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  Outside the nurses make small talk, mundane conversation. Inside each room a patient sits, waiting for the door to open with a rush of air, a hiss.

  Read Updike’s review of the new Jane Smiley. Updike’s writing is showing wear and tear, the holes are showing through.

  Alan, the overweight guitarist from high school, so gifted. “All I do is practice guitar and masturbate. That’s my entire life.” Greg told me Alan had said that—he was frightened by Alan’s depression.

  David Foster Wallace writing about S

  That’s where the doctor came in, with the line “What’s disappointing is the area of uptake” and sitting down and looking away. I wonder what I’d been about to write? “Wallace writing about S”? Who’s “S”? Or what? Suicide? But I’d used a capital letter. So it’s a who. Couldn’t be suicide. Anyway, I didn’t know the extent of Wallace’s depression until after his death, and this was before that. But Wallace wrote about depression, of course. And everybody said that in retrospect his work is one long ribbon of a suicide note, but I thought it was the opposite—not the work of a depressed guy, but the work of a healthy guy who was writing about depression, compassionately. But anyway I’d used a capital letter. Sontag wrote about illness. Maybe it was “S” for Sontag? But I hadn’t read her book on illness, on purpose, and I still haven’t—I think I said that already, I can’t remember now. And did Wallace even ever write about Sontag? If he did, I’m not aware. And if he did, and I’d read it, how could I have been aware of that fact then and not now? But I’ve answered my own question, obviously he might have written about Sontag somewhere, and I could have read it, and been writing about it at the point of interruption. But the only reason I offered Sontag as a possibility was that I’d been writing about my friend’s depression, and the idea of illness must have been somewhere on my mind because I was sitting in a hospital room. Who’s to say I wasn’t changing the subject? I could have been thinking of Wallace writing about anyone whose name begins with “S”—Stefan Edberg, for example—or the title of a film or book or magazine, or the name of a country, or, obviously, any word meriting a majuscule. In any case, whatever I meant will remain forever lost at precisely that edit point, the real cutoff, the point at which that past self ceased to exist. In the past, people didn’t edit films with computers like they do now, like they’re doing right now, at this second; they made incisions directly on the film itself, which was laid out upon a kind of little operating table: sometimes fragments of actual film would fall on the floor, unnoticed, and then in the evening they’d be swept up by the cleaners into a dustbin, along with dirt and newspapers and dried leaves. Or sometimes footage would be collected, spooled on reels like ribbons (ribbons, after all, are what films are), locked in a room somewhere in a metal cabinet that would eventually rust, and the film stock would literally dissolve into dust. This is what happened to the film my relative Will Cody made in the fall of 1913. He turned to the new art form of “moving pictures” when he lost creative control of the live circus he’d created. He had been in debt; among other reasons, he had taken out a personal loan to cover wages for Native American performers his producers were unwilling to pay. His film, The Indian Wars, was a revisionist Western, envisioned as something between a narrative and a documentary. It portrayed reenactments of battles between the army and indigenous tribes as precisely as possible, at considerable cost, going back to the actual locations of the skirmishes and massacres, casting real-life veterans of the combat on both sides, rigorously following the original battle plans; Will wanted to record the past. (Oddly, this is similar to what Kubrick wanted to do for his Napoleon film; he never made it.) And then the final act dealt with Native American assimilation: pseudodocumentary footage of Indians raising hands in classrooms, or opening bank accounts, or standing in line at the art deco post office, or riveting things in a factory, or asking questions in hospital rooms. Some critics blamed this section, which they accused of didacticism, however well meaning, for the film’s dismal performance at the box office.2 (“What’s disappointing is the area of uptake.”) The prints of the film were nitrate, as were nearly all silent films of the silent film period, and like the vast majority of silent films—I don’t think people are aware of this, the vast majority—The Indian Wars completely decomposed, along with its version of the past and along, indeed, with the past itself.

  Meanwhile my oncologist was talking, in the present. I couldn’t hear him. The first thing my new self realized was how strongly the room smelled of rubbing alcohol. Reeked, in fact. Overwhelming. What was the source of the odor? I glanced at the counter. All white and spotless and rectilinear, all cotton balls and white latex gloves and needles and poisons. I remember I did have the distinct impression that while I would feel a form of happiness in the future, it would be a new type of happiness profoundly unlike (and, to be honest, less happy than) any I had known. What do I mean by “happiness”? I don’t mean exultant, radiant, manic joy—although there’s nothing wrong with that. And I knew I would have those moments again. If I made it out of all this alive, for example. That would be exciting, ecstatic even.

