Descartes' clocks

Author's name: Nader Kazem

To what extent does illness change us? In what sense is this sick, thin, pale, bedridden, speechless person unable even to move his lips to offer his relatives and friends a fleeting, even courteous, smile? In what sense is he the same person who, before his illness, was slender, radiant, rosy-cheeked, full of vitality and energy, and loved to laugh? Is a person the same person after illness, after the illness has changed everything about his physical appearance, not to mention his psychological state? Émile Cioran, the French/Romanian nihilistic writer, used to say that “one must change one’s name after every important experience” in life. Illness is not only an important experience after which we must change our names in order to become different people and to call things by their true names. Rather, it is the most dangerous human experience after death. Because it is almost the only human experience that changes us completely or almost completely, so that after it we are no longer the same as we were before it, as our body becomes not only separated from us, and its center of control outside of us, but it is as if it has become something else, foreign to us and to us, so that if one of us stood in front of a mirror he would not recognize himself, and would not know that this ghost before him is his body after it has shrunk, become defined, and shrank until it became the remains of a human being, “half or a quarter of a human being.”