Little finger

"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads
of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us
consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of
connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon
receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine,
first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of
that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon
the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of
man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too,
perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings
concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the
commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in
general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these
humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his
business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the
same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The
most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a
more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow,
he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will
snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred
millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense
multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this
paltry misfortune of his own."

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments: To Which Is Added, a
Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (London: George Bell & Sons,
1892), p. 193.

Jinasena on God

In her blog The Useless Tree, Namit Arora writes:

In 9th century CE India, a Jain teacher called Jinasena composed a
work called Mahapurana. The following is a quote from it.

Some foolish men declare that [a] Creator made the world. The
doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be
rejected. If god created the world, where was he before creation? If
you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he
now? No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an
immaterial god create that which is material? How could god have made
the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and
then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you
declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another
fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator,
and have risen equally naturally. If god created the world by an act
of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will made
nothing else and who will believe this silly stuff? If he is ever
perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in
him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create
the universe than a potter could. If he is formless, actionless, and
all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul,
devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything. If
you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do
so then god is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was
the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created out of
love for living things and [in his] need of them he made the world,
why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune?
Thus the doctrine that the world was created by god makes no sense at
all.

http://blog.shunya.net/shunyas_blog/2012/04/jinasena-on-god-the-creator.html

Brambles

Why do only brambles go into politics? Here's the fable of the trees
Jotham told after his brother Abimelech (Gideon's son) proclaimed
himself king:

"The trees once went out to anoint a king over them, and they said to
the olive tree, 'Reign over us.' But the olive tree said to them,
'Shall I leave my abundance, by which gods and men are honored, and go
hold sway over the trees?' And the trees said to the fig tree, 'You
come and reign over us.' But the fig tree said to them, 'Shall I leave
my sweetness and my good fruit and go hold sway over the trees?' And
the trees said to the vine, 'You come and reign over us.' But the vine
said to them, 'Shall I leave my wine that cheers God and men and go
hold sway over the trees?' Then all the trees said to the bramble,
'You come and reign over us.' And the bramble said to the trees, 'If
in good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and take
refuge in my shade, but if not, let fire come out of the bramble and
devour the cedars of Lebanon.'"
Judges 9:8-15 (English Standard Version)

On the history of abortion

From Robert M. Hardaway, Population, Law, and the Environment, 1994,
pp. 112-113:

Soranos of Ephesus ( A.D. 98-138), "the most learned of GrecoRoman
gynecologists," attributes to Hippocrates a writing in which
Hippocrates himself "told a girl how to accomplish an abortion by
jumping." 30

Aristotle proposed that a mother have an abortion if the state was
unable to accommodate the child. 25 However, he was one of the first
philosophers to make the distinction based on fetal movement (later
known as "quickening"), insisting that any abortion be conducted
before there is "sensation and life." 26 Plato also saw abortion as a
means of attaining an optimum population. 27

...

In any case, Soranos of Ephesus ( A.D. 98-138), "the most learned of
GrecoRoman gynecologists," attributes to Hippocrates a writing in
which Hippocrates himself "told a girl how to accomplish an abortion
by jumping." 30

Noonan, a noted abortion historian, has noted that "in the
Mediterranean world in which Christianity appeared, abortion was a
familiar art." 31 Soranos set forth in a treatise of the day the most
common and familiar methods of abortion: "purging the abdomen with
clysters; walking about vigorously; carrying things beyond one's
strength; bathing in sweet water which is not too hot; bathing in
decoctions of linseed, mallow, and wormwood; applying poultices of the
same decoctions; injecting warm and sweet olive oil; being bled and
then shaken after softening by suppositories." 32 Given these other
less dangerous methods of abortion it is not surprising that
Hippocrates would forbid the use of "deadly drugs" or "pessaries" as a
means of inducing abortion.

