Oncology & Mistakes

Samuel Johnson wrote that "Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning."  (It should be added that nothing kicks off a blog, article, or review quite like that quotation.  It's everywhere.  Nobody seems to know precisely where it comes from.)

The hanging today will be the oncology report, and I've found Dr. Johnson's maxim to be selectively true.  I can focus terribly well on getting to the hospital.

But there should be some provisions for making that a paid career, because I for one cannot for the life of me bring myself to grade freshman essays.  And as I've got three solid days slated for doing nothing but that, I'm one annoyed and perplexed and lost little bastard.

The Bible as Literature stuff is a little sexier, most of the time.  There are lots of little eye-rolls when the arguments seem to be a confused presentation of Sparks Notes wrapped around some web-evangelist's passionate (but generally wrong) exposition of the New Testament.  But in general the ideas are fresh and excited.  I've never had two sections of that class that were so intellectually vigorous or spirited, and their papers reflect that.  I grade them quickly and efficiently and gratefully.

But freshman essays... well, I'd like to write a history of grading these things.  I believe that the opening lines to The Hobbit were written on the back of a stack that Tolkien was marking.  They're awfully conducive to daydreaming.  I suspect that they might have been responsible for both world wars as well as the English Civil War.

As it turns out, I'll be giving my freshman composition students their final exam while the oncology team gives the family their report.  I'm looking for somebody to give it for me.  I doubt it will happen, though.  Too much unfinished business, too many little unfulfilled commitments that get put off until the end.

Academics are so strange.  In my field we like to bring order out of chaos as much as we can.  You take a medieval manuscript: say, Piers Plowman.  You compare it to all the other manuscripts, and establish its genuineness (but against what standard?), its relationships to other manuscripts, its variations.

We use the category of the mistake or the scribal error to account for a messiness that we feel needs explanation.  It rarely seems to cross our minds that a variation is a form of freedom that is desirable: we're stuck in the idea of the perfect, the platonic, the ideal.  Do not fall from the idea of the perfect text, we seem to feel, or you will have your name blotted from the Lamb's book of life.

But messiness is, in real life, the norm, I think, if not the glory.  The writer of Revelation who threatened the world with hell if they changed his book strikes me as being a highly realistic individual who knew what scribes were: by the middle of the fourth century, his elegant number of the Beast, 616, would have been changed to 666.  A mistake?  No, not likely.  More likely the elegant breathtaking freedom that some places and times had with texts.

Mom, like a manuscript with a host of idiosyncratic readings, is a mistake, a falling off from the ideal, a thing in need of biological explanation.  She is changing, and yet we feel in her the same bright spirit flickering under a weight of pain.

The oncologists come with a host of words, plans, patterns for living to which she may conform, or not, but the mistake will run on for a very short time before catching in the fire of death and guttering out.

And I can't concentrate.  I see things with wonderful clarity.  But I can't seem to make things matter to myself, as this short time runs over painful, bumpy roads towards its end.

Love has its price, and we're paying it.  I mustn't make my students pay it today.  Instead I must, ironically (and for the last time in the foreseeable future) judge how they have done against an ideal, and what mistakes they have made against a pattern that has been set for them.

There are hard choices.

But this woman is no mistake.