This past week I haven’t done much reading, thanks to a stomach flu that incapacitated me for much of the week. I did begin Down From Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age by Richard Selzer, former professor of surgery at Yale Medical School.
I am not sure how I came across Selzer’s writing. Once I did, I fell in love with his clear and analytical language. The first book I read by him was Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery and then Taking the World in for Repairs.
I must admit upfront that while I have been drawn to medical dramas like ER and Chicago Hope in the past, I was not always enamored of reality medical series on Discovery Channel when we had cable or satellite. Even when ER went in for the closeups, at least, I had the feeling that it was fake, but with the reality shows, it was too visceral, knowing that an actual person was on the other side of the camera.
Yet when I read Selzer, his writing is so sparse and clean, I cannot help but be drawn into the real life stories, and in this case, story:
A childhood spent in the 1930s seems much more distant than sixty years, as though it had taken place a century before that, when the streets of Troy were gaslit. Between then and now, between Troy and New Haven, there is a chasm across which swings only the frayed rope bridge of memory. Besides, like any memoir of growing up, this one is an impersonation. The author, seeking to enact his boyhood, cannot entirely shuck his manhood. The past remains beyond total recall, no matter the exactitude of the writer. If the telling seems to have a certain staccato rhythm, it is because the past remembered is made up of small, random bursts of turbulence and long periods of stagnation. More than once, I have tied dried apricots and paper leaves to the branches of a long-dead tree to give it the appearance of life. Oh, had I the muse for it, I would do as Homer did: wear vine leaves in my hair, strike a lyre with the flat of my hand and sing of Troy– tales of heroism, treachery, vengeance, single combat. Instead, I have only these unbaptized scraps to offer in the hope that, taken together, they will provide a glimpse of that time, that place. Perhaps they will also reveal how one boy grew up to become a doctor who writes. To Troy, then. Troy! Where in October even the dogs in the street pause to admire the foliage. Troy! Unfurling down the hillsides like the grayish pink tongue of a spaniel to lap the waters of the Hudson River.
I wasn’t going to quote the complete first paragraph, but then decided that I couldn’t do it justice without quoting it in its entirety. If that first paragraph seems to end on an incronguous note of a grayish pink tongue of a dog, it is only a foreshadow of the things to come as he doesn’t always paint a pretty picture of Troy or the medical profession (from what I’ve read about the book). Yet how he paints the picture, using the words that he does, is a thing to behold, in my estimation thus far.
Note: I will continue reading this this afternoon in between watching the two NFL Conference Championship games on a large screen TV at a local bar/restaurant. As a Pennsylvanian, I am pulling for the Eagles and the Steelers, but if the two come to blows in the Super Bowl, as someone who grew up on the greats of Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, John Stallworth , Rocky Bleier and Lynn Swann, I will be pulling for the Steelers. I have no choice in the matter. The ghosts of my past are too demanding, and I must obey– not to mention, I am a big fan of Willie Parker and Hines Ward.
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