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Three: Octogenarian Afterthoughts
- University of Wisconsin Press
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three Octogenarian Afterthoughts “Fragments Shored against My Ruins” Further Steps down a Pyramid of Deterioration Although the last several pages were drafted during the copyediting phase in 2010, the preceding section (“Doing ‘Good Work’”) was first drafted some time in 2000. Since then, there have been significant changes in my life and work situation—changes I have experienced not as steady decline, but as steps down a pyramid of deterioration. A very big step occurred in June of 2006, when I was in Malibu attending the high school graduation of my grandson Noah. It was an unusually hot afternoon, and before it was over I briefly passed out and was later taken to an emergency room on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. It was ten days—during which I had empty time to ponder the hierarchical miscommunication of information in hospitals—before I was released with a diagnosis of “atrial fibrillation.” Since then my blood has been drawn monthly to check medications—and to remind me of my heart condition. During 2006 there was also a series of ageappropriate physical problems: arthritis, gout, symptoms of glaucoma, wobbly walking that quickly tired me out, as well as a bad fall that left me immobilized for two weeks and cane-dependent during an extended period of rehab—and still today for any long walk. Recently, I have had great trouble with any activity that involves bending to the floor— which makes it hard for me to look on lower shelves or to pick up the many things I drop in the course of a day. Along with persisting 179 180 Octogenarian Afterthoughts aftermaths of prior cancer episodes, all of this has made research much harder to manage, especially if it involves travel. There have also been more specifically work-related problems— some old, some new, but taken together, increasingly bothersome: shortand long-term memory loss, frequent misreading of punctuation marks and words,31 inability to locate research materials in plain sight on my desk, dead-end computer detours from hitting wrong keys, and frequent panicky brain freeze while staring at the screen of my computer— as well as nightly insomnia after the first three or four hours of sleep, which I try to fill with work-related reading, scribbling idea notes that often later prove illegible, or turning instead to soothing classical music on public radio. When I do get back to sleep, I very often (perhaps due to medication?) have long and vivid narrative dreams, which when I am able to remember them seem work related. Over the last several years I have had a series of very devoted research assistants who, beyond normal research functions, have been my personal home computer techs, trouble shooting by phone and e-mail, or working with me at my apartment, which has become my primary worksite.Acting as advisers on the purchase of new equipment (a bigger screen, better lighting, a voice recorder, new programs, for which they have provided personalized tutorials), they have worked hard to enhance my failing faculties. But they have not yet figured out a way to keep me from misreading words or hitting wrong keys. To make matters worse, the one mental faculty surviving this general deterioration is the one for critical evaluation—now directed primarily against my own work. Beyond the department the processes of superannuation and marginalization in the discipline at large have speeded up in the last decade. 31. Misreading can sometimes lead to humorous and symbolically significant results— as when (while perusing the New York Times one recent morning) I broke out laughing when I misread “experimental” as “experiential”—and on further thought realized that the slippage was not Freudian so much as Boasian. Recalling my earlier footnote on polarities and continua (above, p. 153), I came up with a number of other intellectual boundary issues that could be posed in similar terms, including not only Boas’s between “physicist vs. historian” and “laws vs. phenomena,” but also one between “epigram vs. enigma” that I came across in the New Yorker one morning in a review essay on recent work on the history of Christology—where, as in many other cases, it is a polar opposition sometimes blurred. The latter possibility in the case of my own historiographical thinking is the opposition between “provocative vs. evocative.” [54.234.184.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:59 GMT) 181 Further Steps down a Pyramid of Deterioration Despite an annual session in my...