  What I had the sense I would miss, forever—and I think I may even have been right—are those sudden, uncued moments of inexplicable, profound, unexcited contentment. I wonder if the poet Ezra Pound—who quickly coined the term “imagism,” and just as quickly, mercurial, on a dime, abandoned it—would call these moments “images,” like the glimpse he had, once, of commuters on the subway in Paris, which is where I lived once—it’s a city that has arcades, streets within streets, cities within cities, and buildings made of steel and glass. He saw a beautiful face within the crowd in the metro station at Place de la Concorde, which is where the guillotine stood. And then he saw another face, and another. He subsequently immortalized the whole experience in a famous poem, which you may well know, or, perhaps, remember from a class on poetry you might have taken once.

  IN A STATION OF THE METRO

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  Petals on a wet, black bough.

  Like this one time I was in Düsseldorf with a couple of German friends having brunch, and it was an unseasonably warm late morning in late autumn, and we weren’t saying anything of any particular importance, and nobody was in love with each other or anything like that. Just the light and the falling leaves and the sense of being safe. Or this other time when I was having my car washed in a suburb of Chicago, I was standing on the sidewalk watching, and the white sunlight—odd how much time writers spend writing about light, you’d think more of them would write more about more important things—but anyway the white sunlight fairly dashed itself against the water and the glass, jaggedly, and the attendants, these black guys clad in electric-blue scrubs wielding sponges and towels, were laughing softly and hilariously about something; and I was listening to Debussy in my head, and it was incredibly loud, and I felt, overtaking me, an enormous rush of anticipation, of the sense of potential, the impression that something vague and very good was going to happen not so long from now. It was those kinds of moments, I caught myself thinking, that would be lost to the new self.

  Or this one time I was in college, driving eastward across the entire country with this woman I was in love with, and as day tipped into dusk, at the diamondsharp peak of the afternoon, we came upon the Missouri River and saw, for the first time, after hours of yellow waving grain, pitchblack steel: we crossed the bridge over the ribbon of water that bisected the country, and the landscape was orangelit, and the bridge, casting a long shadow, was pointing somewhere.

  Ah, but you’re saying—this could just be the old stupid romantic view of lost youth. And true, I’m part Irish, very sentimental; I remember this one time I was in the park and my then-girlfriend looked up from reading Yeats and exclaimed—all he does is talk about faded youth! My friend Sarah, also a writer (I mean, she is a writer—I’m not really a writer, I’m just writing this one thing and that’s it), grew up in London. Every
Sunday morning her father would take her to this fancy pub in the neighborhood, and they’d have coffee and read the newspaper together, and the sunlight (light again!) streaming through the windows and—well she described it better than I ever could, but at the end of her description she said, “How could I have known, then, how wonderful that was?”

