more so in the shrunken mind of the narrow-vocabulary papers. The moon is made of green cheese, the heart of soft-centred chocolates in red velvet. The moon is for June, to spoon under at the prompting of the heart. The moon takes all women in its tidal tug, the heart has all the best lines. When the first foot was set in the dust of the moon, its silvery disc, the lozenge of love, was not pulverised. Minds baulked at the conclusion of literal events. The first transplanted heart, tucked in by the archetype of all heart-throb surgeons, did not hurt the romance of the idea of heart. It is a soft pump of muscle, but do you not wear it, with no incongruity, upon your sleeve? Does your heart not come into your mouth when you see the whore’s heart cut out by her brother? Heroes are great-hearted, hearts are for lovers, knaves, tarts and queens. The heart has its reasons; it is a lonely hunter. All life returns there repeatedly, and at the end, having reddled the blue gallon of blood for the last time, the great heart breaks.
The heart is an emblem we understand. It is proof love need not be literate. So the meaty seat of my professional endeavour is rich in metaphors. It stands for all we beat for against the tide of what is sure. To consider all this in the servicing or repair of a faulty heart would be as rash as to drive a space rocket on champagne and a driving licence. Professional men must not reflect too much; we delegate this to our universities. The trick of living is to travel light, and too much thought will put wings on your cap perhaps, but set your ankles in stone. If lawyers gave to law the equal balance its practice and philosophy require, no judgement would ever be made. Draco’s bloody stylus would still, ineffably slowly, be approaching the set wax. Seeing illness, sooner or later, we must act, and thought, the instigator of action, is also its great enemy.
I am a man of thought become a man of action.
Hospitals, then. Most people will tell you, as though revealing something quite exclusive about themselves, that they hate hospitals. I love them. Hospital was for me what university had not been. I at last was able to leave home. My parents would not have understood my leaving home while I was at university in London, so I cycled daily from Bayswater to Bloomsbury and took my meals with my mother and father. My first hospital was in Buckingham; even my mother realised that this would make it impossible to share our evenings and our food. It came just in time, for me. My mother had begun to ask about girls. I think she was relieved enough that there were none, in case I should be distracted from my work. Perhaps she imagined that I did all the courting I needed in the refectory or lecture hall. In fact I went to the cinema once a week with a dark medical student named Douglas Hardiman, who wore the same jersey for four years during which it grew tighter over his belly. His flesh raged. Once inside the cinema, we would separate. Douglas would look about till he saw a girl as nearly alone as possible. If there was no single girl, he sat next to anyone female whose flank was undefended. After the film, there would be either Douglas alone and with a story of sally and rebuff, or Douglas with a girl who might even accompany us on a subsequent trip to the cinema. They would not last longer than this, on account of Douglas’s approach, which was an impassive but violent molestation, his face staring ahead at the screen, his hands working like a person trying to get inside a corpse for warmth in a snowstorm. Outside of the cinema, as far as I could see, he could not look at his victims. He was compelled to talk, and to talk about medicine. He was drawn to discuss all that, in the early 1960s, was not pertinent to the wooing of girls. He would glaze over in cafés – the Rumble Tum, the Digest, the Tom Tom – and give monologues on lesions or fluke. The clear beauty of the function of the eye, or articulation of
The heart is an emblem we understand. It is proof love need not be literate. So the meaty seat of my professional endeavour is rich in metaphors. It stands for all we beat for against the tide of what is sure. To consider all this in the servicing or repair of a faulty heart would be as rash as to drive a space rocket on champagne and a driving licence. Professional men must not reflect too much; we delegate this to our universities. The trick of living is to travel light, and too much thought will put wings on your cap perhaps, but set your ankles in stone. If lawyers gave to law the equal balance its practice and philosophy require, no judgement would ever be made. Draco’s bloody stylus would still, ineffably slowly, be approaching the set wax. Seeing illness, sooner or later, we must act, and thought, the instigator of action, is also its great enemy.
I am a man of thought become a man of action.
Hospitals, then. Most people will tell you, as though revealing something quite exclusive about themselves, that they hate hospitals. I love them. Hospital was for me what university had not been. I at last was able to leave home. My parents would not have understood my leaving home while I was at university in London, so I cycled daily from Bayswater to Bloomsbury and took my meals with my mother and father. My first hospital was in Buckingham; even my mother realised that this would make it impossible to share our evenings and our food. It came just in time, for me. My mother had begun to ask about girls. I think she was relieved enough that there were none, in case I should be distracted from my work. Perhaps she imagined that I did all the courting I needed in the refectory or lecture hall. In fact I went to the cinema once a week with a dark medical student named Douglas Hardiman, who wore the same jersey for four years during which it grew tighter over his belly. His flesh raged. Once inside the cinema, we would separate. Douglas would look about till he saw a girl as nearly alone as possible. If there was no single girl, he sat next to anyone female whose flank was undefended. After the film, there would be either Douglas alone and with a story of sally and rebuff, or Douglas with a girl who might even accompany us on a subsequent trip to the cinema. They would not last longer than this, on account of Douglas’s approach, which was an impassive but violent molestation, his face staring ahead at the screen, his hands working like a person trying to get inside a corpse for warmth in a snowstorm. Outside of the cinema, as far as I could see, he could not look at his victims. He was compelled to talk, and to talk about medicine. He was drawn to discuss all that, in the early 1960s, was not pertinent to the wooing of girls. He would glaze over in cafés – the Rumble Tum, the Digest, the Tom Tom – and give monologues on lesions or fluke. The clear beauty of the function of the eye, or articulation of
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