A Voice Through a Cloud

After violently coughing for a week, I broke a rib, specifically rib #5, which an x-ray revealed to be “minimally displaced.” This means, not broken in pieces but not a neat crack either. It is extremely painful, because it hurts with each breath. When you cough, it’s like being stabbed in the chest with an ice-pick. I had to sleep sitting up at first, because it was worse lying down. Obviously there are a million worse things but still, it is awful in its own right.

This constant pain and misery have reminded me acutely of  A Voice Through a Cloud, one of the best books I’ve ever read, an autobiographical novel about a young man whose bicycle accident destroys his health, and led to the author’s early death. The novel beings in the hospital, where the narrator regains consciousness in terrible, unspeakable pain.

Over the years since first reading it, I’ve come to think of my accidents and illnesses as a Voice Through a Cloud, meaning the sense of isolation you feel when in pain. You’re not really you anymore, you have entered a new consciousness as unlike reality as an acid trip. All your sensations are distorted, food is different, the sheets feel different, other people are shadowy figures who live outside your membrane of suffering.

This has gone on too long but it takes at least six weeks for a bone to mend and sometimes longer. Let this be a lesson to you to get enough calcium!

My brain has been altered throughout this ordeal, focused primarily on How long can I stand this, and Why doesn’t anything help, even opiates.

When I’ve been able to think outside the rib pain, my thoughts have turned to deep philosophical questions interrupted by the need to check on Kim and Pete. They are more real to me than my family at this point, and their relationship more momentous and consequential than any other. I mean, all the tattoos, the dinner dates, the threats from Kanye, the impossibility of their whole coupledom, the thought of him dealing with her enormous fake ass…

I’ve been mentally and spiritually haunted by a friend’s angry statement that she doesn’t want to hear about Ukraine because the world didn’t care about the war in Syria. I believe this is a stance of the far left, the wokity woke, who resent the privilege of the white, European Ukrainians. When I said, But what about those poor women evacuated from the maternity hospital only to be killed in the theater they took shelter in, my friend sneered, They don’t even have maternity hospitals in Syria!

I keep compulsively reviewing this, trying to figure out if one of us is just nuts. I am trying to focus on East Africa, which is facing a terrible famine that will only get worse. At least we can all agree on the heartbreaking unfairness of this, except for a guy in a NYT comment thread who insists that it’s Africa’s fault for not controlling its population.

Then, I wondered whether anyone can have a philosophy or value system that is entirely rational and not an outcome of one’s own psychology and, ahem, personal issues. Just think about that. Do I hate capitalism become I’m not rich and I hate the rich (which I do)? Do I think truth is important because the liars in my family have betrayed me so often? Do my white friends who see racist micro-aggressions everywhere feel guilty or an unconscious need to subscribe to all tenets of the progressive left? Does my half-brother, a staunch determinist, just dread the notion of having free will?

These are the rambling preoccupations of an altered consciousness, plus the worry that the internet has ruined life as we knew it without any off-ramp.

Denton Welch‘s A Voice Through a Cloud on the other hand is a masterpiece that I can’t recommend highly enough. The astounding intelligence of it’s author proves that pain can be an impetus to art in the right hands (rather than a drive to see what Kim and Pete are up to.) It is a work of genius that raises a faint hope for humanity and will elevate your soul at least temporarily while the world careens toward oblivion.