By Medieval times, St. Thomas Aquinas had adopted the Aristotelian
notion of quickening. Aquinas "was clear that there was actual
homicide when an ensouled embryo was killed. He was equally clear that
ensoulment did not take place at conception," 33 and stated in
Politicorum that "seed and what is not seed is determined by sensation
and movement." 34

Martin Azplicueta, "the guide in moral questions of three Popes, and
the leading canonist of the 16th century," 35 was a consultant to the
Sacred Penitentiary, "the Roman Tribunal for deciding cases of
conscience submitted to confessors." 36 Historian Noonan has noted
that Azplicueta stated in Consilia that "the rule of the Penitentiary
was to treat a fetus over forty days as ensouled. Hence therapeutic
abortion was accepted in the case of a fetus under this age." 37

On October 29, 1588, however, Pope Sixtus V launched a campaign
against the prostitutes of Rome by issuing the bull Effraenatam that
declared abortion to be homicide regardless of the age of the fetus.
Punishment was to be excommunication, and only the Holy See could
grant absolution from the excommunication. 38 Though this appeared to
be plainly inconsistent with existing dogma, Sixtus, in a fit of pique
and in apparent exasperation with the Roman prostitutes, nevertheless
justified his precedent-breaking bull by rhetorically asking, "Who
would not punish such cruel lust with the most severe punishments?" 39
(Implied in the answer was that a prostitute, when faced with the
severe punishment of excommunication, would choose to carry an
unwanted child as a lesser form of punishment.)

Sixtus V's bull, issued in the heat of a campaign against Roman
prostitutes, and apparently based on the dubious assumption that an
unwanted child was God's retribution for lust, mercifully did not stay
in effect long. Only 2 years later, after Sixtus died, the new Pope
Gregory XIV, noting that "the hoped for fruit had not resulted,"
issued restrictions in 1591 on Effraenatum, "repeal [ing] all its
penalties except those applying to a fetus which had been ensouled."
40 Thus the dogma of Aquinas and Azplicueta was restored. 41

It was not until almost 300 years later, in 1869, that God revealed to
Pope Pius IX that St. Thomas Aquinas, Azplicueta, and Gregory XIV had
all been wrong, and that the abortion of any fetus, regardless of
quickening, was grounds for excommunication.

Back

After a one-year break from Chronicon Mundi, I plan to start posting
again, perhaps only for myself.

Paul

Endless memory

One of my favorite short stories has long been Borges' Funes el
memorioso (Funes the Memorious, 1942), about a man who, as the
Wikipedia reminds me (because I forget things), is incapable of
Platonic ideas, of generalities, of abstraction and whose world is one
of intolerably uncountable details. Funes finds it very difficult to
sleep, because he remembers "every crevice and every moulding of the
various houses which [surround] him."

Now I learn that Borges was wrong. It turns out that people with
"superior autobiographical memory" are very much capable of the human
capacity for abstraction. The uncountable details of their lives are
not intolerable. Other than remembering everything, or just about
everything that ever happened to them, they are perfectly ordinary
people. Here's a 60 Minutes piece on such people:

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2zTkBgHNsWM

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1th1fVIc8Vo&feature=relmfu

a letter

The following is a letter and the story behind it, from Andrew
Carroll's War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars
(Kindle edition, 86% into the book):

"All letters and artifacts left at the [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall are
collected, catalogued, and preserved by the National Park Service,
National Capital Region. Duery Felton Jr., a park service curator (and
Vietnam veteran himself), was organizing a container of memorabilia
gathered at the Wall when a small photograph and letter left by
another Vietnam veteran caught his attention:

' Nov 18, 1989

Dear Sir,

For twenty two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was
only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that
trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I'll never
know. You stared at me for so long armed with your AK-47 and yet you
did not fire. Forgive me for taking your life, I was reacting just the
way I was trained, to kill V. C. or gooks, hell you weren't even
considered human, just gook/target, one in the same.

Since that day in 1967 I have grown a great deal and have a great deal
of respect for life and other peoples in the world.

