February Light: A Love Letter to the Seasons During a Year of Cancer and Recovery

National Review, Oct 27, 1997 by Anthony Daniels

Stuttering is more properly a disability than an illness, though the author of the memoir of that title believes it is caused by a physical cerebral condition too subtle to be diagnosable by the tools that are currently available to neurologists. Marty Jezer strikes me as a thoroughly decent man, of the kind who apologizes to you when you stand on his toes. He is brave, too, inasmuch as he became a political activist despite his truly appalling stutter. His memoir unintentionally records the steady decline in the moral seriousness of American liberalism: from civil rights through the Vietnam War to political correctness.

He describes very well the social difficulties and embarrassments that stutterers face, but this is a subject that perhaps is better suited to an article or an essay than to an entire book. As Voltaire so wisely remarked, the secret of being a bore is to tell everything. And unfortunately Mr. Jezer goes in for that most politically correct of all psychological concepts, self-esteem. "I love myself," he writes, "and accept my stuttering, but I'll never learn . . . to love my stuttering." This is the Oprah Winfrey school of self-examination, simultaneously shallow and destructive. Anybody who can say that he loves himself, or alternatively that he doesn't love himself, is an irredeemably lost soul.

The Seeing Glass is an account of temporary blindness, whose author captures very graphically the terror of fast-disappearing sight due to optic neuritis of uncertain cause. But Jacqueline Germane's account takes an insufficient number of pages to make a book, and therefore she adds in her memories of her autistic brother, sadly killed in a road accident when he was only 31 years old. But her blindness is sufficiently well conveyed to the reader that he shares in her joy at the recovery of her sight.

Despite moving moments in these books, the question still arises as to why this literary genre should have become so popular in the last few years. I have on my shelves scores of such memoirs of illness, sent to me for review, and the number seems to be rising geometrically. It is all most curious.

Perhaps it is because, for the first time in human history, there are large numbers of people alive who have never experienced serious illness. In our assumption of good health, we have forgotten the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. For the sufferers themselves, the experience is so totally unexpected that they feel impelled to write about it; while for readers, the land of illness is as exotic as foreign countries were before the era of the jumbo jet and mass tourism, which have converted everywhere into a neighborhood of everywhere else. Memoirs of illness are thus the modern equivalent of travel literature. Disease is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

There is another reason for our modern obsession with health and deviations therefrom. Despite our longevity, unparalleled in history, we are in a state of existential funk. We are no longer convinced, as our forefathers were, that life has a transcendent meaning or purpose. In these somewhat alarming circumstances, we believe that our present life is all we have, and that its marginal prolongation is the best that we can hope for. We read about health, disease, and death as eagerly and greedily as the pathological gambler reads about systems of betting in roulette or the form of horses. We are looking for auguries of immortality.