We Learn Nothing

by Tim Kreider

  Time moves differently in hospitals—both slower and faster. The minutes stand still, but the hours evaporate. The day is long and structureless, measured only by the taking of vital signs, the changing of IV bags, medication schedules, occasional tests, mealtimes, trips to the bathroom, walks in the corridor. Once a day an actual doctor appears for about four minutes, and what she says during this time can either leave you and your family in terrified confusion or so reassured and grateful that you want to write her a thank-you note she’ll have framed. You cadge six-ounce cans of ginger ale from the nurses’ station. You no longer need to look at the menu in the diner across the street. You substitute meat loaf for bacon with your eggs. Why not? Breakfast and lunch are diurnal conventions that no longer apply to you. Sometimes you run errands back home for a cell phone or extra clothes. Eventually you look at your watch and realize visiting hours are almost over, and feel relieved, and then guilty.

  My mother had been moved out of the ICU into a “step-down” unit by the time I arrived. Mom, who’d taught nursing for twenty years, was, like most medical professionals, a difficult patient—fretting about potential complications, second-guessing her doctors, tying to micromanage her treatment. My sister could gauge her condition from reading signs like her heart rate, temperature, and white cell count, but I had to gauge it from trying to read my sister. When, on the second day, Mom’s fever broke, and everybody started using the phrase “turned the corner,” I understood that she was going to live. After another day or two my sister went back to her job and family in Boston, while I would stay on with Mom for a few weeks while she recuperated. It was one of those occasions when you have to forget about the month you had planned out in your datebook and accept that what you’re going to be doing instead is mostly nothing.

  Hospital stays are one of the few times in adulthood when we have an excuse to drop all the busywork that normally preoccupies us and go to be with the people we love. You simply spend time with them, without any social occasion for it—a wedding or anniversary, dinner or the theater. You just sit there in the same room, making small talk or reading, offering the dumb comfort of your presence. You are literally There for them. When you’re a kid, this is one of the dullest, most dehumanizing things you’re forced to do—being dressed up in a navy blazer or a sweater vest and dragged to family reunions to be fawned over like a photo in an album, your physical presence all that’s required of you. But if you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone. And it isn’t only selfless. At the beginning of my stay, my friend Lauren told me over the phone, “I know this seems like a drag, but someday, I promise you, you will look back and be grateful that you had this time with your mother.”

  Since my childhood my mother’s and my love for one another has been refracted through the medium of art. I think it was easier for her to infer what might be going on in my head by reading over my shoulder than by asking me. She kept an eye on the Warner Bros. cartoons I watched on Saturday mornings and found them almost as funny as I did. She was especially fond of that lothario Pepé Le Pew, admiring his dauntless confidence (one of the same qualities, come to think of it, that must have first attracted her to my father, who in college was also something of a dandy). We made a point of watching the annual airings of movies like Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, and the Pink Panther films together (Mom’s favorite line from Blazing Saddles was “Hey, where’s de white women at?!”). When I was fifteen, more inscrutable than ever, she noticed me cracking up over a copy of Catcher in the Rye, which she hadn’t been under the impression was meant to be a funny book. She surreptitiously read it herself to gauge my emotional health and discovered, to her relief, that it was. After that, throughout my teen years, we traded book recommendations, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a subtler comedy than Return of the Pink Panther but not entirely dissimilar; there are jokes about sodomy and halitosis in Pale Fire, and its fictitious annotator, Charles Kinbote, is no less clueless or deluded of his own greatness than Messrs. Clouseau and Le Pew.

  Unfortunately all the books I’d packed with me for this trip were the sorts of enduringly unenjoyable classics you assign yourself out of literary guilt. My reasoning had been that a long hospital stay might have the same effect as grad school; deprived of any more entertaining alternatives, I would be driven into a state of such consciousness-altering boredom that Dostoyevsky would be fun. But half a chapter of Moby-Dick made Mom sleepy, and she ixnayed Crime and Punishment after the author’s introduction. “Isn’t that about an old lady getting hit with an axe?” she asked. “It sounds kind of depressing.”