So many times over the years I have stared at your picture and your
daughter, I suspect. Each time my heart and gut would burn with the
pain of guilt. I have two daughters myself now. One is twenty. The
other one is twenty two, and has blessed me with two granddaughters,
ages one and four.

Today I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. I have wanted to
come here for several years now to say goodbye to many of my former
comrades.

Somehow I hope and believe they will know I'm here, I truly loved many
of them as I am sure you loved many of your former comrades.

As of today we are no longer enemies. I perceive you as a brave
soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I can now respect the
importance that life held for you. I suppose that is why I am able to
be here today.

As I leave here today I leave your picture and this letter. It is time
for me to continue the life process and release my pain and guilt.
Forgive me Sir, I shall try to live my life to the fullest, an
opportunity that you and many others were denied.

I'll sign off now Sir, so until we chance to meet again in another
time and place, rest in peace.

Respectfully,
101st Airborne Div Richard A. Luttrell.'

Felton instantly knew he had to include the photography, as well as
several lines from the letter, in an upcoming publication the National
Park Service was assembling called Offerings at the Wall. In 1996 a
good friend of Luttrell's saw the book and shared it with Luttrell,
who had not seen the photograph and the letter since he had left them
at the Wall seven years earlier. Suddenly confronted with them again,
he broke down and cried. The pain of the memory was so great that
Luttrell realized it might never go away unless he tried to return the
photograph to the daughter of the slain Vietnamese soldier. Although
he realized that, without an address or even a name, the odds of
finding someone in a country of 80 million were astronomical, he was
determined to try. Luttrell contacted Felton, who flew to Illinois and
personally returned the items. And then, with assistance from the
Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, Luttrell was able to convince
newspapers in Hanoi with an accompanying article. Miraculously, a copy
of a paper made its way to a tiny farming village where the family of
the soldier recognized it. Several days later Luttrell received a
short, translated letter, forwarded from Vietnam by fax, written by a
woman identified only as Lan. The message read:

Dear Mr. Richard, the child that you have taken care of, or through
the picture, for over 30 years, she becomes adult now, and she has
spent so much sufferance in her childhood by the missing of her
father. I hope you will bring the joy and happiness to my family.

Luttrell immediately responded and asked Lan if he could visit her in
Vietnam. She said yes, and in March 2000 Richard Luttrell—the first
time he had been back in thirty-two years—found himself face-to-face
with Lan in her village. The moment she saw him, Lan burst into tears
and embraced Luttrell. 'I'm so sorry,' he said to her, also crying.
Lan forgave Luttrell, and the photograph of her and her father now
rests on a small altar in Lan's home."

Here is the photograph:

http://tinyurl.com/69pzwe4

--

Women

This morning's International Herald Tribune reports: "women make up 54
percent of physicians below the age of 35 in Britain, 58 percent in
France and almost 64 percent in Spain." And last year, the Washington
Post reported: "For the first time, more women than men in the United
States received doctoral degrees last year." The times they are
a-changin'.

--

My Amazon library

Here is a link to my Amazon library:

<https://www.amazon.com/gp/ays/index.html?app=profile&targetCustomerId=A2FZU73C3VNFZV&profile=A2FZU73C3VNFZV>

The Stutterer

The Stutterer

http://www.slate.com/id/2285533/pagenum/all/

How he makes his voice heard.

By Nathan Heller

Behind bold facades lie a thousand small humiliations. Abraham Lincoln
grew so depressive that he couldn't, for a while, be trusted near
sharp objects. Ella Fitzgerald started her singing career after being
too ashamed to dance publicly. Susan Sontag came upon an issue of
Partisan Review as a teenager, found it totally impenetrable, and
spent the rest of her life trying never to be that unsophisticated
again. Some version of these unlikely equations lies behind The King's
Speech, the account of King George VI's crippling stutter that has
brought in tides of coverage and praise since its release late last
year. The movie describes the king's struggles to speak in the run-up
to his coronation and the start of World War II. Along the way, it
turns a spotlight on a barely understood disorder—one that, as it
happens, wasn't just a royal problem. Winston Churchill stuttered,
too, although the movie barely mentions the fact, making for an irony
that's striking even in a wartime history soaked with it: At a moment
when the nation's future rested on the power of public oratory, both
of Britain's highest leaders had a harder time speaking a sentence
than most people in the street.