  My oncologist was looking at me now. Hard to read his face. I suddenly recalled that at our first consultation, he told me that he had been born in Milwaukee. Frank Lloyd Wright and Orson Welles, whom an Italian friend of mine calls the two greatest artists of the twentieth century, were both born near Milwaukee. I was born in Milwaukee too. My parents were very fond of the arts, although they weren’t professional artists. My mom was gifted musically, and my father was gifted writerly-ly. We lived in a comfortable, Tudor-style house in a subdivision that originally, in the nineteenth century, was a grain farm for a brewery downtown founded by a German immigrant, Jacob Best. His son-in-law, Frederick Pabst, took it over and expanded the business into a very successful company: one of the company’s brands, Pabst Blue Ribbon, became very popular indeed: in the 1986 movie Blue Velvet, a character played by Dennis Hopper talks about it even. In a 1997 book David Foster Wallace talks about this even. Eventually the brewery didn’t need the farm anymore, so the farm was converted, for the burgeoning bourgeoisie, into our subdivision. The curvy streets were designed to form the shape of a Prussian military helmet. You can see this clearly from the airplane if you’re flying in a south-westerly direction to Mitchell Field and if you know where to look. I love traveling and in the hospital room I realized I probably wouldn’t be traveling anywhere for quite some time now. The house across the street was the original farmhouse, and our house was the second or third built, I think. They put a plaque on it, the national registry of historic buildings or whatever. The main thing in our dark orange living room was an immense old dictionary on a podium like a Torah on a bimah. It wasn’t an unusual thing for my dad to amble with some urgency into the living room to look up a word; this was normal, actually. I thought all businessmen did this; but then I thought all businessmen went to work in an office building that was converted from a Victorian arcade: a building of cast iron and glass (cast iron being easier to weld than steel) with a skylight, dizzying balconies, and a fountain at the bottom: a building that not too long ago housed a billiard parlor, Turkish baths, and a bar: a city within a city. But when I was a child I didn’t like the arts because I found them imprecise and meaningless. Music, above all. Couldn’t stand music. I could read it and play it but I couldn’t really stand it: I liked math and science, especially biology; I was a little obsessed with taxonomy. When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an ornithologist. I would try to memorize the Latin names of the birds, even though I hadn’t studied Latin. This came in handy later, in high school, when I did study Latin because I had discovered girls and suddenly I had understood why people liked the arts, and science and math flew out the skylight like birds; and at the same time my father had a nervous breakdown and rediscovered literature and quit his job to write, and my parents divorced. My father told me about Ezra Pound. How Pound’s grandfather had been the governor of Wisconsin. How at the age of fifteen Pound had said that by the age of thirty he would know more about poetry than any man alive, and by the age of thirty he did. When my father told me that, I was at that age where you’re going across a bridge, in a sense, and whatever you read and whatever you hear will mark you forever, like it or not, and so I happened to read Pound and Eliot and Auden, and that’s why I think about them all the time even though they’re not fashionable; I’ll probably refer to them again during this essay and I’m a little embarrassed about that; I’m afraid you’ll think I’m not fashionable. Writers hope readers will like them, just like people hope other people they haven’t met yet will like them. And sometimes, for this precise reason, people and artists will put up defenses, and this is why, partly, Auden called one of his great books The Shield of Achilles. A young woman by the name of Rachel Wetzsteon wrote a great book about Auden. The idea of a shield, and hoping people you haven’t met would like you—these ideas have something to do with Rachel, I think. My father met Auden once, and he said that Auden was too shy and awkward to speak or even meet his gaze. I finished high school and went to college in Chicago and studied music. One time my father, who was living out West, in the desert, drove back and we shared an apartment for a while. The novelist Jonathan Franzen came over for dinner one night, and my father said, that’s just about the cagiest guy I’ve ever met. So it’s the same thing. Greek soldiers would face each other on plains, with heavy shields strapped to their left arms for protection. I finished college and moved to Paris and worked at a place that designed carpets, and I continued to write music. My oncologist was saying something, but I was trying to put all this together. After three or four years I moved to New York and worked at a hedge fund, briefly, and then started studying music at Columbia. Then my father died; my brother Matthew and I visited a Greek island in whose center waterfalls gave way to springs; and then I came back to New York, and planes flew into buildings, and there was much dust, and smoke, and leaves of paper, and leaves, and death; and then I felt a lump in my neck that was determined to be a malignant tumor; and it was easily treatable, and the treatment didn’t work; and now I’m in this room, floating, shrieking, trying to put all this together.

  Pound, I propose, is the most emblematic artist of the twentieth century because he was the most ambitious, and basically single-handedly created the English with which we’re speaking and writing right now; and then a war happened, and he went insane, became a fascist, and was arrested and locked in a small open cage outdoors, and in this cage he was floating and shrieking and trying to put things together. And then he was nearly penalized with capital punishment for treason; finally, he was placed in a hospital room, from which he was later released, and he moved to Venice in Italy and finally died.

  And then there’s that great thing the writer C. David Heymann writes about, actually meeting Pound in Venice near the end of the old man’s life. Mr. Heymann walked in and there’s Pound, sitting there, saying absolutely nothing. After a long period of what must have been freakishly uncomfortable silence, Pound started rhapsodizing about Eliot and Yeats and Joyce and Ginsberg and the Beatles as if he’d known this young writer, a stranger, for years.

  But then the brittle-boned figure before me had once again retired behind his impenetrable shield of reticence: he said nothing. The hands continued to work away at each other, and the eyes were quiet and far away. Then the lips began to move, searching for words which would not come.

