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Friday
It so happens that I have a bad bout of the flu (in spite of having had a flu shot), although at first my doctor thought it was something more serious and sent me to the emergency room. The pain has now been brought under control but, as I’m not yet up to writing a substantive post, you’re getting this instead.
The Sewanee hospital’s emergency room, where I have spent many hours with my mother, is quite small so I was occupying a bed in full view of the ER administrator. As I was lying there groaning, with stabbing pains alternating between head and chest, she was sitting behind her desk doing, well, administrative work. I felt like I was in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The scene I had in mind was when an invalid finds himself sharing the same room as the ivory company’s chief accountant. Despite the Congo’s challenging conditions, the accountant is immaculately dressed. Marlow describes him as “a miracle”:
I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.
To this man, the illness of others is an irritant:
When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalid agent from upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. ‘The groans of this sick person,’ he said, ‘distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.’
I did my best to keep my groans from becoming an annoyance but wasn’t always successful. I apologized several times.
I fully acknowledge that my flu was nothing compared to the malaria suffered in the novel. Nevertheless. I still related to what Marlow experiences towards the end of the book:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
A little later he describes this condition as “a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself.”
While I didn’t share his careless contempt when it came to my pain—instead I fervently prayed it would go away—I recognized the greyness.
It all made me see why Marlow is in awe of the station manager that he meets upon first arriving in Africa. The man is a mediocrity and maybe even a hollow man à la T.S. Eliot—”Perhaps there was nothing within him,” Marlow reflects—but he has one thing going for him:
His position had come to him—why? Perhaps because he was never ill… He had served three terms of three years out there… Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself.
Given how I have been feeling the last few days, I can see why Marlow is impressed. And with that, I’m off to crawl beneath my blankets once again.
