Autumn V. Illness

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn IV. Poetry and landscape

A long time since I wrote in this book. In September I caught a cold, which meant three weeks’ illness.

I have not been suffering; merely feverish and weak and unable to use my mind for anything but a daily hour or two of the lightest reading. The weather has not favored my recovery, wet winds often blowing, and not much sun. Lying in bed, I have watched the sky, studied the clouds, which... always have their beauty. Inability to read has always been my horror... but I find that in my present circumstances, in my own still house, with no intrusion to be dreaded, with no task or care to worry me, I can fleet the time not unpleasantly even without help of books. Reverie, unknown to me in the days of bondage, has brought me solace; I hope it has a little advanced me in wisdom.

For not, surely, by deliberate effort of thought does a man grow wise. The truths of life are not discovered by us. At moments unforeseen, some gracious influence descends upon the soul, touching it to an emotion which, we know not how, the mind transmutes into thought. This can happen only in a calm of the senses, a surrender of the whole being to passionless contemplation. I understand, now, the intellectual mood of the quietist... [I'm not sure, but I think he has in mind here Christian quietism rather than philosophical quietism.]

If the evidence of a well-spent life is necessarily seen in “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,” mine, it is clear, has fallen short of a moderate ideal. Friends I have had, and have; but very few. Honour and obedience -- why, by a stretch, Mrs. M --- may perchance represent these blessings. As for love --?

Let me tell myself the truth. Do I really believe that at any time of my life I have been the kind of man who merits affection? I think not. I have always been much too self-absorbed; too critical of all about me; too unreasonably proud. Such men as I live and die alone, however much in appearance accompanied. I do not repine at it; nay, lying day after day in solitude and silence, I have felt glad that it were so.  At least I give no one trouble, and that is much. Most solemnly do I hope that in the latter days no long illness awaits me. May I pass quickly from this life of quiet enjoyment to the final peace. So shall no one think of me with pained sympathy or with weariness. One -- two -- even three may possibly feel regret, come the end how it may, but I do not flatter myself that to them I am more than an object of kindly thought at long intervals. It is enough; it signifies that I have not erred wholly...

Alpha.

There is so much here I hardly know where to start. I’m going to come back to the matter of illness at the end, but first let’s start with “reverie” and how we discover “The truths of life.” If you think about it, this is even more profound than how we connect with “lost time.” Where do our most profound thoughts come from? Do they accumulate over time -- with multiple readings of a book or multiple reveries on some topic, for example -- or are they gifts from the gods? I will suggest in a later section (for thematic reasons) a connection between drinking and insight, but, unless you want to attribute that blessing to Dionysus, that doesn’t get us much closer to a real answer.

As much as I love reading -- in part because it is often a spur to thought, as here -- I may prefer sheer reverie. I’m also fond of a less “sheer” form of reverie where, in my mind, I walk someone through a subject I think I know well. It is amazing how often I will discover either new insights or at least new problems, as I lay out what I think I know. (That is also a major reason I am writing this blog.)

That is pretty far from “a surrender of the whole being to passionless contemplation.” Possibly, since I am so often thinking about philosophical questions, I am not as consumed by the distractions of everyday life as the average person. And yet I’m fairly certain that if I was bed-ridden by illness for an extended period, I would discover new things. It would be like raking a garden with a new rake, one with much longer tines. Treasures that had lay hidden below the top layer of soil would be pulled to the surface.

And then there is the matter of “evidence of a well-spent life...” So much of what he writes here is also true for me. Also the bit about “Such men as I live and die alone...” Though I would suggest that, really, we all die alone. I take his point and agree that I (at least today) would prefer this to be the case. The thought of dying with a bunch of people about sounds really annoying to me. Day to day, my absence would affect very few if any lives. For a larger number of people, some problem or task would eventually come up that I normally would see to, or at least help with, and, as dumped lovers so often say, they would miss me then. 

I have an online friend with serious health problems and a special needs daughter in her 20s. I’m sure the thought of not being around to look after her daughter causes her as much anxiety as does her heart problem. I “know” that life will take care of itself, in the sense that water will find its way to the sea -- it may not take the path you would prefer, but it will find some route and that will be “fine” as far as the water and the sea are concerned. If pressed, I might even admit that I wouldn’t mind seeing things go to hell just a little in my absence.

To come back for just a moment to the idea that everyone dies alone, I've just finished reading Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT? by Roz Chast which includes this quote about the death of her father (which confirms what I already believed, so it must be right).

Joan, the hospice nurse, told me the sequence of events: that his breathing had deteriorated; that she and my mother were by his side, that at some point, my mother left the room for a minute to use the bathroom, and that’s when he died. She told me that the phenomenon of a dying person choosing to die when his loved one left the room, if only for a moment, was one she had seen as a hospice nurse many times. She added that his death had been peaceful -- that he just “slipped away.”

Illness as a pain in the ass.

Not a little eerily, I too got a moderate cold in September that lasted three weeks. It had been years since my last cold so I had almost forgotten how annoying they can be, and this wasn’t even a bad one. The last two weeks of just feeling dull and “off,” after the worst of the symptoms were over, was the most annoying.

Since I didn’t wish to share my coughing and nose-blowing (and germs) with the general public, I mostly stayed home and -- as much as I could stand it -- stayed in bed the first week. My body is not fond of that much inactivity. And yet there has been at least a small reward for all my “suffering.” Today it occurred to me that one of the ways in which Henry Ryecroft is fictional is in his endless hiking across the Devon countryside. Surely a person, like George Gissing, dying of emphysema, had a much more limited walking range.

I myself probably walk a mile or three a day on average (it’s hard to judge in a city -- especially one with a variety of street grids with blocks of different lengths.) Several times it has occurred to me that Ryecroft walks even more than I do, but only now, thinking of Gissing’s emphysema, does his compulsive hiking make sense. You most covet what is denied you. You forget tired feet, worn shoes, pesky insects or overly protective birds, and only recall the joy and freedom of movement.

It is probably no accident that so much of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time is also about walking: Swann’s and the Guermantes Ways. For the asthmatic, Proust, as for Gissing, a walk in the country would have been a dicey, and tantalizing adventure. Total speculation here.

Next: Autumn VI. School of hard knocks.