  Tristram Shandy turned out to be ideal sickroom reading. Reading Sterne’s mock-pompous prose aloud, my voice found an ambling cadence, and, in a kind of benign possession, assumed what I imagined was Sterne’s arch, deadpan tone. Gradually we acclimated to the pace of a world with less to do, when reading aloud from the latest installment might be an evening’s entertainment. To call Tristram Shandy “slow” would be missing the point, like calling The Master and Margarita implausible or Huck Finn a little broad. Tristram Shandy isn’t slow so much as static, occasionally retrograde. Laurence Sterne seems to take a perverse, almost sadistic pleasure in thwarting our need for narrative progress. His titular hero, whose history the novel ostensibly is, is not even born until well into Book (not chapter, Book) III. At one point his uncle Toby starts to tap ash from his pipe and, what with various digressions and flashbacks, doesn’t finish tapping it out until eleven chapters later. The Story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles has to be begun no fewer than five times, each time being interrupted by Toby’s enthusiastic suggestions and refinements.2 Come to think of it, Tristram’s life begins with a false start—or, rather, doesn’t, quite: the Shandys set off for London to give birth in civilized surroundings, per a prenuptial agreement, only to be told it was a false alarm, and head back home again.

  Every time we came to one of these false starts, dead ends, or circuitous detours that brought us back where we’d started, my mother would give Sterne, via me, the same kind of look she used to give my father when he got to the dénouement of one of the long, increasingly improbable stories he was fond of telling—a kind of affectionate disgust, amused despite herself, understanding very well that her exasperation was itself the punch line. Sterne, like my dad, knew how to string an audience along; he constantly drops little hints of hot gossip to come, like the scandal of Aunt Dinah and the coachman, or the story of Uncle Toby’s amours. When, in the very last volume of the book, we finally arrive at the long-promised wooing of the Widow Wadman, it commences with three chapters: one blank, one a transcription of the march “Lillebullero” (which Toby is wont to whistle in times of stress), and one that begins (if you’ll permit me to quote at length):

  Eventually Mom and I came to regard Sterne’s suspenseful teasers at the end of each volume, such as “The reader will be content to wait for a full explanation of these matters till the next year,—when a series of things will be laid open which he little expects,”3 with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Interpolations like “But this by the bye” were so self-evidently redundant they could not be other than jokes. By this point we knew it was pretty much all by the bye.

  “One has to surrender unconditionally to Sterne’s caprices” is Nietzsche’s advice, “—always in the expectation, however, that one will not regret doing so.”4 Once we’d accepted that nothing was ever going to happen in Tristram Shandy, our expectation that anything ought to have started to seem stodgy and humorless. It turned out to be very much in the tradition of the silly plotless films Mom and I had always enjoyed—or, rather, they turn out to have been in its. Tristram Shandy flouts its obligations as a novel in the same way that Blazing Saddles and Airplane! mock the whole idea of a movie. Sterne affects to lament his resolute lack of progress: “Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?” he sighs
after Walter Shandy and his brother Toby have in fact spent a whole chapter getting down one flight. “For we are got no farther yet than to the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom and for aught I know, there may be as many chapters as steps.”5 In the next chapter, Walter takes a single step down the next staircase, which almost makes you want to cheer, but he hesitates there and starts another conversation—and then, agonizingly, he actually backtracks, with-drawing his foot from the stair and walking all the way back across the landing to lean against the wall. You can’t help but laugh at this, even if it’s with that grudging admiration that says: Ahh, you bastard. But the conversation that Walter and Toby have on the landing, about women and pregnancy, is one of my favorites in the book. It’s as if Sterne were saying, Now wasn’t that worth waiting for? And you were in such a rush. He never does get them off the staircase; in the end, he leaves it up to the reader and even inquires, all innocent curiosity, how you managed to do it.

