Vita Nova

I had some vague idea that I would one day write a book (maybe a comic picaresque memoir) about having cancer, but it also feels like maybe I don’t have time for that. With what rapidity life follows my pen, etc.

—Text to friend, December 28, 2025

I am used to dealing with the dead. I am used to dealing with people who died in what we would regard, today, as middle age. As an English professor who writes about eighteenth-century literature, it comes with the territory. David Hume: died 1776, aged 65; Eliza Haywood: died 1756, aged 62; Laurence Sterne: died 1768, aged 54. The shortest-lived of these souls, Henry Fielding, died in 1754, aged 47. In a passage from Fielding’s most famous novel, Tom Jones, the narrator invokes the muse and asks her to assure him that “some tender maid, whose grandmother is yet unborn” will one day read his novel and “from her sympathetic breast send forth the heaving sigh.” Fielding wants his words to have the power to move someone completely unknown to him. “Comfort me,” he continues, “by a solemn assurance, that when the little parlour in which I sit at this instant shall be reduced to a worse furnished box, I shall be read with honour by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.”

When, during the pandemic, I was prerecording and uploading lectures for my classes, I would use this passage to suggest to my students, many of them scattered across the globe in different time zones, that the literary form of the novel is itself a technology of remote asynchronous communication, one that might, as Fielding hopes, allow the living and dead to speak to each other across time and space. Researchers who write about the past are well acquainted with this peculiar form of intimacy. As a character in a recent Ian McEwan novel characterizes his relationship with the dead subjects he writes about: “That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot touch them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love … ”

Henry Fielding is one of those dead strangers I have come to love, whose fiction can “move me and touch me.” He opens his invocation by bidding the muse, “inspire my glowing breast,” playing on inspiration in its literal sense of inhalation. When Fielding’s prose causes my “sympathetic breast [to] send forth the heaving sigh,” I can almost believe that my exhalation completes the breath he envisages in 1749.

It was the first day of the new academic year and also the first day of my sabbatical. I was writing at my dining table when I felt a slight but regular pulsing around my clavicles. It didn’t hurt, and, at first, I was less panicked than curious. I got up and looked in the mirror; yes, there it was! I could see it: a distinct, measured throbbing in the little notch just above my sternum. The pulsing began to travel down my right arm, the spasms growing in intensity until they whiplashed my entire body as I yelped and toppled over. It was like an earthquake but the other way around.

Fielding’s invocation of the muse is unusual because it mocks the form—he has earlier grumbled that “nothing can be more absurd” than “the invocation of a muse by a modern”—and so when we arrive at the chapter titled “An Invocation,” it is no surprise that his tongue is firmly in his cheek as he piles on the classical references and invokes not only the sylphlike muse of inspiration but also a “plumper dame” whom he hopes will reward him with a “quickly-convertible bank-bill” and “comfortable house.” Fielding’s invocation is also unusual in its placement, more than two-thirds of the way through the novel, rather than at the work’s outset. The way I read it, Fielding invokes the muse in this moment because—and this is one of many moments in which I find Fielding deeply relatable—he is flagging. He has reached (in my paperback edition) page 599 of an 872-page novel, so he is a fair way in, but he still has a lot of plot to get through to wind things up. I have run (shuffle-jogged, really) only one marathon, but it strikes me as the equivalent of the realization that sets in around mile sixteen that you still have ten to go.

I was meant to have flown to England, to York, to give a talk called, “Carrying on in Tom Jones.”

The problem that Fielding dramatizes in his midway plea for the muse’s assistance is the same one that Roland Barthes, in his 1978-1980 series of lectures, The Preparation of the Novel, identifies as integral to what he calls “the long form,” referring to the novel in general: how to carry on. I suspect that anybody who has ever tried to write anything has direct experience of this difficulty. One source of this struggle is interruption: what Barthes characterizes as the “bitty, repetitive tasks that come round and round again … that interrupt the flow, the continuity of creative work.” Conversely, however, the interruption of life’s routines is also key to achieving what Barthes calls a “Complete Break”—a Vita Nova, after Dante’s first work—“the discovery of a new writing practice” that “should break with previous intellectual practices.”

