Disability: More and More Forever

” . . . The awful thing about growing older is that you begin to notice how every day consists of more and more subtracted from less and less.” Christopher Hitchens

[“On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part III,” Vanity Fair, September 2008]

 

I am in a hotel in Chicago, liminal with dyspepsia, American travel food being what it is, and I’m contemplating my own aging with alarm on the 26th floor of the Hyatt. My bad back won’t let me tie my shoes and the day has been more and more subtracted from less and less. I did manage to read an essay by George Orwell on the flight from Syracuse–his early remembrances of boarding school brought back vividly my own stumbling in the world of adult cruelty, for it warn’t no picnic being the blind kid in public school back in the day. Orwell saw early the preternatural sadism of his teachers. And so, reading him on the plane I felt that shy, unanticipated connection with another soul who managed to endure, even as the nature and meaning of that endurance was inapparent.

 

I’m in agreement with Christopher Hitchens’ observation. But I also see, via Orwell, that if your childhood was charged with conditional panic, “more and more, subtracted from less and less” was always the essential quality of being. From boyhood on, with a disability, one feels the electrolysis, the buzz of alarm at the core of the very minutes.

 

I still feel this. And now I have a backache to go with it. Less and less, but the soaring and anticipatory “more and more” was always the case.