Cambridge

July 3, 2011

I knew I was sick when I rose yesterday morning. I felt the cold too much. I was disoriented. But I couldn’t send my troops to Bury St. Edmund’s on their own, so I took a few pills and headed for the train. I always hope that it’s going to be something other than phlebitis–don’t people get the flu? Food poisoning? La grippe? But it is always the same, and as we hurried down the streets of that pretty little town I got sicker and sicker, and before we entered the Greene Man Brewery for our tour, I was in a taxi heading for the station. A pretty girl sat across from me on the train, and her perfume gave me the dry heaves. I wonder what story she is telling about that. Did make it back to Lucy Cavendish, where I fell into an exceptionally brutal episode of the disease. Fever and chills. Fever, pain, chills. Pain. Chills. And above all the hideous mess the fever makes in the brain, sickening and compulsive, tangled lines of thought that one cannot break. The progress was exceptionally clear-cut this time, though I don’t understand why the symptoms of a fever should be so elaborate and successive. Maybe the worst was that when the rest got home, nobody checked on me. They had seen me stagger away toward a taxi, and yet when they got back, nothing. I could be dead in my room right now and nobody would know, depending on how long it took me to decompose. This was hurtful. There are moments in the progress of the disease when company would be a real comfort. Now that I say that, I have never had such comfort since my mother, so why make a big deal of it now? But I thought we had a different relationship here.

Bored and sick at the same time.

I think this is part of the great humiliation which started two days ago, struck down and no one cares. It’s hard to convey that I am smiling as I write this.

Night: Evensong at St. John’s. If Kings’ singers attest, “We are angels,” St. John’s, with their almost-pushed tempi, their thrilling fortissimi, proclaim “We are men.” The anthem was Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb.” I have heard this piece a dozen times and sung it several, but never before HEARD it, really. By the time they came to “for I am in twelve hardships,” I was slain in the spirit, weeping like a child, transported. When I heard the phrase used by the kind of people who use it, I thought “slain in the spirit” was ridiculous. It is not.

Went to the Pickerel afterwards and met Alex R, a John Kennedy Jr-resembling, John Steinbeck-admiring law student from Fresno. He wants to go into politics and be, for starters, mayor of Fresno. I prophesy success.