The King's Speech has been quite successful—some people are expecting
it to walk away with many of this week's top Oscars—but it's vague on
certain key points. Even after seeing the film, viewers don't really
know what to make of George VI's stuttering. Roger Ebert saw a monarch
who "seizes up in agony" at the idea of speaking; Anthony Lane came
away assuming that the king's trouble exposed a deep childhood shame.
In the film, George VI's therapy, charged with heavy social and
Freudian overtones, becomes a metaphor for "bridging the gap between
classes," as the Daily News put it, and perhaps even the "unconscious
equation of words with feces," J. Hoberman wryly wrote. Or something.
For a movie that's supposed to be about finding one's voice, The
King's Speech raises more questions about life with the problem than
it answers.

Stuttering, in my mind, is a word that conjures beiges and grays: the
feeling of always being lusterless and square in conversation; of
woozy headaches brought about by gasping through my sentences; of
childhood boredom in stuffy, cork-tiled offices where speech
therapists told me to slow down and read long lists of words aloud.
Somehow, I never wanted to slow down, and still don't; and in this
respect stuttering also signifies a bargain I have spent adult life
trying not to make. The disorder is not what might be called "a given"
from birth for me, though it's been a looming specter for as long as
my memory reaches. I started speaking in sentences shortly before
turning 1. At 3, those sentences first met with some resistance on my
tongue, the way a car moves off asphalt, onto dirt—and then, finally,
across rocks that jolt the tires and make it hard to track where you
are headed. Today, I am still being jolted, and the jagged terrain
behind bears the track marks of my own innumerable small humiliations.
In the seventh grade: A substitute asks the class to read out loud,
and when I stumble over my first sentence, she inquires of the other
students whether I'm "OK" and "always like this," and while I continue
fighting with a pr sound, my ears tune in to every judging shudder in
the room—the creaking chairs, the restless exhalations, the
uncomfortable shifting, in the desk beside me, of a girl with many
colored pens who seems to me in some way very beautiful. In high
school: A medical assistant taking down my charts asks whether I just
have a problem with my speech or whether there is mental retardation,
too. ("As far as I'm aware …" my answer begins.) In college: I slow
down several seminars trundling through fragile language meant for
clever tongues. And so on. In each case, what I feel most impelled to
explain to the people who can hear me is just: This is not my voice.

The stutterer's voice is the central focus of The King's Speech and a
good part of the reason, I suspect, the movie has achieved its outsize
resonance. This is because the stutterer's voice points toward a
paradox of verbal culture: Language was born of a need to communicate
orally and in the moment, and yet, at its most influential, language
is so little dependent on spontaneous speech that even someone
permanently stymied on that front—a stutterer—can eke out a message
that commands a nation. It is reassuring to know this, partly because
it affirms that there is more to public meaning and shared truth than
smooth talk and rhetorical style. In a moment when the words of
leadership are routinely distrusted as fleeting or opportunistic, The
King's Speech champions a notion of the public voice as something
impervious to glib manipulation. The difficulty of the stutterer's
speech proves its good faith.

