A couple of posts ago, I blogged about the silences of pain in people I had known, contrasted with one writer's seeming need to display her wounds before the world.
And along comes an article about exactly that subject: Theodore Dalrymple's "The Pains of Memory," about an old professor and her lifetime of protective silence.
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There was a Damage Summit one time in my kitchen: my family member and a friend. In the world's unspoken 'hierarchy of suffering' (see other post), those two could pull victim rank on probably about 85% of the postwar industrialized world.
The friend was talking about a job interview he'd recently had.
"The interviewer," he said, "asked me to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to me."
The cats arched their backs and swiveled their ears. The cracked old linoleum itself seemed to send a ripple across the segmented pattern which would resemble a bug's eye if you pulled back far enough.
The friend leveled his gaze across his listeners, the animals with their instincts, the room with its secret eye, me with my willingness to respect what I did not understand.
But most of all, the one sitting across from him, the one who would hear into his next words so completely that their brevity would be enough and enough and more than enough. The one who would therefore need to ask no questions, neither for clarification nor sympathy nor the healing which neither one of them believed in; the one with whom it was therefore safe to say:
"So I told him."
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"And he said, 'I'm sorry I asked.'
"I said, 'You should be. Think about it next time.'"
That's all the book that he would ever write.
