Good Morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. Recently I went to the hand doctor because
my hand isn’t working totally perfectly and he was like, Hey!
Do you remember the time we talked about not signing your name so much?
And then you signed two hundred fifty thousand copies
of your book The Anthropocene Reviewed and I was like, yeah, but that was for work, doc.
And the doc was like, was it? Was it for work?
And I was like look, doc. The heart wants what it wants.
Anyway long story short I have a few problems,
but one of them is arthritis which is terrible news,
but does have a silver lining, which is that I get to add to my catalog of itises.
I’m a heavily itis-ed person, like, over the years I have or have had orbital cellulitis
and euicilifidic acophigitus, and viral meningitis not to mention the normal ituses sinusitis,
gastritis etcetera.
But in this respect I am, of course, not unique, In our lives most of us will become
extensively familiar with itisus. We have been invited to a very strange party
where you get to have a consciousness but it's made out of meat.
Sometimes people ask me why I write so much
about illness and disease and are historical responses
to them and I guess my question would be why isn’t everyone writing about it.
As Virginia Wolf wrote a hundred twenty years ago.
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings,
it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and
battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”
And not just in literature, historical narratives
also tend to focus on Kings and wars and political philosophies
and whatnot, but disease is a terribly important historical force, maybe the most important one.
Like, it’s almost certain that in the last two thousand years more people died
just from tuberculosis then died from all wars combined, and before you think
Like, oh, that’s ancient history…no!
More people died last year from tuberculosis than died in the war.
And every year going back to world war two.
Around ninety-three percent of all humans die from disease.
A phenomenon so common that we attribute these deaths to natural causes.
Although for the record there is nothing natural about the fact that people die of cholera in Haiti
but not in the United States or the fact that poor people in the United
States are twice as likely to develop heart disease as rich people.
And so I write about disease and our responses to it from OCD in Turtles all the Way Down
to the plague in Anthropocene Reviewed because there is this terrible
and strange circumscriber of consciousness and I don’t
think we’re talking enough about it,
and also the way we're talking about it matters, like, let me give you a weird example.
Itis means inflammation and so as a suffix itis
referees not to the bacterial or viral infection itself
but to the body’s attempt to deal with that infection,
or in the case of autoimmune diseases like esophagitis
the body mistaking healthy cells as threats and this is very interesting to me
for somewhat personal reasons, like, I got orbital cellulitis because bacteria
invaded the soft tissue between my eye and my brain
and started spreading out of control but the name orbital cellulitis doesn’t translate
to like staff invading your eye socket it translates to your own white blood cells caused
swelling behind your eye. In this and many other ways we tend to
describe disease and illness as failures and insufficiencies
of the body rather than literally inevitable side effects of having a body.
And so even in these extremely subtle ways,
we are prone to imagining disease as a failure of one’s self.
A failure of one’s biology or circumstances or moral choices.
And so I think examining the ways we imagine and understand illness can be really productive,
especially in a world where so much illness is not really caused by bacteria or viruses
it's caused by poverty and lack of access to clean water and other human built systems
and in that sense our habit of imagining disease as primarily being about human choice
is justified not because human beings are responsible
for their illnesses, but because our collective choices are.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.