2 Forward 2 After that meeting, we kept in touch by email

      After that meeting, we kept in touch by email, but never saw each other
again. It was not just that I disappeared into my own world of deadlines and
responsibilities but also my strong sense that the burden was on me to be
respectful of his time. It was up to Paul if he wanted to see me. I felt that the
last thing he needed was the obligation to service a new friendship. I thought
about him a lot, though, and about his wife. I wanted to ask him if he was
writing. Was he finding the time? For years, as a busy physician, I’d struggled
to find the time to write. I wanted to tell him that a famous writer,
commiserating about this eternal problem, once said to me, “If I were a
neurosurgeon and I announced that I had to leave my guests to go in for an
emergency craniotomy, no one would say a word. But if I said I needed to
leave the guests in the living room to go upstairs to write…” I wondered if
Paul would have found this funny. After all, he could actually say he was going
to do a craniotomy! It was plausible! And then he could go write instead.
While Paul was writing this book, he published a short, remarkable essay
in Stanford Medicine, in an issue that was devoted to the idea of time. I had an
essay in the same issue, my piece juxtaposed to his, though I learned of his
contribution only when the magazine was in my hands. In reading his words, I
had a second, deeper glimpse of something of which there had been a hint in
the New York Times essay: Paul’s writing was simply stunning. He could have
been writing about anything, and it would have been just as powerful. But he
wasn’t writing about anything—he was writing about time and what it meant to
him now, in the context of his illness. Which made it all so incredibly poignant.
But here’s the thing I must come back to: the prose was unforgettable.
Out of his pen he was spinning gold.
I reread Paul's piece again and again, trying to understand what he had
brought about. First, it was musical. It had echoes of Galway Kinnell, almost a
prose poem. (“If one day it happens / you find yourself with someone you love
/ in a café at one end /of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar / where wine stands
in upward opening glasses…” to quote a Kinnell line, from a poem I once
heard him recite in a bookstore in Iowa City, never looking down at the paper.)
But it also had a taste of something else, something from an antique land, from
a time before zinc bars. It finally came to me a few days later when I picked up
his essay yet again: Paul’s writing was reminiscent of Thomas Browne’s.
Browne had written Religio Medici in the prose of 1642, with all its archaic
spellings and speech. As a young physician, I was obsessed with that book,
kept at it like a farmer trying to drain a bog that his father before him had failed
to drain. It was a futile task, and yet I was desperate to learn its secrets, tossing
it aside in frustration, then picking it up again, unsure that it had anything for
me but, in sounding the words, sensing that it did. I felt that I lacked some
critical receptor for the letters to sing, to impart their meaning. It remained
opaque, no matter how hard I tried.
Why, you ask? Why did I persevere? Who cares about Religio Medici?