I would later learn that I was experiencing a focalized brain seizure, which is one in which you remain conscious. The seizure felt focalized, too, in the narratological sense, in which a third-person narrator tells a story from a character’s point of view: I experienced the seizure and observed myself experiencing it at the same time.

The need for such an interruption emerges from a sense of “living out the middle-of-the-journey.” Barthes vocalizes the realization of the critic in this position: What? From now on until I die I’ll be writing articles, preparing my teaching, giving lectures—or, at best, writing books—on subjects, which are all that’ll vary (and so little!)? Fielding, in his invocation, understands the problem of writing similarly; the challenge is to figure out how to interrupt “the stream of nature,” which always threatens to pull you back into its flow.

And yet: how does one resist the relentless pull of life’s routine? “[A]n event, sent by Destiny,” Barthes writes, “can occur to painfully or dramatically mark, cut into, incise, break up that slow running aground.”

Much later, after I have been diagnosed with widely metastasized lung cancer, I ask my oncologist what caused it—I have never smoked and have no family history of lung cancer.

He answers, “Bad luck.”

As Barthes observes, such an event is, “alas, pain’s asset.” Barthes cites several examples of people whose lives changed because of a painful interruption. The last example he provides is the Belgian singer Jacques Brel, who, upon being diagnosed with lung cancer, “changed his life, his ‘middle of life,’ just a few years before he died.” As Barthes sums up, “whatever the nature of the incident, the middle of my life is nothing other than the moment when one realizes that death is real.”

After the seizure, I spent twelve hours in the ER, which was exactly like The Pitt, partly because it also unfolded in real time.

When a room finally opened up for me in the main hospital, I had a wry, laconic nurse named Benjamin who told me he would be asking me a lot of questions in no particular order.

“Do you want a flu shot?”

“I mean, sure, but also maybe not … now?”

“How about a chaplain, do you want to see a chaplain?”

“Also, maybe, not … yet?”

He gave me anti-seizure medicine, which made me really nauseous, and then anti-nausea medicine, the combination of which knocked me out hard for the next several hours.

The last course I taught was a graduate seminar titled The Long Form. We read, slowly, Fielding’s Tom Jones and Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel in tandem. The pairing was inspired by Kate Briggs, the translator of Barthes’s lectures and the author of a novel, The Long Form, which centers on a day in the life of a new mother who reads Tom Jones in fits and starts in the brief snatches of time when her baby, Rose, sleeps or plays.

When I woke up Benjamin was gone. I felt disoriented, but my new nurse, Sade, soothed me. A resident came in to put electrodes all over my head, which felt surprisingly relaxing, like getting your hair checked for lice. For a while I sat in the hospital bed by myself with my electrodes under my shower cap, as if I were getting a very deep conditioning treatment. At some point the resident came back.

“Has anyone talked to you about your MRI results?” she asked.

When I said no, she took a deep breath, and as she started listing all the organs in which they’d discovered lesions, I found myself thinking, do I even have that many organs? At some point I noticed that the resident’s eyes were welling up with tears. When Sade came back in she was also wiping away tears. I realized it’s never a terribly auspicious sign when your medical team is crying.

Together, they took all of the electrodes off my head.

“My hair looks like shit,” I said.

Sade put my hair in a ponytail for me.

“You’re a really good nurse,” I said.

“You’re a really good patient,” she replied.

Like Barthes, Fielding is preoccupied with interruption, though he comes at it from a different direction. The problem is not (or not only) how to move lengthwise, from the short to the long—how to pick up from where you left off—but also how to, so to speak, move crosswise, from the inside to the outside—or to put it in the forbidding language of narratology, how to move between diegesis and extra-diegesis. Diegesis is what happens in a story; anything that is outside that story is extra-diegetic—moments, for example, in which the narrator digresses from telling the story, or muses on the act of storytelling.

