Excerpts from
Confessions of an Asthmatic Critic
By Carsten Jensen
I was predisposed towards loneliness. For the most banal of reasons. I suffered from asthma. Asthma, as I´m sure you know, is a condition in which the respiratory system ceases to function normally. An asthmatic attack may be brought on by physical exertion or an allergic reaction, or it may have a psychosomatic cause. Almost invariably this last is the case. My greatest fear was never that I would have an attack, but that I would have an attack when other people were watching. For a child, asthma is a stigmatizing illness, it sets him apart and makes him the last thing in the world he wants to be: different. Asthma predisposes the sufferer to detachment. You listen to the sound of others´ breathing in the same way as you listen to your own. You observe others in the same way as you observe yourself, in fearful anticipation of another attack.
You become expert in putting up a front. If there were other people around when I had an attack, I always did my best to hide it. My face turned puce, I was incapable of talking or of concentrating on what others said, there was a terrible gurgling in my windpipe and my shoulders gradually hunched up level with my ears, under the strain of heaving the necessary air down into my lungs. But I carried on as if nothing were the matter, kept my eyes fixed straight ahead and, if I could have managed it, would probably have whistled. When it came to putting up a front, I belonged to the apocalyptic school: I foresaw and fully expected the collapse and disclosure that would betray my fatal otherness. I knew that, like a stage set, my front was bound to topple over during the second act, to reveal the chaos backstage.
I developed an instinct for being antisocial. In the company of others I was in enemy country. Alone, I experienced the true meaning of the expression to breath more easily. My asthma inclined me towards reading, and for many years I had the idea that only people who had some sort of physical defect could love books. What reading taught me was not only to learn to live with loneliness and even to take pleasure in it, but also to accept that which lies at the root of all loneliness: the otherness to which I felt that I had been condemned.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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