“I read a lot of Montaigne in my deer stand last fall. Everything he ever wrote is on my cellphone. That is ridiculous and lovely.”
Mike Perry on Montaigne
Muppet or a Man?
One of my favorite moments from The Muppets was this song penned by the Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie.
(via Billboard)
Rebecca Solnit on Hope
One of my absolute favorite writers and thinkers, Rebecca Solnit, talks to The School of Life about hope, despair, and the surprises of history.
(via Open Culture)
‘The thing that brings you back’
Yesterday, I linked to a piece in Vanity Fair by Christopher Hitchens about his ongoing tribulations with cancer. Today on Boing Boing is a beautiful, heart-wrenching piece by Xeni Jardin on her recent cancer diagnosis,
The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal.
You must be at peace with not knowing, they tell me. That is how you get through outer space, and find your way back home.
The thing about this thing, or, at least, this first week of this thing, is how it takes you out there to the cold planet again and again and again, when you aren’t expecting it. Long, undulating waves of fear pull you out to where you are alone and unreachable, even by words sent from the strongest satellite.
The thing that brings you back is love.
As someone who’s admired Xeni for a long time, my thoughts are with her, wishing her the very best recovery.
Am I really stronger?
I [remember[ lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.
(via Arts & Letters Daily)