A distinct feature of The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, to give it its full title, is that it tells two different stories on both of these levels, diegetic and extra-diegetic. As the novel’s title implies, the diegetic story—the “actual” story—centers on a loveable rascal named Tom Jones, whom the benevolent Squire Allworthy discovers as an infant, “wrapped up in some coarse linen,” sleeping in his bed. Allworthy decides to raise the infant, Tom, as his own. When Tom is eighteen, he is falsely accused of treachery and Allworthy banishes him from his home; a road trip ensues, full of hijinks and encounters with characters from all walks of eighteenth-century English life; all the while Tom strives to prove his innocence and woo the lovely Sophia. This story is told mostly in the third person in the past tense, to wit: “Tom Jones was universally disliked.”

The extra-diegetic story, by contrast, concerns the unnamed narrator of this tale who makes direct addresses to the novel’s reader, to whom he confides, intimately, the various considerations, struggles, and joys that attend his relation of Tom’s story. The narrator’s story is told mostly in the first and second person and the present tense, thus: “Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress.”

I got transferred to a hospital room with its own vestibule and a view of the Santa Monica Mountains. I wondered whether I was being rewarded for being a good patient but also noticed that everyone coming in and out was in hazmat suits. I was actually now in isolation because one of the lesions in my lungs had suggested a possible tuberculosis infection. The resident who had told me about the MRI results came back to tell me they were all now rooting for TB. I spent the next few days in a vicious TB cycle: I could only prove I didn’t have TB by producing a sputum sample to be tested, but, since (as it turned out) I didn’t actually have TB, I couldn’t produce any sputum despite the valiant efforts of the Respiratory Collection Team, whom I repeatedly disappointed. (“I can see you’re giving it your best shot but that’s just saliva.”)

Generally speaking, critics view Tom Jones’s diegetic and extra-diegetic narratives as different beasts; there has not been much scholarship challenging Wayne Booth’s assessment in 1961 that “the ‘plot’ of our relationship with Fielding-as-narrator has no similarity to the story of Tom.” Against that backdrop, one of the aspects of Briggs’s novel to which I respond especially strongly as a critic of Fielding is its engagement with the idea that both parts of Tom Jones—diegetic and extra-diegetic—are about the role of interruption. As Briggs recognizes, Allworthy’s discovery of the infant Tom between his sheets is as much a dramatization of discontinuity as Fielding’s interspersed critical reflections on how exactly to tell the story—what to leave in and what to leave out.

“Hello, is this Sarah Kareem? This is Matt from the Hotel Indigo.”

“Oh! Ohhhhhhhh!” I suddenly realized that I forgot to cancel the hotel in England.

“Yeah, so we were just wondering when you were going to check in.” There was something slightly sarcastic in his tone, like “just wondering when her ladyship might find it convenient to stop by.”

Looking at the clock, I realized it was about 4:00 a.m. in York. I was clearly on the phone with the night receptionist. (I later found out that his official title is night auditor.)

“Oh wow … oh, right, oh God, I’m so sorry I had meant to cancel earlier. I’m actually not even in the country … something actually came up I mean, the thing is … ”

Here I giggled nervously, which did not add to my authority in this particular exchange, and I think, in retrospect, that it was partly because what I was about to say still felt so unbelievable to me that it sounded like a lie.

“The thing is, I actually had, I actually had a brain seizure.”

“Yep.” Matt said. 

Just, “yep,” period. 

No follow-up question, no exclamation of any kind. His refusal to be fazed was … deeply impressive. It was complete and unrelenting. There would be no performative empathy. No concessions made.

I recognized “yep” as a tacit and also somehow brazen acknowledgment that he did not believe a word I was saying and would not be pretending otherwise.

Matt cleared his throat, “So you won’t be checking in then, is what you’re saying?”

“Right, won’t be checking in. Unfortunately not. Not even in the country!” I repeated. I don’t know why I sounded so jolly. Possibly all the steroids.

I paused. “I had actually hoped that, because, because you see because I was in the hospital, I had passed on your number to some friends and family and I was hoping maybe one of them had been in touch to explain the situation and cancel the reservation?”

“Nope. We’ve not heard from anyone.” 

