Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

There was a small emergency situation quite recently, though, in which I was not tempted to make fun of the doctor. He was a young doctor, I admired his decisiveness and his technical skill, and I was also quiet because of my pain. I had bruised my finger badly, and what he had to do was to release some of the pressure under the nail. He did this in what he said was the best way, but also the old-fashioned way, using nothing but a candle and a large paper clip.

The receptionist or nurse this morning thought I wasn’t “up” yet because I didn’t know the exact dose or the full name of my thyroid medicine. But I was careless about that information because of my skeptical attitude toward the health-care profession and because I do not try to conceal that attitude. I did not mean to be disrespectful to her in particular. But after she said this, I noticed two other possible signs of poor functioning: a real estate dealer I called on the phone later in the morning thought at first that I was another real estate dealer. I asked her why she thought this. She had trouble answering, but I guessed that it might have been my lack of enthusiasm, or a coldness in my tone of voice. Then, still later, when I was talking to my husband on the telephone, I was so confusing, contradictory, and long-winded that he compared me to a legal brief he was reading. This document is fifty pages long and concerns a possible class action against an insurance company for misrepresentation.

After wondering for some weeks what to do about the tomato plants, my husband told me he was going to explain to the dentist that none of the plants was good enough to give him, though that is not strictly true. Then, just hours later, he told me that he had changed his mind. He was going to patch the soaker hose and give the plants a little more time.

But on the other hand, it occurs to me that maybe my brain is working well enough but simply more slowly than usual. Maybe the quality of my work will be good but I will take longer than usual to make it good. Or maybe the dose of thyroid supplement I’m taking, which has been increased once without much effect, will be increased to the proper level soon enough so that by the time I reach the final draft of this translation I will be thinking sharply and quickly again. Then I wonder if I will think even better than before this whole condition began, because my brain will have been trying so hard in the meantime, without adequate support from my thyroid, that maybe it will have developed new cells. But I don’t know enough about the brain’s anatomy to know if that is possible.

Or maybe some of the time I go ahead quickly enough but without producing very high quality work, while some of the time I go ahead slowly and produce better quality work, so that it is a choice: either go slowly and do good work, or go quickly and do poor work. But then, those have always been the two options in translation, I see, so I should say that now the choice is: go even more slowly than before and do adequately good work, or go more quickly and do really poor work.

But with any luck, the dosage will gradually be raised high enough so that in a couple of months I will be able to do work that is both quick and adequately good or quite good. The dosage can’t be raised too abruptly or my heart will suffer.

I had thought at first, If my brain is working this well with inadequate amounts of thyroid hormone, how well my brain will work with the proper amounts of thyroid hormone! But then I began to distrust the thought, because what seemed like good working of the brain seemed good to that very same brain that was lacking the proper dose of hormone, and that brain could be quite mistaken.

Another question I had recently was this: is the rather pessimistic turn that my thoughts have taken these days due to the state of the world, which is bad and which gets worse more quickly than one can hope to save it, so that I become quite scared? Or is it due simply to the low level of my thyroid hormone, which would mean that maybe the world is not really in such a frightening state and seems that way only to me? So that I could say to myself: Remember your low thyroid hormone level and have faith that the world will be all right?

What an insult to the mind, I think then, that the chemicals of the body and nothing else are causing my thoughts, which I take so seriously, to move in a certain direction. What an insult to the amazing brain that such a simple thing as a level of chemicals should point it in a certain direction. Then I think, No, it’s not an insult, I can think of it not as an insult, but as part of another fascinating system. I can say, I would prefer to see it as part of a single, interesting system. Then I think, And, after all, it is this amazing brain that, in thinking this, is being so magnanimous to the dumb body. Though of course maybe it is the chemicals of the dumb body that are permitting the amazing brain to be magnanimous.

Now I have been to the dentist again for a cleaning and checkup, and he has found a large cracked filling in a tooth that he said should really have a crown or a cap. He said he had predicted this years ago. But when I objected to more major work, and asked for a postponement, he consented to treat it with a bonded filling that might or might not last for a long time. I was a little surprised that he agreed to this. I wondered if he was losing his enthusiasm, or losing the conviction — which all my dentists seem to have had — that all work on my teeth should be as extreme and as complete as possible. I also noticed that he was curiously silent about tomatoes, saying nothing, either, about the other vegetables in his garden, or about his harvests. We talked instead about crowded holiday spots and the westward expansion of the United States during the nineteenth century. His grandfather had actually lived in the days of the westward expansion and used to talk to him about it. He said it was surprising how recent that time was.

Our talk extended out into the reception area while I paid my bill and took a pencil from the box of gift pencils. Considering the rapid population growth, he said, he did not want to come back after he died. I agreed that I would not want to come back either, at least not as a person, adding the qualification, which I believe, that if we have to come back we may be safer coming back as cockroaches. The receptionist and dental hygienist, who were listening, looked surprised at this.

Now that the fall semester has begun, the woman who gave both parties is back at work at the college. Nearly every day, I read notices that she sends out to all the faculty. She has a very sharp and funny mind, a good education, and an interesting background, but her notices are deliberately neutral in tone and strictly practical. Some are about empty cardboard boxes free for the taking, some about stray cats on the campus, and a great many about misuse of the Xerox machines. Only now and then can I detect from something she says about a page of sonnets left in her office, or from her rhetorically balanced sentences, or from her use of the word criterion , how sharp she is.

Since the dentist’s wife now has her degree, she is no longer studying with my husband, but I do not remember what she is doing, though I was told, probably by my husband.

We have been eating the tomatoes from our garden, though the harvest is not as good as it has been in other years. A woodchuck has dug a hole down under the fence and up among the tomato plants and has been eating the tomatoes as they ripen. My husband puts heavy stones in the hole, but during the night the woodchuck moves them.

I thought this was the end of it, that I would hear no more about the dentist and the results of the season’s planting. I thought there was a slight embarrassment all around. But last week my husband came home from his three-month cleaning with a bag of onions and told me that the issue had been tacitly resolved, that he and the dentist had talked about the long dry spells coming at the wrong times and how the summer had been a poor one for tomatoes. Even the dentist’s plants had not done well. And yesterday, during the insertion of my bonded filling, the dentist told me how he makes grape jelly. I am relieved that there are apparently no hard feelings. The dentist’s onions are pretty, small and fresh. I will want to think of some way of preparing them so that they will be particularly noticeable as we eat them.