How am I? Very well, thank you. Actually, now you ask, I do have this stubborn pain in the small of my back, and my right knee isn’t what it might be, and I think I have a little arthritis in my left foot, and… what do you expect? I’m in my late forties, and I may be even older by the time you read this. I still have my hair and my teeth, but my days of niggle-free, hangoverless, unthinking good health are gone forever.
Tim Parks was a couple of years older than I am now when he started to experience acute pain in his bladder region. He also needed to pee three or four times a night, which, as all hypochondriacs will know, suggests a problem with the prostate. Ugly little word, prostate. Of all the manifold ways in which our bodies can fail us, prostate cancer seems one of the cruellest and most random. Parks, prolific novelist and longtime Italian resident, went to the doctor, underwent tests. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him. The pain got worse. He had to work standing up. The nightly visits to the lavatory became more frequent. The flow became a dribble. A friend of his, a urologist, suggested unpleasant-sounding surgery, but Parks didn’t fancy it. He realised how little he had ever thought about his body, how he had taken it for granted, as healthy people tend to. Of course, like many writers, he was a world-class worrier. ‘Do I write stories, I wondered now, because in general I have such a weak grip on the story of my own life?’ Sitting in a waiting room, he suddenly remembered that, twenty years before, he had suffered from acute prostatitis. How on earth do you forget such a thing? At the time a friendly doctor had shown him a passage in a textbook, which he now realised he could recall verbatim:
The chances of a complete recovery from prostatitis are minimal, almost non-existent in fact. Prostatitis sufferers tend to be restless, worrisome, dissatisfied individuals who drag their miseries around from one doctor to the next in search of a cure they never find.
As it happens, Parks had recovered, but was this pain a relapse? Was he a restless, worrisome, dissatisfied individual? Parks’s father, an evangelical Anglican cleric, had died of lung cancer at the age of 60, never having smoked. ‘If there was one thing I didn’t want it was to be like my father, though I wasn’t so blind as not to see that I was, in fact, very like him.’ And so gradually, the illness, or whatever it is, seeped into every corner of his life and work. ‘Illness… like love or hate, draws everything to itself, turns everything into itself. Whatever I thought about came back to that: my condition.’
Then, in India for a conference, the arch-rationalist Parks went to an ayurvedic doctor.
He sat back and looked me in the eyes. His face was frank. ‘This is a problem you will never get over, Mr Parks, until you confront the profound contradiction in your character.’ I can’t recall being more surprised by a single remark in all my life.
Thus begins a journey into what a more unscrupulous publisher would call ‘self-discovery’. Parks hates the word ‘empower’ and is nervous of being seen as a hippy-dippy new age type, but the fact is that his condition was cured not by drugs or surgery, but by breathing and meditation. The process
oblige[d] me to rethink the primacy I have always given to language and the life of the mind. Texting, mailing, chatting, blogging, our modern minds devour our flesh… We have become cerebral vampires preying on our own life-blood.
This may be more acutely true of writers than of normal people, but then only a writer so in love with words could tell a story like this so engagingly. Teach Us To Sit Still is a small triumph of narrative artistry, luxuriantly written and full of bone-dry humour. I’d recommend it to any man over 45 who frets incessantly about his health — which is to say, any man over 45.
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