  A physical therapist showed me how to help my mother climb stairs—a slow, laborious, two-feet-per-step procedure, painstaking as rock climbing. I had to remain a step below her, holding her elbow, ready to catch her in case she fell. Mom had recovered sufficiently to be moved to a hospital with a physical therapy program, where she would regain enough mobility to live independently again. She described herself as “something of a star” in physical therapy. “Apparently they don’t see a whole lot of people who’re in as good shape as I am,” she said. The therapist also demonstrated how to help Mom get in and out of cars, a meticulous swiveling operation that kept her center of gravity directly over her feet. She showed us strategies for getting things out of the fridge or down off shelves, and suggested rearrangements of furniture for maximum convenience and economy of motion. We were like astronauts training for zero-g underwater: the simplest tasks had to be thought out, planned, and orchestrated, performed in slow motion and taken (literally) step by step.

  I’m an impatient person. I take stairs two at a time; I can’t stand getting trapped behind a phalanx of schoolkids or tourists on the sidewalk; a computer taking seven seconds to perform some operation is maddening to me. I hate all the boring in-between parts of life. Seeing my mother barely able to rise from a sitting to a standing position unaided, or shuffling slowly from the bed to the bathroom, made me furious for reasons I could not understand. Watching her tug feebly at some plastic packaging, I wanted to rip it open for her; waiting as she groped for a word, I had to restrain myself from yelling it. Since middle age Mom’s taken longer and longer to retrieve proper nouns—the first words we learn and, she advises me, the first to go—but now the waits were getting excruciating. She and I had a history of conversations in which she would switch topics without any sort of signaling segue, and we would continue talking, unbeknownst to us, about two different things, the dialogue becoming increasingly Ionescan until we’d stop and stare at each other in bafflement and have to backtrack to the point where we’d diverged. The most famous of these had conflated the repair of my car with the completion of the Chief Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, yielding what seemed to both of us like really unreasonable time and cost estimates. (It was not unlike the misunderstanding occasioned by Uncle Toby’s shocking offer to show Mrs. Wadman “the very place” where he received his war wound, which is resolved only when he produces a map.) But when we had another of these exchanges in the hospital, I wasn’t so amused. I probably don’t have to tell you that getting mad at your own mother for being old and sick does not make you feel like a model son or exemplary human being. Getting irritated at my own irritability did not improve matters. It made me only a little more forgiving of myself to understand that my anger was mostly fear.

  I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, thereby missing out on the very thing we’re so scared of losing. Sterne’s stairway is a perfect metaphor for all those tedious interstitial moments we can’t wait to get through that make up most of our lives; we don’t even think of stairways as places in themselves, only as a means to get somewhere else. I remember children’s stories about kids who were granted the power to effectively fast-forward their lives, skipping all the homework and chores to get right to the good parts—driver’s license, girlfriend, being a grown-up. Inevitably, they ripped through their whole lives in no time and found themselves suddenly old, looking back on a blank, elided lifetime without even memories to show for it. We’re all so eager, both in life and in art, to get past this bullshit to the next Good Part up ahead. Believe it or not, Sterne’s telling us, this bullshit is the good part. I know this seems like a drag, but I promise you, someday you will be grateful you had this time with your mother. All those digressions were the story. With his tortuous nonplot he’s trying to tease us out of our insatiable impatience for narrative, our silly urgency to know What Next. It occurs to me now that the line Harold was so fond of quoting, Mrs. Shandy’s question to her husband that interrupts his ejaculation, dooming the homunculus Tristram to a life of misfortune—“Pray, my Dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”—is an intrusion of time and obligation into what should’ve been pure, unself-conscious pleasure in the moment. In effect, Sterne’s saying, Relax. What’s your hurry? We’ll get there soon enough—all too soon, in fact. And once we arrive, the fun will be over. So why not enjoy the company? He knows that all journeys, and all stories, have the same ending, at a place nobody wants to go.

