A personal letter on a near-fatal injury, and my coping through philosophy.
“How strange then that Socrates should have been so treated by the Athenians. Slave, why do you say Socrates? Speak of the thing as it is: how strange that the poor body of Socrates should have been carried off and dragged to prison by stronger men, and that any one should have given hemlock to the poor body of Socrates, and that it should breathe out the life. Do these things seem strange, do they seem unjust, do you on account of these things blame God? Had Socrates then no equivalent for these things? Where then for him was the nature of good? Whom shall we listen to, you or him? And what does Socrates say? Anytus and Melitus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me: and further, he says, “If it so pleases God, so let it be.”
(Epictetus, Discourses 1.29.8–9, trans. by George Long)
S.R.,
It wasn’t all that long ago that I lie, immobilized, in a hospital bed.
One morning, in June of 2017 (I was twenty then), I had a stroke.
Socrates: “Have you come just now, or long ago?”
Crito: “Reasonably long ago.”
(Plato’s dialogue, Crito, 49a10–11, my translation)
I remember getting out of bed in the late morning.
It was sudden that I felt something was wrong (this feeling I initially tried to “walk off” around my house, which both then and still now I find quite amusing).
In a matter of minutes my left side had become limp, numb, and disordinate.
I was, for a time, hemi-paralyzed – a thalamic stroke due to an AVM – and the recovery since has been gradual, though vestiges linger.
“You are a little soul, carrying around a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations,11.37. Quoted in Oldfather’s Loeb Classical Library translation of the Fragments of Epictetus, 26)
There is an inconsistent pain, not at all dissimilar to a burning sensation or a chill, that runs down the left side of my face, along my jaw, through my hand, down my leg.
Even as I type I can feel it, as if,
“[A] thin flame traces under my limbs”
(Catullus 51, my translation)
The memory of those first few days are a blur, and seem all to bleed together.
I recall, however, a moment.
Lying in a hospital bed, looking over to one side, through the window and down at the busy street below, I was reminded, then, of something the philosopher Epictetus said:
” [R]emember that the door is open. Do not be more cowardly than children, but just as they say, when the game no longer pleases them, ‘I will play no more,’ you too, when things seem that way to you, say, ‘I will play no more,’ and so depart…”
(Epictetus, Discourses I.24.20, trans. by Robert Hard)
And of the Buddha’s words in the Great Full-moon Night Discourse,
” This [body] is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.”
It was in that moment that, in a narratival sense, I made a commitment to myself. To my friends, my family – to the world at large. That this was not some insuperable obstacle, that there were reasons to continue.
That there is hope.
I spent a week in that bed, and two weeks at a rehabilitation center not far from New York City, where much of my time was spent in physical therapy.
To think then that I had to relearn how to walk. How to touch and to feel. How to grasp objects. Basic tasks I’d taken for granted, like getting dressed, or showering, were difficulties.
For much of that time there was a despair that lingered as if in the air – that now I live with this burden, a sword hanging over my head which no one can remove. That now I inhabit this broken body, which at any moment can be brought down once again by the snap of a tenuous thread. That this is fundamentally a solitary journey, though many embark on ones similar.
I’ve felt since those days a burning tension to make proper use of my time, even though I feel that I waste much of it in rushing around and coming undone. Despite all I’ve heard of the brevity of life and how to make good use of it, I’m still not sure what that means.
It would be dishonest of me to say that there aren’t moments in which I think of abandoning the whole affair. Moments in which I feel that I’ve thrown away my “second chance” at life. Moments of malaise and despair.
I, however, have a commitment.
” Remember that you are an actor in a play of such a sort as the producer wishes…”
(Epictetus, Encheiridion 17, my translation).
My consolation then, and consolation now, and since a fortunate age, has been philosophy. Set aside the books, the disputation, the terminology, the pedantry.
Amid the vagaries of life, the peculiarities of being, we live in the hope of some ground upon which to stand amid “all of this”.
Even if philosophy were a noble lie, I’d cling to it if only for that hope.
“Pick me up and throw me where you will.
Wherever I land I shall keep the god within me happy…”
(Meditations 8.45, Trans. by Martin Hammond)
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George