TE19 Iberian Adventure

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

a committed smoker from the age of 14 to 38) has rendered every cigarette I’ve ever smoked an act of sin. As in Zeno’s Conscience, I have sworn to myself a million times that I have smoked my last. I did so, however, conditioned by my father’s heart disease. I have even had to accept that something which has undeniably brought me a great deal of pleasure has also provoked genuine moral torments. The worst part of all this is that, deep down, under these disquisitions, breathes the most fearsome and voracious beast that human beings have created in centuries: guilt.

A guilt that, consistent with my family’s perverse Lamarckism, has been inherited as an acquired characteristic.

***

I remember the procession of specialists, the cast of drugs, the languid table tops which alluded to the trail of suffering. There was no room inmy 11-year old’s horizons for robinsonades. Just an assortment of warnings. Illness is a verbal tyrant. It monopolizes every conversation, develops a vocabulary that infects every discourse, and colonizes the needs of the performers who turn out to portray it. If tradition decrees that we discuss the time while sharing elevators, in the house of suffering a logic of pathos stipulates that every word said must feed the disease. Thirsty for names, the disease demands to be defined, pursuing its cohort of nuances towards the unrestrained crescendo of a devastating syntax. As I search for a motif that encapsulates what it means to live in 119