  One reason my mother was so slow to recover her mobility was that she suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Its onset was late and her symptoms were still minor—the most noticeable one was a tremor in her left hand if she missed her medication—plus Mom’s official policy is 100 percent positivity in regard to all things, so around her kids, at least, she tended to minimize her diagnosis, saying she didn’t want us worrying about her. All of which makes it easy to ignore the fact that the condition is progressive and incurable. During her sepsis she had also suffered what physicians call “an insult to the brain”—in this case a shortage of oxygen—so I could no longer be sure what was just Mom and what might be cognitive deficits. Insult—it’s an apt description for all the indignities of age and infirmity. All the equipment she was being taught to use—walkers and rails and plastic shower stools—seemed humiliating and infantile to me, like being confined to cribs and high chairs all over again at the other end of life. Here I was reading aloud to the woman who used to read The Snowy Day and Fantastic Four comics to me.

  Tristram Shandy is such a lighthearted book that it’s easy to forget it was written by a man who’d known he was terminally ill since his twenties. From time to time he gripes in asides about his “vile cough,” but he never names the dreaded disease, tuberculosis. His professed philosophy of “Shandyism” is a defiant frivolity that declines to take the world as seriously as it tries to insist upon. In the same way that he discreetly elides the catastrophe of Uncle Toby’s courtship with censorious asterisks and alludes to some heartbreak with one “Jenny” through dark apophasis, he always averts his eye from death, as when he declines to describe a soldier’s last moments: “ . . . shall I go on?—No.”6 His one-step-forward-eleven-steps-back structure is a stalling tactic; all that defiant idling is a little passive-aggressive fun at Death’s expense. Look at the diagrams he’s drawn of his previous chapters’ chronologies, like parodies of the Aristotelian dramaturgical ramp: leapfrogs, corkscrews, and French curls, jagged flashbacks, drooping detours, and long, meandering ox-bows, the author dragging his feet in his reluctance to arrive at tedious, predictable Point B. Four volumes into his life story he pauses to take stock of his progress and realizes that he’s gotten only as far as Day One of his life, and that it’s taken him a year to write, so that another 36
5 days to write about have piled up in the meantime. “It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—and consequently the more your worships will have to read.”7 This idea that as long as he lives he’ll have even more to write has an illogical corollary: as long as he keeps writing, he won’t die.8 With all his evasions and deferments, by constantly adding on more stairs and days, Sterne’s trying to turn time’s arrow into Zeno’s.9

  At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own. A number of the old family stories Mom told me in the hospital suggested a weird streak of histrionic aggression toward fruit: a great-grandfather chopping down his whole orchard after failing to sell any apples at market, Uncle Harvey defiantly eating an entire bag of oranges at the Canada/U.S. border rather than allow them to be confiscated. She told me that her own mother had subscribed to a then-prevalent philosophy of childrearing consisting of two rules: 1) treat all your children equally and 2) raise the first one right so she can help you raise the rest of them. It seemed never to occur to her that these two rules were in any conflict. She appointed her oldest daughter, Helga, as her lieutenant and charged her with the responsibility of overseeing the three younger siblings, who, needless to say, rebelled, calling Helga “the Sarge,” which made the Sarge cry. When Helga was born, my grandmother said she wouldn’t take a million dollars for this baby, and wouldn’t give a nickel for any other. “And then I had three nickel babies,” she’d laugh. She used to call my mother a pill. “Lydia is a pill,” she would tell people, as if explaining a lisp or a lazy eye. Mom told me that when she met my father, a sharp-dressed kid who used idiosyncratic slang that may well have been of his own invention, like Okey-dinah and Eat the wall, “he was the first person who made me feel like I was something.” She even told me, to my surprise, what his last words to her had been: * * * * * * * * * *.