英语临床6夏季课件 INTOXICATED BY MY ILLNESS.docVIP

　　INTOXICATED BY MY ILLNESS Anatole Broyard So much of a writer’s life consists of assumed suffering, rhetorical suffering, that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate. Suddenly there was in the air a rich sense of crisis, real crisis, yet one that also contained echoes of ideas like the crisis of language, the crisis of literature, or of personality. It seemed to me that my existence, whatever I thought, felt, or did, had taken on a kind of meter, as in poetry, or in taxis. When you learn that your life is threatened, you can turn toward this knowledge or away from it. I turned toward it. It was not a choice but an automatic shifting of gears, a tacit agreement between my body and my brain. I thought that time had tapped me on the shoulder, that I had been given a real deadline at last. It wasn’t that I believed the cancer was going to kill me, even though it had spread beyond the prostate — it could probably be controlled, either by radiation or hormonal manipulation. No, what struck me was the startled awareness that one day something, whatever it might be, was going to interrupt my leisurely progress. It sounds trite, yet I can only say that I realized for the first time that I don’t have forever. Time was no longer innocuous, nothing was casual anymore. I understood that living itself had a deadline. Like the book I had been working on — how sheepish I would feel if I couldn’t finish it. I had promised it to myself and to my friends. Though I wouldn’t say this out loud, I had promised it to the world. All writers privately think this way. When my friends heard I had cancer, they found me surprisingly cheerful and talked about my courage. But it has nothing to do with courage, at least not for me. As far as I can tell, it’s a question of desire. I’m filled with desire — to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality. While I’ve always had trouble concentrating, I now