all interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life

Even though the plane I took from Columbus (Ohio) to New York (New York) was evidently in no real danger of crashing, I thought that it was, and I guess that's all that matters.  One might experience near-death experiences all of the time; who knows what comes falling behind you as you walk down the street?  Maybe I narrowly escape anvils and grand pianos on a regular basis, but they make no impact on my psyche.  But thinking that I was about to die, even if I wasn't, once again reminded me how extremely fragile our lives are, and how I'm still really not ready for it to end.  Like Colin Farrell at the end of In Bruges:  I really really hoped I wouldn't die. I really really hoped I wouldn't die.  Except my flight was nothing like In Bruges, in that there was no shooting, cocaine, or midgets, and no one adorable like Colin Farrell, who I love despite his reputation for being a term that implies a variety of negative qualities, specifically arrogance and engaging in obnoxious and/or irritating actions without malicious intent.

I also realized that if we were somehow free from all disease and the so-called natural aging process we would probably just eventually succumb to an accident of some kind.  How long can we avoid those falling anvils and grand pianos?  I thought of the the genetically perfected character played by Jude Law in Gattaca, who was paralyzed by being hit by a car, although, admittedly, he was trying to kill himself.  In any case, if we could stop the so-called natural aging process, I think we would still end up pretty ragged after a while.  We'd still keep accumulating scars, both physical and otherwise.  I once wrote that the moon isn't covered with craters because of some natural moon-aging process: things smack into it.  Things smack into us too.

I'm still confused by the widespread belief that we live much longer than ever, when Psalm 90 clearly states:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Why were the Bronze Age desert nomads living as long as we do now?

My laser eye surgeon has started to find new things to do with me that have nothing to do with laser eye surgery.  She found a wart on my eyelid that she removed and sent to a pathologist.  When I came for the follow-up visit, to find out if it was cancerous or genital, she decided to remove a tiny mole from under my eyebrow as well as something she said was a cyst.  She had to inject anesthesia into my eye's near abroad using a very large needle -- imagine what could have happened had I jerked or twitched: cross my heart; hope to die!  I squeezed a rubber ball as she poked the needle into my eye, and the intense pain was followed by an unsettling numbness all over my face.

"As we get older, we have to do a lot of work just to maintain our appearance," she said.  I remembered a man in his 60s who I had spoken to recently who had warts and moles all over his eyelids, so I nodded in agreement.  She then admitted that she had been receiving injections of sausage poison in her face since her mid-30s, and that she now gets frequent doses of injectible facial fillers.  She is a very attractive woman at the beginning of her late 40s, and I felt stupid that I had assumed that her unlined face was simply the result of healthy living and no brow-furrowing owing to the lack of worry in her laser-eye-surgery-financed Westchester and Upper East Side good life.

A friend of mine from childhood recently invited me to her 40th birthday party.  She held it in the East Village, a neighborhood that has been making me feel old since my early 30s.  (I remember being in some bar in the East Village on my 32nd birthday, back when Moby was always playing in the background, and I was wearing leather pants or some similar fashion atrocity and groping some kid while his young friends made horrified faces at him, as if to indicate that he shouldn't be consorting with someone so grandfatherly.  Now I can't even really tell the difference between a 23 year old and a 32 year old.)  Anyway, I made my way through the East Village to my childhood friend's party, and she had attended my birthday party last November, so when I got there and wished her a happy fortieth birthday, she said, "you know how it is," and I thought, lordy, lordy, lordy -- this woman thinks I'm forty!  So I immediately informed her that I still had five months in my thirties.  My childhood friend has almost no wrinkles, despite being a casual smoker.  I don't think she gets sausage poison injected into her face, though, since she's a Unitarian.

My therapist friend who told me that many non-homosexuals are interested in non-heterosexual sex also told me that anger and bitterness at the passing of the years was very common, especially among non-heterosexuals, and that many non-heterosexuals in midlife feel a lot of resentment towards the young, especially when the young seem to be having so much fun.  Also: the glorification of youth and ageism and body fascism, etc.  I was concerned that people kept feeling this way through old age, but he told me that once you hit your 60s or so you start to accept things a bit more and realize that you need to move on.  There is a season for everything, evidently. I thought of what Boethius wrote in his Consolation of Philosophy:

He who to th' unwilling furrows
Gives the generous grain,
When the Crab with baleful fervours
Scorches all the plain;
He shall find his garner bare,
Acorns for his scanty fare.

