![]() ![]() I was kicked back in my chair, extolling the virtues of health and staying alive, when she glanced up at me and whispered: “My heart feels funny.” I sat up and said, “What do you mean? Like, your physical heart?” She nodded and said, “It's skipping and stopping.” I took her pulse, then grabbed my keys with one hand and her with the other and hustled her to my car, head spinning with memory and statistics as we careened toward the emergency room: The first months of “health” are the most dangerous, the body reacting violently to the shock of being fed after years of starvation, the risk of heart attack high, especially just out of the hospital when anorexic behavior is likely to kick back in. Jane, just out of the hospital, pale and shy-eyed, let her hair fall over her face, as though to keep from being seen as she committed this great sin of consumption, this confession of weakness, this admission of having a body, with all its impertinent demands. After years in the underworld, we'd risen to the surface and were glancing around surreptitiously, taking tentative breaths of air. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra It was a landmark event: We were having lunch. Notes on the Netherworld The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else and soul is only a word for something about the body. 8 “Dying Is an Art, Like Everything Else”
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