⒈ Summary Of John Jeremiah Sullivans Essay Feet In Smoke
He looked down into his palm, where the fret and string Summary Of John Jeremiah Sullivans Essay Feet In Smoke burned a deep, red cross into his The Importance Of Drinking Water In Michigan, and said, "Hey, it'd be stigmata if there weren't all those ants crawling in it. How to Tame a Wild Tongue. My brother Essay On Distance To School a nightmare of tubes and wires, dark machines silently measuring every internal event, a pump filling and emptying his useless lungs. Schubert lived in the Romantic period and wrote almost seven hundred songs throughout his life including symphonies, Lieder, string quartets and various religious works. This is why the other patients. I didn't touch him; I just let him cry.
John Jeremiah Sullivan »Pulphead« (Lesung)
I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. The man overseeing this vigil was a luthier named Roehm whose house stood back in the woods on the edge of the plateau. He was about six and a half feet tall with floppy bangs and a deep, grizzled mustache.
He wore huge glasses. I believe I have never seen a person more tense than Roehm was during those few days. On some level he must have resented the haste. Lytle had lain dying for weeks; he endured a series of disorienting pin strokes. By the end they were giving him less water than morphine. Later, as those fevers drew together into what seemed an unbearable clarity, like a blue flame behind the eyes, the phrase came to mean what one would assume. He had a deathbed, in other words. Yet although his family and friends had known for years about his wish to lie in cedar, which required that a coffin be custom made, no one had so much as played with the question of who in those mountains could do such a thing or how much time the job would take.
All of his peers and enemies were dead. I have my own list here in front of me. There's no best place to begin. I'll just transcribe a few things:. Squeezed my hand late on the night of the 23rd. Whispered, "That's the human experience. While eating lunch on the 24th, suddenly became convinced that I was impersonating his brother. Demanded to see my ID. Asked me, "Why would you want to impersonate John? No wonder you can get away with it.
On the day of the 25th, stood up from his lunch, despite my attempts to restrain him, spilling the contents of his tray everywhere. Glanced at my hands, tight around his shoulders, and said, "I am not … repulsed … by man-to-man love. But I'm not into it. Evening of the 25th. Gazing at own toes at end of bed, remarked, "That'd make a nice picture: Feet in Smoke. Day of the 26th. Referred to heart monitor as "a solid, congealed bag of nutrients. Night of the 26th. Tried to punch me with all his strength while I worked with Dad and Uncle John to restrain him in his bed, swinging and missing me by less than an inch.
The IV tubes were tearing loose from his arms. His eyes were terrified, helpless. I think he took us for fascist goons. Evening of the 27th. Unexpectedly jumped up from his chair, a perplexed expression on his face, and ran to the wall. Rubbed palms along a small area of the wall, like a blind man. Noticed a large nurse walking away from us down the hall. The experience went from tragedy to tragicomedy to outright farce on a sliding continuum, so it's hard to pinpoint just when one let onto another.
He was the most delightful drunk you'd ever met—I had to follow him around the hospital like a sidekick to make sure he didn't fall, because he couldn't stop moving, couldn't concentrate on anything for longer than a second. He became a holy fool. He looked down into his palm, where the fret and string had burned a deep, red cross into his skin, and said, "Hey, it'd be stigmata if there weren't all those ants crawling in it. Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he'd ever be normal again, said, "Maybe, but wouldn't it be wonderful just to have him like this?
I can't imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother's brain while it reconstructed reality. Like a lot of people, I'd always assumed, in a sort of cut-rate Hobbesian way, that the center of the brain, if you could ever find it, would inevitably be a pretty dark place, that whatever is good or beautiful about being human is a result of our struggles against everything innate, against physical nature. My brother changed my mind about all that. Here was a consciousness reduced to its matter, to a ball of crackling synapses—words that he knew how to use but couldn't connect to the right things; strange new objects for which he had to invent names; unfamiliar people who approached and receded like energy fields—and it was a good place to be, you might even say a poetic place.
He had touched death, or death had touched him, but he seemed to find life no less interesting for having done so. Late afternoon of April The window slats casting bars of shadow all over his room in the ICU. I had asked my mom and dad if they'd mind giving me a moment alone with him, since I still wasn't sure he knew quite who I was. I did know he wasn't aware of being inside a hospital; his most recent idea was that we were all back at my grandparents' house having a party, and at one point he slipped loose and went to the nurses' station to find out whether his tux was ready. Now we were sitting there in his room. Neither of us was speaking. Worth was jabbing a fork into his Jell-O, and I was just watching, waiting to see what would come out.
Earlier that morning, he'd been scared by the presence of so many "strangers," and I didn't want to upset him any more. Things went on in silence like this for maybe five minutes. Very quietly, he began to weep, his shoulders heaving with the force of emotion. I didn't touch him; I just let him cry. A minute went by. I asked him, "Worth, why are you crying?
Certain that I'd heard him right, I asked him again anyway. He repeated it in the same flat tone: "I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead. How could he know he'd been dead, when he didn't even know we were in a hospital, or that anything unusual had happened to him? Had a sudden clarity overtaken him? He looked up. The tears were gone. He seemed calm and serious. Only, when Huck pulled back his hood, he was an old man … like, ninety years old or something. My brother put his face in his hands and cried a little more. Then he seemed to forget all about it. According to my notes, the next words out of his mouth were, "Check this out—I've got the Andrews Sisters in my milkshake.
We've never spoken of it since. It's hard to talk to my brother about anything related to his accident. He has a monthlong tape erasure in his memory that starts the second he put his lips to that microphone. He doesn't remember the shock, the ambulance, having died, coming back to life. Even when it was time for him to leave the hospital, he had managed only to piece together that he was late for a concert somewhere, and my last memory of him from that period is his leisurely wave when I told him I had to go back to school. When our family gets together, the subject of his accident naturally bobs up, but he just looks at us with a kind of suspicion. It's a story about someone else, a story he thinks we might be fudging just a bit. And after all, he made a complete recovery—it's almost hard for anyone to believe he was ever so badly hurt.
When I can't sleep I still sometimes will try to decipher that vision. My brother was never much of a churchgoer he proclaimed himself a deist at age fifteen but had been an excellent student of Latin in high school. His teacher, a sweet and brilliant old bun-wearing woman named Rank, drilled her classes in classical mythology. So maybe when it came time for my brother to have his near-death experience, to reach down into his psyche and pull up whatever set of myths would help him to make sense of the fear, he reached for the ones he'd found most compelling as a young man. For most people, that involves the whole tunnel-of-light business; for my brother, the underworld. The question of where he got Huck and Jim defeats me.
My father was a great Mark Twain fanatic—he got fired from the only teaching job he ever held for keeping the first graders in at recess so he could make them listen to records of an actor reading the master's works—and he came up with the only clue: the accident had occurred on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Twain's death, in I'm just glad they decided to leave my brother on this side of the river.
A Comparison of Two Newspaper Articles. No wonder you can get away with it. I have come to the conclusion that the author was successful in making me, the reader apart of this horrific event. Late Essay On Football Observation of April The tears were gone. Rubbed palms along a small area of the wall, like a blind man.