Go not forth to cull sweet violets
From the purpled steep,
While the furious blasts of winter
Through the valleys sweep;
Nor the grape o'erhasty bring
To the press in days of spring.

For to each thing God hath given
Its appointed time;
No perplexing change permits He
In His plan sublime.
So who quits the order due
Shall a luckless issue rue.

Except he wrote that in Latin.

Cum Phoebi radiis graue
Cancri sidus inaestuat,
Tum qui larga negantibus
Sulcis semina credidit
Elusus Cereris fide
Quernas pergat ad arbores.

Numquam purpureum nemus
Lecturus uiolas petas
Cum saeuis Aquilonibus
Stridens campus inhorruit;
Nec quaeras auida manu
Uernos stringere palmites
Uuis si libeat frui;
Autumno potius sua
Bacchus munera contulit.

Signat tempora propriis
Aptans officiis deus
Nec quas ipse cohercuit
Misceri patitur uices.
Sic quod praecipiti uia
Certum deserit ordinem
Laetos non habet exitus.

Maybe that isn't as relevant as I'd thought.

I had the good fortune again this year to go up to Ulster County for a work retreat.  We took the bus, despite the Don-Draperesque glamor of a train ride up the Hudson.  I had developed a terrible upper respiratory infection after having been caught in the rain at a recent street fair with sadomasochistic decorations, about which a handsome, non-heterosexual, half-Greek, half-Egyptian, Muslim acquaintance said: awful.  I was very tired from having been up much of the night with mild respiratory symptoms.  I tried to read.  In a Vanity Fair article about Nancy Reagan, I saw this sentence: "It seemed as if every time we spoke, another friend of hers had passed away."  I decided to nap instead.

We arrived in New Paltz and were taken by van to the lodge where we would be spending two nights.  The driver seemed to have some sort of social-skill impairment disorder and was slightly rude to us, in a socially unskilled way, not like the deliberate and cruel way people are rude in New York City.

I felt pretty sick, and the setting, along with my illness, made me think of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), although I don't believe that I had tuberculosis.

My room had a nice view.  But women like looking at a view; men do not.

I had a charming balcony, but I didn't really feel like rocking back and forth, and the air was not as crisp and alpine as the air to which Hans Castorp had access in his sanatorium.

 

There was more humidity than would be recommended for the tubercular.

 

The next day we went for a hike.

 

We had a Cockney guide, who was mostly nice, although she didn't know very much.

 

The outfit of a colleague of mine reinforced my Zauberbergian delusions.

 

We looked back towards the lodge.

 We looked out over the ridge.

 

We looked north towards the Catskills.

 

I spied a house nestled amongst the greenery.

 

We observed many interesting natural phenomena, although our Cockney guide was unable to supplement our preexisting knowledge.

 

At one point a black snake crossed our path. 

 

"That's a black garter snake on the path," said our Cockney guide.  Except that she pronounced the word "path" like "pawff".

Later I learned that there is no such snake.

We took our lunch outdoors, despite the cloudy skies.

 

The amount of food was extravagant, although much of it was wholesome.

We headed back to the lodge for our afternoon meetings.  Despite being stuffed, I still had some appetites.

 

We spent the rest of the day in meetings, although we took a break around 17:00.  People wanted to engage in outdoor recreation.  I still felt crappy, so I headed up to my room.  After a short time I heard yelling and the sound of pouring rain.  I went out to my balcony and saw that two of my colleagues were in the middle of the lake.

 

 

They were getting wet.

Après la pluie vient le beau temps.

 

I prefer flood to drought.

 

I prepared for dinner.  The lodge had relaxed their well-known dress code, but I put on a suit anyway.

 

I was served a gigantic steak.  Its size was obscene and just looking at it made me feel obese and arterially clogged.  I only had a few bites.  It was tasty, but the idea of consuming an entire butter-drenched slab of beef made me feel repulsed and repulsive.  Most of it went to waste, and my carbon footprint grew ever larger.

I went out for some air.

