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PARTISAN REVIEW
creasingly difficult, as one focuses on that loss, not to read into it some
greater significance than what it merits. Writer and physician and theologian
join hands in assigning responsibility. Disease has somehow been welcomed,
accident has somehow been sought out. Psychosomatic illness may not be as
fashionable an intellectual theory today as it was twenty years ago. But we
continue to speak of disease-welcoming personalities and accident-prone peo–
ple. A modern vocabulary makes "scientific" the fears and superstitions
operating on both the butcher's mad wife and my own judgement-obsessed
mother.
As
a believer, did Michael view his treatment at the hands of his jailer–
wife and guard-sons as another trial, a further test, to be endured? Pain can–
not be allowed to be fortuitous. Michael and his wife and sons were actors
together in some mysterious metaphysical drama. In some dark corner of his
mind, Michael achieved purgation. He had suffered, he had endured - and his
suffering and endurance were meaningful. They proved
him
worthy.
As
Michael sleeps now alongside his new wife - yes, the parishioner
who cleansed him - does he remember that disease, too, is a sort of sharing,
a communion of sorts? Does he recognize how it inflicts itself on others?
When Michael first told me he had decided upon the ministry, I re–
member asking
him
whether he had read Kafka. He hadn't. I hope he never
does. Let him conceive of himself as an original. On the blank page, Kafka
stands more powerful than the father he created. To the tubercular writer,
Gregor Samsa embodies the ordinary drabness of suffering.
Illness can be a metaphor only to those determined to remain ignorant
of its truth. Susan Sontag was painfully accurate in that. And by the same
token, illness can
be
therapeutic only to those determined to avoid its tedium.
The mathematical probability of illness or accident can be created by
any number of possible factors . For Michael, the war. For me, a prospec–
tively innocent two weeks at summer camp. A reminder for all philosophers
of chance. On the bus going to camp, we were seated according to height. I
was a tall boy, taller than the two friends from the neighborhood I was going
to camp with. I was made to sit next to another tall boy. His name was
Jerry, he had watery blue eyes, and by the time we arrived at the camp I
had invited him to share a bunk with me and my two friends from the
neighborhood. Eleven days later, Jerry and I were fighting to stay alive in a
small country hospital. Jerry died. I lost the use of my legs to the virus. My
two friends returned to the city untouched. Was it simply a time when a
capricious God or a quixotic fate had it in for taller boys? Would shorter boys
have their turn next year? Did Jerry and I share an "inclination" to embrace
the disease-carrying virus? Were my two neighborhood friends better pre–
pared to resist its siren song? A simple cast of the dice is never enough:
judgement demands more magical incantations.
Think of what our age has created from such spiritual voodoo. In the