  Finally: “It is sad . . . very sad to look back.”3

  C. David Heymann’s book from which the preceding passage is drawn is terrific—he wrote it when he was only thirty, for heaven’s sakes. How exactly he ended up becoming, as his publisher states, “the author of several acclaimed biographies, including Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton; A Woman Named Jackie: An Intimate Biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis; R.F.K: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy; and Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor”—I have no idea. That’s quite a career trajectory. And also some of these biographies have been turned into television miniseries. Not the Pound one though. Mr. Heymann is currently in the news for alleging—for the third time!—that Bobby and Jackie did what my friend Steve in college called the “bone dance” (as in, what’re you up to tonight, Steve? and he’d say, well, taking this chick out to dinner and, hopefully, doing the bone dance). I thought—and later, I discovered I was mistaken—that it’s Mr. Heymann’s book on Pound that includes an anecdote in which somebody visits the poet, either in Venice or at the madhouse, and Pound abruptly stops a beautiful monologue on something or other and, glancing at his listener, says, “The film breaks.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I said,” my oncologist apparently continued, “do you have any questions?”
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  I asked him—such a nice guy—to kindly repeat everything he just said. Ever the good student, I took notes. And note the difference in style. For this— not the diagnosis—was the real bifurcation. Here I’d thought all along the diagnosis was the rupture. No; the proof is in the pudding, the truth is visible in the penmanship, forever altered. And how many losses of innocence have I already described, and how many more will I have to describe, recontextualizing—which is the same as minimizing—the previous ones? How many will there be? Just when you think you are out, they pull you back in. Innocence, apparently, isn’t lost in a moment, like Eve biting into an apple, like a column disappearing suddenly in a cloud of dust; innocence crumbles, sometimes over centuries; it stumbles against itself, the loss ever-widening, exactly like a sequence of modulations in Beethoven (as the nineteenth-century music theorist Heinrich Schenker described—and I paraphrase—oh now we’ve arrived at our cadence, our musical goal, and—oh, wait, no now we’ve arrived, and—oh no sorry now we’ve arrived, I thought it was then but it’s now but so now we can—oh no jeez sorry now we’ve oh no sorry NOW); exactly like the stupefying orchestral circle of fifths that leads us back to the reprise of the first (“A”) section of the stupefying coda to the eighth album of those English-born but actually in a way mainly really Irish musicians Pound was talking about in the hospital with Ginsberg, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a coda that occurs after the show is over, finished, it’s done, hurry up please it’s time, good night ladies, good night ladies, good night, good night (next to this line, in Eliot’s original Waste Land draft, Pound, who took the “jumble of good and bad passages”4 and made a masterpiece out of it, had written—uniquely in his annotations!—“splendid”); and it’s not over, of course, it’s never over, there’s always an after, there’s always a coda, here in the form of a terra-cotta zephyr of a C major chord (there’s still plenty of good music to be written in C major, Arnold Schoenberg, of all people, once said) wafting in and lilting down to its resolution, G, pausing just long enough for John Lennon to tell us, heartbreakingly, that nothing of what we’ve experienced over the last thirty-five minutes—not the initial exuberance of the masquerade; not the admission that without community we cannot live; not gazing at variegated jewels of the nighttime sky, which the unblind see as a black void, and which Joyce, who went blind, correctly catechistized as “the heaventree of stars”; not the overcoming of, as Shakespeare put it, and as Pound put it later, “the capacity to do harm”; not the joy of letting meandering thoughts meander, reasonless, for the sole sake of joy; not the heartbreak of that singular moment in life when you understand you’re no longer a child (for me it was crossing a steel bridge after driving through fields of yellow grain which now were orange); not the celebration of the blissful madness of the West (the circus) or the blissful sanity of the East (the flow); not the charms of the music hall; not the glimpse of a woman wearing a cap (“a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember,” the now elderly Bernstein warns the ambitious young newsman; “she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl”); not the rage against the machine of Madison Avenue and daytime television; not the ecstasy of the symmetry of the musical reprise (a joy unknown, until this moment, to the pop/rock album)—none of this matters, Lennon tells us, because he’s just read the newspaper and—oh, boy. And now we’re in minor. And we may never get out. But of course we will, unforgettably, with the help of ten hands on three pianos—one lent, uniquely, by Daniel Barenboim, just when you think the guy’s exhausted pretty much any further possibility of cultural generosity, you learn something like this about him—and with the help of one of the, well, no, I’ll just go ahead and say it, the greatest E major chord in the history of Western music,* a conclusion that very nearly had been a bunch of white guys humming Tibetan chant, which incidentally is as good an illustration of the fragility of great art as the image of a forty-nine-year-old Ryan O’Neal (Paramount’s original choice, to Mr. Coppola’s horror—hey, the suits told him, Italians can have blond hair too) saying, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Which would have been even worse. But we know now, in hindsight, it ends with that chord and, as the groove proves, we will never see it any other way; but before, when it was actually happening, we simply weren’t sure how it would turn out. It’s also exactly like yet another fresh spring after yet another waterfall in the center of a Greek island: yet another giving away.