 

Later we had a bonfire.  It was prepared by staff from the lodge.  They handed us metal rods with marshmallows speared at one end.  When we had cooked it to our satisfaction, we would return it to them and then they would hand us back a marshmallow-graham-cracker-chocolate sandwich.  My colleagues had brought alcohol to the bonfire, which I had correctly suspected was forbidden, as this lodge once forbade alcohol everywhere, in the spirit of Carrie Nation.

I thought I saw demons in the fire.

 

 

The next day was truly sunny, and I felt somewhat better.  We had another activity with the Cockney guide.  She fought with us a bit about a misunderstanding regarding our schedule.  I understood why this lodge had trouble attracting luxury travelers.

 

We wandered around for a while before beginning our final meetings.

 

Where the bee sucks, there suck I, I thought.

 

I hoped that her colony hadn't collapsed.

 

We finished our meetings and were driven back to the bus station.  A colleague had an unpleasant interaction with the autistic van driver.

We boarded the bus to New York.  While delayed for hours in the terrible traffic, we learned of the deaths of many celebrities.  We had emotional reactions.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

I suddenly though abut a disturbing image in One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), in which ghosts continue to age after death.  I remembered thinking that this was a horrifying idea, and that there are so many potentially terrible possibilities for the afterlife.  Faruq once read Cien años de soledad and said to me, "It's like Buddenbrooks with dumb people."

Later that night I met a non-Jewish German who had worked for the Anti-Defamation League.  I sent a text message to Faruq right away.  I was willing to pay the extra international charges, since I knew Faruq would be furious.

Comments

[jason]

But it's also kinda amazing you didn't run away before or jerk-twitch during the injection; I would likely do the former.

[MattG]

On the subject of the accidental nature of our existence/life/death (and at the risk of being annoyingly 'recommendy'), I have to mention "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" by Richard Rorty. He basically posits that once you accept this -- i.e., the accidental nature of existence -- the only 'truth' is the (constantly evolving) language in which we tell our stories, or something like that.

[henry]

Any Hans Castorp experience is incomplete without a meticulous re-enactment of the rather complex blanket-wrapping techniques Mann describes. Mummies on balconies.

'The Road to Wellville' was filmed at Mohonk House, I believe. At least they used it for some of the outside shots. Does the menu offer Kellogg choices?

[R J Keefe]

It's quite true, not caring after sixty. It may have something to do with the gravitational pull toward looking in the other direction. Hey, I'm a lot younger than Gale Storm! (Pina Bausch, not so much.)

[Michel]

>>We boarded the bus to New York. While delayed for hours in the terrible traffic, we learned of the deaths of many celebrities. We had emotional reactions.<<

I love this paragraph, even as I'm unsure that two celebrities count as "many." But perhaps a local celebrity had died by that time.

[stan]

Funny thing about eye doctors, now that I have one; they seem to want to find more things to do with your eyes. On Friday, my eye doctor reported that I did not do as well on my glaucoma test as she thought I should have, but expects I will do better next time. I suppose I should have asked her if there is a Kaplan course that helps you cram for glaucoma tests. She also decided that the redness in the eyes was due to an accumulation of dandruff on my eyelids, and she proceeded to attack them with q-tips until I thought she would erase my eyes. I must admit, however, they were better later, after I regained my vision. She really is a peach, tho', and her office is just across the street from me in that truly horrid white brick building that some have now discovered has untold architectural merit just because St. Vincent's wants to tear it down. On the whole, it sounds as though you would be much happier having your business retreats at Holy Cross in West Park. Such lovely views of the Hudson and the Vanderbilt Mansion across the river, and chanting Diurnum is so much more fun than hiking with Cockneys.

[Boomer]

Thanks for a delightful read. I look forward to your post each week. It briefly takes my mind off my body's mad spiral toward entropy.

I am glad that these feelings will lessen in 13 years when I hit 60.

[Jack]

You came to my 'hood AGAIN and didn't tell me!

The East Village is wearing. I went to a non-heterosexual bar the other day and found that the only person remotely attractive, despite the presence of the very young, was the go-go boy, who did a lovely dance to Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi."

[Patrick]

I just had something removed from my eyebrow not too long ago. I have a scar from it but its not cancer and its gone. Beautiful writing and photos.

[David]

Great to see you on Sunday. Another delightful post.

[jimbo]

I always love your pictures of food. You always happen to photograph my favorites! I'm coming to your house for dinner some time.