot more than I’m attempting to outline here.
Then again, in all three works what I’ve been looking for is writing on illness. Something about the wounds that remind us of mortality, our humanness. Perhaps amusingly, I wrote about them in the reverse order from how I’d recommend reading them. If I had to pick a favorite, and I’d rather not, “Being There” would top the list. It’s the one I’ve shared the most with friends. I have, in fact, purchased entire issues of “The Evening of Life” to send to some of my friends. It’s that good.
I’d hoped to make this a short essay. I see now that I’ve failed. Ah well, I do have some suggested questions for you, to support your conversations should you read any of these three essays over the long weekend. Matching my recommended reading order, my questions go in reverse order to this essay’s organization:
What is “being there”? Does this make sense? Were we the one who is “there,” how might we feel? What is it to engage the world on “our terms”? Do we really ever get to?
Is there anything specifically engaging about opening an essay with an awakening, as Hitchens’ essay does, when an essay itself is supposed to inspire a kind of “awakening”? Does the essay match the promise of its opening sentences? Did you feel awakened to anything?
In the first two sentences of Hitchens’ essay, there’s a contrast: a known trope—waking up feeling “like death”—turned into its reality. How does this shake up the reader? Does it call us into the experience more deeply? Even as Hitchens pivots on feeling “like death,” does he try to make his reader feel guilty for using that phrase before? Why or why not? (For the record, I think he does not. I’ll leave the “why” to your conversation.)
In B.D. McClay’s essay, three things are blended: memoir, popular science writing (in this case, specifically on viruses), and historical/religious texts. How do these three things work together? What experience does this blending offer the reader? Did you appreciate it or find it strange?
Considered together, how do these three essays approach illness? Did you have a favorite among them?
A contemplative weekend to you all. See you Monday.
Kreigh
P.S. For those of you hoping for writing on the pandemic, which I imagine is maybe two of you, I can suggest these three reads. All three involve the same author. And all three do different things, but helpfully so. The first is one I teach regularly, “Science Anxiety.” Ignore the conclusion, stay focused on the problem presented, the paradox. Then follow up with these two reads from The New Atlantis, “What’s the Plan?” and “America’s Pandemic Data Gap.”
P.P.S. For those truly daring, historian Jill Lepore explores the literature of pestilence. I wouldn’t call it a comfortable read, though it admittedly hits most of the reads I’d suggest if one were so inclined to revel in plague narratives and two I’d forgotten about. That said, as philosopher Greg Sadler and I discuss in this video, the highlighted Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” is a meandering bit of fiction, however timely it might be. If you are up to it—and it’s understandable if you are not—I commend Lepore’s essay to you: “The plague novel is the place where all human beings abandon all other human beings.” May our world be stranger than fiction. And, for those of you who enjoy paired reads, join this one to B.D. McClay’s piece above.