A Fortunate Man by John Berger Page A

Understanding. It reduces sex to a passing urge, effort to what is necessary in order to maintain a status quo , love to kindness, comfort to familiarity. It dismisses the efficacity of thought, the power of unrecognized needs, the relevance of history. It substitutes the notion of endurance for that of experience, of relief for that of benefit.
    This makes them, as Sassall is always observing, tough, uncomplaining, modest, stoical. His respect for them is genuine and deep. But it does not alter the fact that his own expectations of life are diametrically opposed to theirs.
    It is necessary to emphasize here that we are talking of generalized expectations rather than specific personal ones. The question is philosophical rather than immediately practical. Life is like that, the foresters say. A man may be lucky and have everything hewants, but the nature of life is such that this is bound to be an exception.
    Unlike the foresters, Sassall expects the maximum from life. His aim is the Universal Man. He would subscribe to Goethe’s dictum that
    Man knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world. He knows the world only within himself, and he is aware of himself only within the world. Each new object, truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves.
    His appetite for knowledge is insatiable. He believes that the limits of knowledge, at any given stage, are temporary. Endurance for him is no more than a form of experience, and experience is, by definition, reflective. It may be that in certain respects he is prepared to settle for comparatively little – for an obscure country practice, for a quiet domestic life, for a game of golf as relaxation. (In fact on occasion he revolts even against this: four years ago he had himself accepted as the doctor and cameraman for an Antarctic expedition.) Within his outwardly circumscribed life, however, he is continually speculating about, extending and amending his awareness of what is possible. Partly this is the result of his theoretical reading of medicine, science and history; partly it is the result of his own clinical observations (he was, for example, observant enough to notice that Reserpine, given as a sedative, appeared also to cure chilblains and so might be useful in the treatment of gangrene). But above all it is the result of the cumulative effect of his imaginative ‘proliferation’ of himself in ‘becoming’ one patient after another.
    We can now define the bitter paradox which provokes the disquiet Sassall feels at the contrast between himself and his patients and which can sometimes transform this disquiet into a sense of his own inadequacy.
    He can never forget the contrast. He must ask: do they deserve the lives they lead or do they deserve better? He must answer – disregarding what they themselves might reply – that they deserve better. In individual cases he must do all that he can to help them to live more fully. He must recognize that what he can do, if one considers the community as a whole, is absurdly inadequate. He must admit that what needs to be done is outside his brief as a doctor and beyond his power as an individual. Yet he must then face the fact that he needs this situation as it is : that, to some extent, he chose it. It is by virtue of the community’s backwardness that he is able to practise as he does.
    Their backwardness enables him to follow his cases through all their stages, grants him the power of his hegemony, encourages him to become the ‘consciousness’ of the district, allows him unusually promising conditions for achieving a ‘fraternal’ relationship with his patients, permits him to establish almost entirely on his own terms the local image of his profession. The position can be described more crudely. Sassall can strive towards the universal because his patients are underprivileged.
    From time to time Sassall becomes deeply depressed. The depression may last one, two or three