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a selection from:
Intoxicated By My Illness
by Anatole Broyard
(Continuing Part I: Intoxicated by My Illness)
Yet 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.
I've had eight-inch needles thrust into my belly, where I
could feel them tickling my metaphysics. I've worn Pampers.
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.
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.
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