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Epilogue Penelope’s Shroud, Zeno’s Paradox, and the Closure of the Black Box Although Carol has served (along with the Internet) as a substitute for my failing memory and has sometimes commented on a problematic passage I have read aloud to her, by her own choice she has never actually read the “Black Box” essay. She has, however, commented on the process of its composition. This, by reference to Homer’s Penelope, who during Odysseus’s twenty-year absence kept would-be suitors at bay by weaving a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes and each night undoing the work of that day. But since my modifications of this text have mostly been by insertion rather than deletion, I prefer the analogy to Zeno, who kept the race going by the logical manipulation of its length. Having prematurely celebrated with champagne the printing of a “last penultimate version” on May 20, 2009, within two days I opened a file of “Changes since the May 20th printout.” A few days later, it occurred to me that to foil Zeno once again by leaping across his half-way gap, I needed a coda (offered here as an epilogue) to make clear why and how the “Black Box” was closing at this point. For a while, I wondered if the ideal moment of completion might be the moment of my own death, leaving to Carol and designated advisers the issues of publication and preservation, of audience and access. At the end of 2009, however, I was still around, still tinkering with the “Black Box,” still worrying about issues raised in its “penultimate version.” Some of these related to content (am I more conservative, politically and methodologically, than I have allowed myself to admit?). Others had to do with audience and future disposition: Did I want my children to read this while certain autobiographical topics affecting them remain unresolved? Did I really want the general scholarly world 205 206 Epilogue (including my critics) to have this much access to my darker side? Would my black box perhaps be more aptly named Pandora’s? Does anyone really care? Will the end of the scholarly world as we know it (whether by global warming or by atomic disaster) come so soon that issues of preservation and access will no longer be relevant? Eventually, however, I decided that to continue to worry about such issues might forestall indefinitely the closure of the “Black Box”—and thus allow Zeno once again to triumph, after more than a decade of my hard work. The only way to foil him was to initiate the process of publication, with the hope that I may still be around and functional enough to see it actually accomplished. The likelihood of that outcome, however, was compromised by a prior diagnosis of MCI (mild cognitive impairment), for which my primary care physician (PCP) prescribed the then standard medication Aricept, which is marketed as stalling the advance of Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, however, I was extremely susceptible to its side effects, so much so that (in the spirit of my brother Myron) I refused to go ahead with the treatment, hoping that I would somehow manage to see the “Black Box” essay through to publication. It was in this context that an old friend of mine, in touch after many years, reported that she had a similar reaction to Aricept, but had tried “alternative” non-pharmaceutical treatments (among them herbal remedies, Yoga, meditation—and perhaps controlled doses of lithium) that seemed to work for her without side effects. Coincidentally, I also watched two episodes of The Dr. Oz Show devoted to “alternative” therapies—many of which he took quite seriously, although translating them into brainfunction terms. For a month or so, I was tempted to reject big pharma and go with Dr. Oz and at least part way with my old friend, but I continued to vacillate even after my PCP offered a more recently developed pharmaceutical treatment (the Exelon Patch) that, although more convenient in application, listed a similar array of possible side effects. Not for the first time in my life, I was faced with an anxiety-charged choice between very different therapeutic options. In the event, I decided to go with the majority vote of those closest to me. My doctor daughter Rebecca, who is always my “second opinion” in medical matters, sided with my PCP—as did two of her sisters and my wife Carol. Despite my deeply rooted (and to...

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