I’m on Twitter. One person I followed very early was Howard Rheingold. He’s an amazing guy. We had just a short email correspondence when I asked if I could use some of his social media tips for my PHIL 525 a couple of years ago. Well, I had the sense that I was missing a lot of his Tweets. When I went through my Twitter list today, well, one thing led to another and I found Howard again. Not so great news: a cancer diagnosis.
But as the academic gods would have it, he started a blog about his cancer (scroll down to the end of the page to get the very first post of the blog). I haven’t read it in its entirety, but the beginning part tied in perfectly with the theme of this semester’s PHIL 500 class: Dying, Death, and Immortality. Here’s what struck me — it’s at the very top of this page:
And what about living?Thinking about death led me fairly directly to thinking about living: “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” is always a good question, but it does come up with a certain vivacity in the afterglow of a cancer diagnosis. My immediate and overriding objective in life, of course, is getting well. But what of the big picture? I don’t feel like defining my existence strictly by my particular medical adventures (and thanks to P+T for “adventure, not predicament.”) Although I am committed to full participation in getting well, as long as I have time and strength for other pursuits, I’m going to pursue them. But first, I needed to rethink my life’s course. I had used about half the fifteen minutes I had left until my friend arrived (remember — my thoughts of life and death took place in my hotel room between the moment I read the pathology report in email and the arrival of my friend for what had been planned as a night of cuisine and conversation in Paris.)
As evidence that I’ve been thinking for some time about Kierkegaard’s prescription that “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced,” I doodled the image below at age 17 in 1964, during Professor Deegan’s religion course at Reed. He had Hodgkin’s disease and prohibited smoking in class, which irritated me at the time.
So, please visit his cancer blog as well as his other one. I’ve put off discussing the touchy-feely stuff I’ve been going through since the class started. Seeing his blog has given me a little courage to begin doing so.