Matt sighed.

“Right, right, I see,” I said, hoping to buy time until I figured out some way to crack him, “I see how that creates a problem because I remember now it wasn’t refundable and also, I do see, you know, how, like ‘brain seizure’!” I exclaimed in a wacky “Emergency!” voice. “Like, ha! That sounds so fake, right, like the first thing I thought of was so over the top that instead of just saying I forgot to cancel I came up with the most dramatic-sounding last-minute medical emergency excuse possible. But I really did have a brain seizure. I know every time I say it it sounds more fake but I literally just got home from the hospital. And it’s actually probably because of cancer. A brain seizure related to cancer.”

Matt was listening silently and so I kept talking and finally had a good idea.

“So … you know what, how about, like if I had some documentation from the hospital that would prove the brain seizure, would that help?

“Yeah, actually, that would help a lot.” 

“It would? Oh great!” I was ecstatic. “Because I have documentation! If you just give me the number or email address to send it to, I could send it right away.”

This piece of writing started as a short form within a longer form—and an extra-diegetic intrusion within the diegesis of the talk I was scheduled to give in York. The narratologist Gérard Genette would classify a personal digression within a scholarly essay as an intimate peritext—that is, an appendage within another piece of writing.

The documentation to which I referred was a letter that the hospital social worker wrote. The need for such a letter had emerged while I was trying to cancel my plane tickets. An agent from Orbitz, the online travel agency and portal to the Underworld, informed me that, in order for British Airways to refund the tickets, I would need to fax a letter confirming my hospitalization and scheduled biopsy. And yet, upon receipt of said fax, the same Orbitz representative gravely communicated his deepest condolences on my diagnosis while conveying in no uncertain terms that British Airways would not, unfortunately, be able to refund my plane tickets without seeing the biopsy results and confirming that the prognosis was, in fact, terminal, in which case they would be more than happy to refund my tickets given the likelihood that I would not otherwise be able to use the travel credit they were otherwise pleased to issue me.

With this experience fresh in my mind, I hung up the phone with Matt assuming that the hotel refund was likewise a lost cause, either because I got the email address wrong—he had spelled it out rapidly using the NATO phonetic alphabet until I pleaded with him to spell it out using “actual letters”—or because my documentation wouldn’t be up to snuff. But the next day a brief email arrived in my inbox. There were no condolences, but there was a full refund.

I sometimes wonder if this diagnosis was the cosmos’s last-ditch effort to make me finish my second book. I am a chronic procrastinator, the kind of person who fantasizes, guiltily, that some temporarily-immobilizing-but-not-fatal-nor-disfiguring-and-ultimately-inconsequential accident might befall me and prevent me—legitimately, and this is key to the fantasy—from being able to meet the deadline/teach the class/give the talk. The seizure, which occurred in the left side of my brain responsible for my right arm movement, felt like a genie’s spiteful fulfillment of that half-serious wish for a disabling yet harmless accident.

The biopsy results confirmed that the lesions in my brain and other major organs were widely metastasized lung cancer, but since there was no red stamp reading “Terminal!” on the document I gave up trying to get my money back from British Airways.

How does one extend the short form? How does one make it longer? Is that even possible? To make a short form long?

When I ask my oncologist what my prognosis is, his deliberate, careful answer is, “It could be years.”

And then, after a pause, he adds, regretfully, apologetically, “It should be more … ”

In the moment I am too scared to press him further but after he leaves the examining room I find myself fretting about what “years” means in this context. “Years” must mean less than ten years because otherwise you would say decades, right? No, because decades, plural, means at least twenty years. And the singular—“a decade”—would be too precise in this context. So “years” means anything between two and nineteen years. Right?

Later, when I complain to a friend about the vagueness of “years,” he observes that we all have a limited number of years to live, the exact number of which we cannot know. I find this comforting.

Then he asks, “How old are you again?” and when I tell him I am fifty-one he swears under his breath.

