Stanley Cavell
Excerpts from Memory
The catheterization of my heart will no longer be postponed. My cardiologist announces that he has lost confidence in his understanding of my condition, so far based on reports of what I surmise as symptoms of angina and of the noninvasive monitoring allowed by X-rays and by the angiograms produced in stress tests. We must actually look at what is going on inside the heart.
Even if I had not eight years ago officially retired from teaching, summer months for teachers are not ones in which routine obligations can serve to shape the days in which life is suspended until the hospital date for the procedure is settled and the time comes to pack a bag for an overnight stay. Apart from learning of the risks in the procedure's actual performance, there are the frightening statistics (frightening even when reasonably favorable) that doctors are obliged to convey to you, not alone of problems incurred in or by the procedure itself, but those of its possible outcomes. In the instance of catheterization the possible outcomes are mainly three: one, that no further surgical intervention is necessary, so that either a change of diagnosis or of medication is in order; two, that instruments roughly of the sort involved in catheterization can be (re)inserted to open and to repair, where necessary, arterial blockage; three, that the blockage is severe enough, or located in such a way, that bypass surgery is required. (The possibility that nothing can be done was not voiced.) In a previous such period of awaiting surgery, a dozen years ago, I controlled or harnessed my anxiety by reading. I had found that I resisted the efforts of a novel to attract me from my world; I needed the absorption of labor rather than that of narrative. I discovered that reading a book by Vladimir Jankélévitch on the music of Debussy that I had discovered in Paris and brought back a few months earlier, meaning to read it at once (I was planning a set of three lectures, in the last of which the Debussy-Maeterlinck Pelléas and Mélisande would play a pivotal role), effectively concentrated my attention, partly because of the beauty of the musical illustrations along with the very effort it required for my rusty musicianship to imagine the sounds of the illustrations unfamiliar to me that Jankélévitch includes in his text, partly because of the specificity and fascination of his words, and partly also because I was kept busy consulting a French dictionary for the evidently endless words in French that name, for example, the effects of sunlight and of clouds on moving water.
STANLEY CAVELL is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Emeritus at Harvard University. He has recently completed two books—Cities of Words and Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow—and a draft of a book of autobiographical reflection of which the fragment that appears here is the opening half of the first and longest of eight sections.
