英语临床6夏季课件:intoxicatedbymyillness

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2024年6月28日发(作者：)

INTOXICATED BY MY ILLNESS

Anatole Broyard

1. So much of a writer’s life consists of assumed suffering, rhetorical suffering,

that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had

cancer of the prostate. Suddenly there was in the air a rich sense of crisis, real

crisis, yet one that also contained echoes of ideas like the crisis of language,

the crisis of literature, or of personality. It seemed to me that my existence,

whatever I thought, felt, or did, had taken on a kind of meter, as in poetry, or

in taxis.

2. When you learn that your life is threatened, you can turn toward this knowledge

or away from it. I turned toward it. It was not a choice but an automatic shifting

of gears, a tacit agreement between my body and my brain. I thought that time had

tapped me on the shoulder, that I had been given a real deadline at last. It wasn’

t that I believed the cancer was going to kill me, even though it had spread beyond

the prostate — it could probably be controlled, either by radiation or hormonal

manipulation. No, what struck me was the startled awareness that one day something,

whatever it might be, was going to interrupt my leisurely progress. It sounds trite,

yet I can only say that I realized for the first time that I don’t have forever.

3. Time was no longer innocuous, nothing was casual anymore. I understood that

living itself had a deadline. Like the book I had been working on — how sheepish

I would feel if I couldn’t finish it. I had promised it to myself and to my friends.

Though I wouldn’t say this out loud, I had promised it to the world. All writers

privately think this way.

4. When my friends heard I had cancer, they found me surprisingly cheerful and

talked about my courage. But it has nothing to do with courage, at least not for

me. As far as I can tell, it’s a question of desire. I’m filled with desire —

to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality. While

I’ve always had trouble concentrating, I now feel as concentrated as a diamond,

or a microchip.

5. I remember a time in the 1950s when I tried to talk a friend of mine named

Jules out of committing suicide. He had already made one attempt and when I went

to see him he said, “Give me a good reason to go on living.” He was thirty years

old.

6. I saw what I had to do. I started to sell life to him, like a real estate agent.

Just look at the world, I said. How can you not be curious about it? The streets,

the houses, the trees, the shops, the people, the movement, and the stillness. Look

at the women, so appealing, each in her own way. Think of all the things you can

do with them, the places you can go together. Think of books, paintings, music. Think

of your friends.

7. While I was talking I wondered, “Am I telling Jules the truth?” He didn’t

think so, because he put his head in the oven a week later. As for me, I don’t know

whether I believed what I said or not, because I just went on behaving like everybody

else. But I believe it now. When my wife made me a hamburger the other day I thought

it was the most fabulous hamburger in the history of the world。

8. With this illness one of my recurrent dreams has finally come true. Several times

in the past I’ve dreamed that I had committed a crime — or perhaps I was only accused

of a crime, it’s not clear. When brought to trial I refused to have a lawyer —

I got up instead and made an impassioned speech in my own defense. This speech was

so moving that I could feel myself tingling with it. It was inconceivable that the

jury would not acquit me — only each time I woke before the verdict. Now cancer

is the crime I may or may not have committed and the eloquence of being alive, the

fervor of the survivor, is my best defense.

9. The way my friends have rallied around me is wonderful. They remind me of a flock

of birds rising from a body of water into the sunset. If that image seems a bit

extravagant, or tinged with satire, it’s because I can’t help thinking there’

s something comical about my friends’ behavior, all these witty men suddenly saying

pious, inspirational things.

10. They are not intoxicated as I am by my illness, but sobered. Since I refused

to, they’ve taken on the responsibility of being serious. They appear abashed, or

chagrined, in their sobriety. Stripped of their playfulness these pals of mine seem

plainer, homelier — even older. It’s as if they had all gone bald overnight.

one of the effects of their fussing over me is that I feel vivid, multicolored,

sharply drawn. On the other hand — and this is ungrateful — I remain outside of

their solicitude, their love and best wishes. I’m isolated from them by the grandiose

conviction that I am the healthy person and they are the sick ones. Like an

existential hero, I have been cured by the truth while they still suffer the nausea

of the uninitiated.

12. I’ve had eight-inch needles thrust into my belly where I could feel them tickling

my metaphysics. I’ve been licked by the flames and my sense of self has been singed.

Sartre was right: you have to live each moment as if you’re prepared to die.

13. Now at last I understand the conditional nature of the human condition. Yet,

unlike Kierkegaard and Sartre, I’m not interested in the irony of my position. Cancer

cures you of irony. Perhaps my irony was all in my prostate. A dangerous illness

fills you with adrenaline and makes you feel very smart. I can afford now, I said

to myself, to draw conclusions. All those grand generalizations toward which I have

been building for so many years are finally taking shape. As I look back at how I

used to be, it seems to me that an intellectual is a person who thinks that the

classical clichés don’t apply to him, that he is immune to homely truths. I know

better now. I see everything with a summarizing eye. Nature is a terrific editor.

14. In the first stages of my illness I couldn’t sleep, urinate, or defecate —

the word “ordeal” comes to mind. Then when my doctor changed all this and everything

worked again, what a voluptuous pleasure it was. With a cry of joy I realized how

marvelous it is simply to function. My body, which in the last decade or two had

become a familiar, no longer thrilling old flame, was reborn as a brand-new

infatuation.

15. I realize of course that this elation I feel is just a phase, just a rush of

consciousness, a splash of perspective, a hot flash of ontological alertness. But

I’ll take it, I’ll use it. I’ll use everything I can while I wait for the next

phase. Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well

as to suffer it. I see now why the romantics were so fond of illness — the sick

man sees everything as metaphor. In this phase I’m infatuated with my cancer. It

stinks of revelation.

16. As I look ahead, I feel like a man who has awakened from a long afternoon nap

to find the evening stretched out before him. I’m reminded of D’Annunzio, the Italian

poet, who said to a duchess he had just met at a party in Paris, “Come, we will

have a profound evening.” Why not? I see the balance of my life — everything comes

in images now — as a beautiful paisley shawl thrown over a grand piano.

17. Why a paisley shawl, precisely? Why a grand piano? I have no idea. That’s the

way the situation presents itself to me. I have to take my imagery along with my

medicine.

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