Generally speaking, Barthes casts the short form and the long form as constitutively distinct: the problem to be investigated is how to get from one to the other—“how to pass from the Notation (of the Present) to the Novel, from a short, fragmented form (‘notes’) to a long, continuous form.” However, Barthes briefly engages the possibility of a third form—“something that seems impossible at first may turn out to be possible after all.” He envisages this third form as a long form made up of short forms, of fragments. Such a novel would be one in which “the caesura of the discontinuous is marked,” a kind of novel in which peritext would play an important role. Barthes doesn’t mention Fielding—indeed he invokes this third form as something of a quixotic fancy—“such novels probably exist—or some that come close … ”; nonetheless, I would submit, Tom Jones, in all its discontinuous continuity, is one incarnation of what this third form might look like.

I flip between my own situation and those of others—mostly people with less serious or less advanced cancers—as if my particular predicament can be understood as what Fielding calls a “kind of hairbreadth missings of happiness.”

Genette classifies the “digressive essays” that fill Fielding’s novels as a form of peritext and expresses reservations about the overall aesthetic effect of such intrusions, warning that “incorporating a digression into the text might well mean creating a lumpish or confusion-generating hernia.” As Genette’s metaphor suggests, there is something about the peritext that resembles the morphology of cancer: the digressive peritext, like the cancerous tumor, is a short form nested within a longer form, prone, in both cases, to the creation of both lumps and confusion.

When I tell colleagues I am going on medical leave, one person replies with a link to a scene from the 2003 movie The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, in which the character Aragorn gives a stirring speech to his troops before going into battle. The scene epitomizes the martial rhetoric that surrounds cancer: there is a war on cancer; those diagnosed, battle; medical professionals treat it aggressively. I understand why this particular genre resonates for some, but it overshadows the potential of other genres that might just as well—or better—speak to the experience of having cancer.

My own preferred genres are somewhat more niche. One of them might be termed disaffected workplace comedy, born of my sense that my body is run by a bunch of incompetents who have fallen down on the job. They were all on their phones, the fuckers, when the cancer started to spread. And then, once it metastasized, it was, “Oh shit, guys, now it’s everywhere,” and then someone emailed management and management said this would be more appropriately communicated as a memo and there was a Doodle poll to find a good time to Zoom to draft the memo and after the memo was drafted and circulated by email and sent to management and management confirmed receipt I had a brain seizure.

The seizure had left me partially paralyzed, and while in the hospital, I used voice recognition tools to compose texts and emails, a medium to which I struggled to adapt (“new paragraph no I want to do a new paragraph”). After the mobility in the right side of my body returned, I was surprised to discover that the prospect of writing felt downright luxurious: I wanted, viscerally—and somewhat to my own incredulity—to carry on with “Carrying on in Tom Jones.” What I experienced was the obverse of that impulse to procrastinate: now that there were obstacles to writing, I wanted to write. At first, it felt exhilarating, even thrilling, to return to my essay, confirmation that I was still me, post-seizure, post-diagnosis. Except that I wasn’t, exactly. And that change began showing up on the page, increasingly lumpish.

My oncologist is explaining how the radiation I will get on my brain will be targeted, not general.

Of the latter he says, “After you’ve been doing this a while you do see some people who experience cognitive effects.”

He pauses. “And you remember those individuals,” he adds, meaningfully.

“And you feel bad about it,” he adds even more meaningfully. 

“So they’re not memorable in the sense that the radiation turns them into super geniuses,” I extrapolate, just to make sure.

The writer’s fantasy, Barthes suggests, is of what he calls a “smooth time,” a time that contains “no ‘things to do’ to interrupt the thing to be done … the image that might approach this Smooth Time would be that of Drifting.” Since the publication of Tom Jones in 1749, many of its readers have turned to this same metaphor to explain the experience of reading it. In 1889, for example, Scottish critic and editor Andrew Lang characterizes the experience of reading Fielding as follows: “One seems to be carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one’s self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water.”

