as if this was not true, or as if an exception would be made in my case. Feeling husky and tired on tour? See the doctor when it’s over!
Lost fourteen pounds without trying. Thin at last. But don’t feel lighter because walking to the fridge is like a forced march. Then again, the vicious psoriasis/excema pustules that no doctor could treat have gone, too. This must be some impressive toxin I’m taking. And a mercy for sleep purposes… but all the sleep-aids and blissful dozes seem somehow a waste of life—there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious.
The nice men with the oxygen and the gurney and the ambulance very gently deporting me across the frontier of the well, in another country.
The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.
Now so many tributes that it also seems that rumors of my LIFE have also been greatly exaggerated. Lived to see most of what’s going to be written about me: this too is exhilarating but hits diminishing returns when I realize how soon it, too, will be “background.”
Julian Barnes on John Diamond…
Tragedy? Wrong word: Hegel versus the Greeks.
Morning of biopsy, wake and say whatever happens this is the last day of my old life. No pretense of youth or youthfulness anymore. From now on an arduous awareness.
Amazing how heart and lungs and liver have held up: would have been healthier if I’d been more sickly.
PRAYER: Interesting contradictions at the expense of those who offer it—too easy a Pascalian escape-hatch with me on the right side of the wager this time: what god could ignore such supplications? Same token—those who say I am being punished are saying that god can’t think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.
Nose-hairs gone: runny nostrils. Constipation and diarrhea alternating…
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways and soon, I suppose, I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumor…”
Some years ago, a British journalist, John Diamond, was diagnosed with cancer, and turned his condition into a weekly column. Rightly, he maintained the same perky tone that characterized the rest of his work: rightly, he admitted cowardice and panic alongside curiosity and occasional courage. His account sounded completely authentic: this was what living with cancer entailed; nor did being ill make you a different person, or stop you having rows with your wife. Like many other readers, I used to quietly urge him on from week to week. But after a year and more… well, a certain narrative expectation inevitably built up. Hey, miracle cure! Hey, I was just having you on! No, neither of those could work as endings. Diamond had to die; and he duly, correctly (in narrative terms) did. Though—how can I put this?—a stern literary critic might complain that his story lacked compactness toward the end…
Tendency of some commiserations to sound unintentionally final, either by past tense or some other giveaway of a valedictory sort. Sending flowers not as nice as it might seem.
I’m not fighting or battling cancer—it’s fighting me.
Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.
Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
Vertiginous feeling of being kicked forward in time: catapulted toward the finish line. Trying not to think with my tumor, which would not be thinking at all. People try to make it sound as if it were an EPISODE in one’s life.
ONCOLOGY/ONTOLOGY: Under the old religious dispensation, heaven would simply sentence you to be lavishly tortured and
Fear leads to superstition—“The Big C,” though, seems mercifully to have dumped—and I’m glad nobody wants to slaughter any endangered species on my behalf.
Only OK if I say something objective and stoical: Ian remarking that a time might come when I’d have to let go: Carol asking about Rebecca’s wedding “Are you afraid you won’t see England again?”
Also, ordinary expressions like “expiration date”… will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say— I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!
COLD FEET (so far only at night): “peripheral neuropathy” is another of those words like “necrotic” that describe death-in-life of the system.
AND you lose weight but cancer isn’t interested in eating your flab. It wants your muscle. The Tumortown Diet ain’t much help.
Worst of all is “chemo-brain.” Dull, stuporous. What if the protracted, lavish torture is only the prelude to a gruesome execution.
Body turns from reliable friend to more neutral to treacherous foe… Proust?
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
Not even a race for a cure…
Paperwork the curse of Tumortown.
Misery of seeing oneself on old videos or YouTubes…
“Gradual disclosure” not yet a problem for me.
Michael Korda’s book
You can get so habituated to bad news that good news is like Breytenbach and the cake. Consolations of saying, well at least now I won’t have to do THAT.
Larkin good on fear in “Aubade,” with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism.Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either.
