The Lost Art of Gratitude

She had wondered about the causes of her light sleeping and had spoken about it to a friend, a specialist in sleep disorders. She had not consulted him professionally, but had brought the matter up over dinner; not before the whole table, of course, but in the intimacy of the one-to-one conversation that people have with those sitting beside them.

“I don’t like to ask about medical things,” she said.

“But …,” he said.

“Well, yes. But. You see, you doctors must dread being buttonholed by people who want to talk about their symptoms. There you are at a party and somebody says: I’ve been having these twinges of pain in my stomach …”

“Have you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

He smiled. “The old cliche, you know. Somebody comes and says, A friend of mine has this rash, you see, and I wondered what it was. That sometimes happens. Doctors understand all about embarrassment, you know.”

Isabel nodded. “But it must annoy you—being asked about medical matters.”

He thought for a moment. “Nihil humanum mihi alienum est, if I may lapse into Latin. I don’t set my mind against anything human. Doctors should subscribe to that, I think. Like priests.”

Isabel did not think the comparison quite fitting. “Priests do disapprove, don’t they? Doctors don’t—or shouldn’t. You don’t shake your head over your patients’ behaviour, do you?”

“If doctors see self-destructive behaviour, they might,” he said. “If somebody comes in with chronic vascular disease, for example, and you smell the nicotine on his fingers, of course you’re going to say something. Or a drinker comes in with liver problems. You’re going to make it clear what’s causing the problem.”

“But you don’t ladle on the blame, do you? You don’t say things like, This is all your own stupid fault. You don’t say that, even if it patently is his stupid fault.”

He played with his fork. “No, I suppose not.”

“Whereas a priest will. A priest will use the language of right and wrong. I don’t think doctors do that.” She looked at him. He was typical of a certain type of Edinburgh doctor; the old-fashioned, gentle Scottish physician, unmoved by the considerations of profit and personal gain that could so disfigure medicine. That doctors should consider themselves businessmen was, Isabel had always felt, a moral tragedy for medicine. Who was left to be altruistic? Teachers, she thought, and people who worked for charities; and public-interest lawyers, and … in fact, the list was quite long; probably every bit as long as it ever had been. One should be careful, she told herself, in commenting on the decline of society; the elder Cato was the warning here—a frightful old prig, he had warned that everything was in decline, forgetting that once we reach forty we all believe that the world is on the slide. Only if eighteen-year-olds started to say O tempora! O mores! would the situation be really alarming; eighteen-year-olds did not say that, though; they no longer had any Latin, of course, and could not.

“You were going to ask me a question,” he said. He knew Isabel, and her digressions, her tendency to bring philosophical complications into the simplest of matters.

“Why are some people light sleepers?” she began, and added hurriedly, “I’m one, by the way.”

“So am I, as it happens,” he replied. “It’s often respiratory—sleep apnoea, where you keep waking up because you’re choking. If not, it may be an idiosyncrasy of the brain. Is it a problem?”

“Not for me. Not really. I go back to sleep.”

He nodded. “You could get yourself checked for sleep apnoea. It’s pretty easy to monitor sleep patterns. You don’t look at risk to me, though—it tends to affect heavier people.”

That had been the end of the conversation, as another guest had addressed the table at large and private conversations had trailed off. But now, lying in bed, in one of these brief periods of nocturnal wakefulness that she had decided were the product of brain idiosyncrasy rather than breathing problems, Isabel turned and looked at the sleeping form of Jamie beside her. She still experienced a sense of novelty, even if they had been together for a couple of years now; a sense of having been given a precious gift. And he felt it too; he had expressed it that way, too, when he told her that he was grateful for her. “I feel that I’ve been given something,” he said. “Somebody has given me you. Isn’t that odd? Because it doesn’t happen that way, does it?” She watched him breathing. The sheet that he had drawn up to his chest and that lay crumpled about him like a Roman toga moved almost imperceptibly, but still moved. The act of breathing was not really an act at all, as the will played no part. We did not tell ourselves to breathe—except sometimes, in yoga classes and the like—and when we were asleep, as Jamie was now, the system itself remembered to do what was required. And how many of the other things we did fell into that category?

Isabel wondered what a detailed record of our day’s activities would look like—not a record of the sort that might appear in a diary: Went into town. Had lunch. That kind of thing gave a broad-brush account of what we did but did not list the really particular, the hundreds—tens of thousands probably—of little actions in a person’s day. We did such things all the time: tiny movements of the limbs as we sat in a chair or lay in bed, as she did now; little twitches, the flickering of the eyelids, the touching of the fingers, the inclining of the head. Those were nothing really—background noise, one might say—but they would all be religiously entered in this record of the day. And then there were the things we said—the speech acts, as philosophers called them—which ranged from the ums and ers, the muttered phrases of apology on bumping into somebody in a crowd, the meaningless expressions that lubricated our social dealings with one another. A transcript of our speech over the space of a day would make sobering reading, Isabel thought; and over a lifetime? What would we have said? What would it amount to? How much energy would we have wasted on the smallest of small talk; how many months would be filled with sheer nonsense?

And then, as often as not, when the time came to talk, really to talk, we were tongue-tied, as could happen to people at the bedsides of the dying, when there was an urgency that cried out for big things to be said, and we found that we could say very little, or that tears made it impossible to speak. Isabel remembered once visiting an aunt on her father’s side who did not have long to live; she had wanted to thank her for her generosity to her as a girl, and although she had managed to say the words that expressed her gratitude, the aunt, known for her coruscating wit, had simply said, “Flattery will get you everywhere,” and later that afternoon had died. But at least she had been thanked. “Flattery will get you everywhere” were memorable last words, if indeed the aunt had said nothing more after Isabel left her bedside, which she thought was probably the case. It would be a perfectly presentable final sentence, although not as witty, perhaps, as Oscar Wilde’s gazing in dismay at the decoration surrounding his deathbed and saying, by way of farewell, “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.”