In some ways I am perfectly placed, at the moment, to experience a version of this “smooth time.” I am on medical leave and, as such, freed from many of the obstacles Barthes identifies as impediments to writing under the general heading of “administration.” There are other obstacles, of course: endless phone calls with various health insurance-related entities, all of which seem to have dystopia-inspired names (Accolade; Optum; Lumicera; Navitus); chemotherapy; thoughts of impending death. And there’s the rub: my smooth drifting along is accompanied by the looming sense that around one of these bends there is a vertical drop with churning waters below; I’m not sure when, but I know it is coming.

A young woman who introduces herself as Natalie, a musical volunteer, knocks on the door of my hospital room and asks if I would like to hear some music or sing a song.

I’m slightly taken aback but game. “Oh, sure what do you have?”

“Anything,” she says. “What genres of music do you like?” she asks.

I consider. “Maybe something pop like Dua Lipa or Madonna or Britney Spears?”

We settle on “…Baby One More Time,” although Natalie expresses some qualms because she claims not to know it, and I assume this is modesty on her part until the song starts and I realize, Oh, she really doesn’t know this song because she was born a decade after it came out. That means that I have to carry the song, which is unfortunate, because I am not a very good singer.

About a third of the way through the song, the attending oncologist making his rounds enters the room with a resident. A friend who is visiting me and thus bearing witness reports afterward that the oncologist actually makes the horizontal fingers-across-the-throat abort signal to Natalie when he walks in. I am too absorbed in the lyrics on Natalie’s phone to notice his signal and, if Natalie notices, she is torn between deference to the doctor and to me as I warble on. I am also torn—between the embarrassment of continuing to sing (poorly) in front of the palpably irritated oncologist and the mortified resident (both of whom stand silently listening at the foot of my bed, clipboards in hand) and my commitment to Natalie, to the song, to Britney. The conflict is ultimately resolved by the thought, I know he’s busy but he can wait a minute can’t he? We’ve started and, by God, we are going to finish.

This is when I have the realization, in real time, that this is actually quite a long song. We are only now arriving at the bridge, which is one of the hardest parts.

I must conFESS that my loneliNESS is killin’ me NOWWAHHOWAAOW—Don’t you know. I. Still. Believe. That you will be HERE, and give me a SAAAAAAAIGHYIIGHN.

There’s only about forty-five seconds to go after that but time seems to have slowed down. Natalie and I are stuck in an endless loop in which we travel ever back to our high-pitched, squeaky, parenthetical insistence that we still believe.

The problem Barthes identifies as characterizing the time before Destiny intervenes to effect a Vita Nova is that “the administration of life” comes to “absorb the time of life itself.” A version of this problem also besets my life now; not—or not mostly—the administration of life to which Barthes refers—correspondence, paperwork, chairing committees—but rather the treatment I receive every three weeks that is described as “maintenance chemotherapy,” a different kind of “administration of life” that is also a way of living “just to carry on living,” that manages only “to maintain a life.” My oncologist explains that after I get the chemo, any fatigue or nausea will only last for ten days or so. But I’m having the chemo every three weeks. So that’s ten days of feeling shitty, eleven days of feeling normal, and on, and on for the rest of my life, like Persephone on fast-forward. Somewhere in there, “what has to be wrenched from life” in order to write, Barthes counsels, “is the remainder, the surplus, the luxury.”

A couple of weeks ago, I nearly bring myself to tears contemplating the tube of Redken Acidic Bonding Concentrate Hair Mask on the windowsill next to my shower.

Back in August, when I purchased it, the specialness already conferred by its relative expensiveness was enhanced upon arrival by the tininess of the tube, its nozzle capable of dispensing only the daintiest pile of squiggles into my palm. I used it sparingly, both because it was no ordinary conditioner but rather a mask to be applied ahead of occasions deserving of a more involved toilette; and also because its tininess rendered it scarce. Thus, it is, that, improbably, the tiny tube still sits on the windowsill next to the shower in January 2026. When I pick it up, the tube’s lightness suggests it contains barely enough for one more application. But now I can’t bear to finish it. It is a relic of an earlier time in which I had the luxury of faffing around on the internet researching which products might endow me with glossier locks. A few short weeks later I am Googling “thing wear round neck in case seizure.” I do still have hair to which I could apply the mask: the kind of chemotherapy I’ve been having does not result in hair loss, although, as a result of the brain radiation I have a stark bare horizontal strip across the top of my skull, like one of those “well-loved” dolls you find in every daycare toy box that has a bald patch on its head exposing neatly dotted rows of seams.

