The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe Read Free Book Online Page A

her mythology, she would choose her mythology. This led her to strange, inconsequential lies; she would lie, for instance, about the price of her apartment on Riverside Drive, because she wanted to seem like she was an intellectual who drifted into a lovely apartment and did not spend a lot of money on real estate, like a more bourgeois, ordinary person. This sort of lie is interesting because it is in the service of image, of the creation of self that she was always mindful of; she would bend the outsideworld, in other words, to the powerful inner picture she had of her life. Not everyone does this. Not everyone can do this. And one imagines here the greatest lie, that she was recovering, and the greatest myth she had engineered to date, that of the survivor, of the incandescent defeat of death itself. When someone lies to protect and further their mythology, do they also lie to themselves?
    As he watched his mother decline, David struggled with the dissonance between her intellectual position on illness—which argued for logic, rationality, science, clear-sightedness—and the murky reality of the hospital room. The purity and charisma of the ideas Sontag laid out in
Illness as Metaphor
are irresistible, and yet this time around, for Sontag, seeing clearly and absorbing information would have led only to the certain knowledge that she would die. In this final confrontation with cancer, she needed instead consolation; she needed fantasy; she needed
not
to think clearly. In the end, Sontag couldn’t live her illness without metaphor; she needed the idea of a fight even after the fight was lost. It’s interesting to see the scratched-out lines of the notebook entries. In the middle of her first illness, she wrote:“I feel like the Vietnam War. My illness is invasive, colonizing. They’re using chemical warfare on me.” She scratched it out because she was determined
not
to think this way about illness, because that was the intellectual position she staked out for herself
—not
to romanticize. And yet here it is, under the pen marks, the natural tendency to think in battles, in war, the irresistible instinct to be a warrior.

    The hospital masseuse’s mother comes in and gives Susan a haircut, which pleases her. She can’t lift her head far off the pillow, so this haircut requires unusual skill and dexterity with the scissors. But a haircut matters, even on a transplant ward.
    A chaplain comes into the room. Sontag is polite, which is to say she does not laugh in his face or argue him to the ground. After he leaves she says, “He was kind of cute.”
    Peter sometimes takes her outside in her wheelchair. By this point she’s so weak, and her muscles so wasted from being in a hospital bed, that it is hard for her to roll over, so getting into a wheelchair is a production. But on nice days he rolls her to the lake and they see the ducks flapping around.
    She loved being outside. She loved the air. The great civilized world, Rome, Paris, Kyoto, Sarajevo (“I switch countries as easily as other people change rooms,” she once wrote), had shrunk to her hospital room. At home in London Terrace, there would be the week’s schedule pinned to her refrigerator, packed with operas, plays, movies, music, dinner, friends. Before she got sick, even her younger friends had trouble keeping up with her; everyone who knew her was dazzled by her energy, by her “avidity,” to use one of her words. Peter recalls researching
The Volcano Lover
and, it being three in the morning, suggesting they go to sleep and resume the next day. She turned to him and marveled, “Why? Are you tired?” In her thirties, she wrote in the notebooks, “Is being tired a spontaneous complicity with death—a beginning to let go?”
    Once it gets too cold to go outside, Peter wheels her down the long hallways of the hospital. By this point it’s a huge production to get her out of bed, into the wheelchair, covered in blankets, but it’s good for her to