It dawned on me that my own kind of smarts had no intrinsic value, the “skill” of analyzing Salinger suddenly appearing puny when compared with the capacities of the young nurse who took out my staples and attached my catheter. I learned that there was really such a thing as a vocation, and that some people willed theirs into being, not just by studying medicine and practicing it but also by sitting at bedsides and joking with relatives
The fall brought me no kudos and no respect, but it did cure me of the habit of writing funeral speeches. I’d run right through the rye to the cliff’s edge and looked over, and in the process discovered a newfound appreciation for rye. I took my teen-age misery back to my fetid armchair, opened a book, retreated.
Does this social network genuinely make me feel happy and connected to others? Or did some unseen commercial entity decide all that for me? I don’t think teen-age misery is so very different from what it used to be, but I do think its scope of operation is so much larger and the space for respite vanishingly small. But I would think that: I’m forty-eight.