Given the extraordinarily slow pace of academic publishing, receiving a prognosis indicating a drastically foreshortened life span almost necessitates “the discovery of a new writing practice” that Barthes envisages.

Walking to the post office I ward off gloom by putting on a playlist of songs I made for a dance party last year only to discover that every song I haven’t listened to since my diagnosis is now terribly poignant. I skip the ones I know will make me cry, like Bowie’s “Modern Love.” But it turns out that no song is invulnerable to my maudlin ear.

The last time I listened to this I was dancing around my living room, I think ruefully when “Get Low” by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz featuring Ying Yang Twins comes on.

I can’t even get low anymore, I think further, although, to be fair, that is not, strictly speaking, because of cancer. In fact, it was also true last year and probably actually has been true for lo, these many years.

But the interruption that instigates a new writing practice, a Vita Nova, also has casualties. In his invocation, one of the things Fielding wants the muse to assure him is that his children, “the prattling babes, whose innocent play hath often been interrupted by my labours, may one time be amply rewarded for them.” A friend who read a draft of this essay noted its preoccupation with strangers—whether the dead strangers I know through books or the living strangers with whom this illness has brought me into contact. One reason for that, I think, is that the illness itself feels like an intimacy with a stranger. But also, maybe, it’s too painful to dwell both on the profundity with which my loved ones’—and especially my children’s—lives have been interrupted and on the necessity that they carry on living.

Shortly after being discharged from hospital the first time and after receiving my diagnosis, my partner and I walk to get takeout from a new Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood. (I say “partner” but he was only my boyfriend when I was admitted to the ER; in part because of hospital policies about designated visitors, in part because of commitment forged in crisis, he was my partner by the time I was discharged.) After we pick up the food and start walking back, I have to stop on 23rd street between Santa Monica and Arizona, doubled over on the sidewalk, suddenly overcome by a vertiginous, sickening feeling that isn’t just fear but also a kind of epistemological panic about how to think about the rest of my life.

What I remember now is that I was crying, hard, and that the panic had to do with a sense of being pulled between accepting the end and carrying on. On the one hand, it felt necessary—for myself and everybody I love—to be clear-eyed about this diagnosis and what it means. On the other hand, it also felt necessary—for myself and everybody I love—to throw myself into living as well as possible for as long as I possibly could.

I remember expressing the hope, while having this experience, that I would figure out a way of reconciling an acknowledgement of life’s finitude with the presumption of life’s continuity necessary to day-to-day life. But, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that all one can do is live in a way that dwells in rather than attempts to solve this contradiction. This sense of living in rather than resolving contradiction is an attitude embodied in the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, with whom, as all my friends and family know, I have an especially strong and long-standing parasocial relationship. Hume is preoccupied with the elaborate fictions we concoct to paper over the discrepancies between the intuitions of our imagination and the insights produced by philosophizing. These discrepancies often take the form of a conflict between imagination’s preference for carrying on and skepticism’s tendency to expose the interrupted nature of existence. “The imagination,” Hume writes, “when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object fails it.” Hume’s point is not that we ought to abandon our imagination’s intuitions but simply to observe that, in cases where the imagination and philosophical reasoning come into conflict, “we endeavour to set ourselves at ease as much as possible,” even if that means adhering at once to “two contrary principles.” Put another way, the only way we can live is to commit to “the fiction of a continu’d existence” even as another part of ourselves sees that fiction for exactly what it is. We don’t choose between an interrupted existence and one that carries on; we commit, fully, to both.

   

   

   

   

Acknowledgements

For their help with earlier drafts of this essay, I’d like to thank Emily Hodgson Anderson, Roy Kareem, Crystal Lake, Brad Pasanek, and Cass Turner, with special thanks to Justin Torres.