Wednesday
No sooner had Julia and I recovered from Covid-omicron than we went down with sinus infections. I don’t know if this is normal but it has made caring for my invalid 96-year-old mother difficult. Whenever I get flattened by a sickness this way, I always think of Marlow’s sickness in Heart of Darkness.
To be sure, the two sicknesses can’t really be compared since Marlow almost dies whereas we, thanks to Moderna and Pfizer, knew we had every prospect of emerging healthy and whole. Nevertheless, “impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor” approximates what I felt.
In Marlow’s case, his physical sickness becomes a metaphor for his soul sickness, forcing him to confront various existential questions that he cannot answer. Foremost among these is “What is my life’s purpose?”
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, 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. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.
Further in the passage Marlow talks about “a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself.”
As it turns out, Marlow thinks that Kurtz, the man he has been sent to fetch, does have something to say. His admiration for this idealist-turned-fascist does not speak well for Marlow.
Incidentally, I can now report that Pfizer’s marvelous new pill, Paxlovid, has one downside: while you’re taking it, an awful taste resides in the mouth, something like metallic grapefruit. It doesn’t leave until the regimen is completed. Although the analogy is not exact, I thought of a passage from Rime of the Ancient Mariner as I was taking it:
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
A temporary unpleasantness beats death, however. And cinnamon candy helps counteract the taste.
Wish us well. My mother has been somewhat neglected during our second bout of illness, but we anticipate being able to devote more attention to her shortly.