Sometimes the hospital can make one feel a bit melancholy and detached from things that go on beyond the bed, the machines, the folding walls. There is plenty to find interesting, funny and hopeful. But sometimes melancholy and detachment can be indulged for a little while. Here is a passage that I find to be perhaps one of the most distilled expressions of those feelings. I get by with a little help from my Russian friend, Fyodor, from White Nights:
"For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And meanwhile your soul is all the time craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him! Do you realize, Nastenka, how far things have gone with me? Do you know that I’m forced now to celebrate the anniversary of my own sensations, the anniversary of that which was once so dear to me, but which never really existed? For I keep this anniversary in memory of those empty, foolish dreams! I keep it because even those foolish dreams are no longer there, because I have nothing left with which to replace them, for even dreams, Nastenka, have to be replaced by something!"
A Seattle summer night sky can be cloudless and glowing with the late sunset. I choose to replace this sanitized bedsheet with the white satin far above me, to wrap myself in, though I can't see it right now. That sky really exists, and will again, and I need not long for it as if it were only a dream.
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