For stuttering people themselves, though, it proves something else,
which is that personal voices, the link between the mind and the world
outside, can come from places other than the larynx and the
spontaneous moment. About 1 percent of the world's population
stutters, four times more men than women, but the problem is, as far
as science and treatment goes, largely a mystery. It's not a
psychological hang-up—brain imagery has found actual differences in
stutterers' speech-production neurobiology—yet it's subject to some
psychological influence all the same: Most stutterers report
stuttering more or less in certain situations and under certain
pressures, though the triggers are opaque and ever-changing.
Stuttering is genetic, but it's unclear how the gene governs the
problem. (Researchers have pinpointed a mutation on the 12th
chromosome that's apparently responsible, but that mutation is in a
region normally associated with serious disorders like Tay-Sachs
disease, with which stuttering seemingly shares no similarities.)
There is no cure for stuttering or even, really, an agreed-upon
approach to treatment. Many people who have spoken smoothly for years
still think of themselves as stutterers, since the possibility of
blocking any moment never goes away.

It's hard to describe the feeling of stuttering to anyone who has
always spoken smoothly. It is not a nervous impulse. It is not,
despite appearances, a spastic feeling. Stuttering starts in the voice
box and the upper lungs with something like a pressure clench, the
sensation of some valves closing against a flow, a trap tripping its
release at the wrong moment. (John Updike described it as the feeling
of "a kind of windowpane suddenly inserted in front of my face while I
was talking, or of an obdurate barrier thrust into my throat.") The
clench occurs suddenly, irreversibly—in the final instant before
beginning a sentence, in the middle of a phrase—making the experience
of being a stutterer somewhat like the chronic knowledge that your
clothes may explode off your body any moment. You stay on your toes
for sudden self-embarrassment. Your sole object, when a verbal block
comes, is to break past. Most of the quintessential tics of
stuttering—the repetitions, hisses, swallows, blinks, head shakes,
gulps, silences—are coping mechanisms, habituated tricks for pushing
beyond this impasse in the throat. Why anyone would ever persist in
such tics is perhaps best answered by the predicament of a swimmer
cramping in the middle of a river. Part by reflex and part by urgent
pragmatism, you dispense with any hope of an elegant stroke and flail
toward the far shore. If you give up completely, or fall silent too
long, there's the risk that you'll be swept entirely under, lose your
meaning.

Meaning is crucial here, because most stutterers feel in constant
danger of being misunderstood in at least three separate ways. There
are, first, the communication risks of trying not to stutter. Speech,
for a stutterer, is a chess game; it is not uncommon for our minds to
be running three or four sentences ahead of our lips, with constant
backtracking and recalibration along the way. In some cases, people
known as "covert stutterers" or "closet stutterers" go through life
apparently speaking smoothly but actually living like deer in season,
constantly fleeing from words and situations that might spell trouble.
Churchill—who rehearsed his speeches obsessively and faced the day
buffered by epic rations of whisky—is sometimes said to have been a
deft closet stutterer in maturity, his celebrated verbal dexterity
being just that, a means of maneuvering away from danger. Flight,
though, has a cost. When words change, meaning does also. This is true
in the literal sense (in my most craven moments, facing an impatient
cashier at a busy lunch spot, I've ordered the most safely
pronounceable sandwich on the menu, which is usually turkey) and in
more oblique ways, too. Not long ago, Joe Biden, who stuttered openly
into college, undertook a famously weird circumlocution seemingly to
avoid landing on the word Avatar—a sound that he'd just nearly blocked
on. The hesitation was roundly interpreted as a sign not of speech
trouble but of mind trouble, and, in some sense, maybe it was. To
word-substitute is to substitute one kind of verbal control for
another, to feel your speech slowly drifting away from the voice in
your head.

When stutterers don't succeed in sidestepping an obstacle, or aren't
comfortable living with their words at such a remove from their
thoughts, there is the problem of being literally understood.
Stuttering ravages the sentence, the sentiment, the idea, such that
following the stutterer's train of syntax can be like trying to parse
a line of Morse code. (Biden was nicknamed Dash in high school.) If
you happen to be a verbally minded stuttering person, this is
something you never get used to. Part of your mind holds onto the hope
of speaking clever things as effortlessly as you think of them, of
being witty and charming; words you wish you had the tongue to say
instead flourish inside, feeding a sort of verbal fantasy life.
Everybody dreams. But stutterers, perhaps especially, dream of verbal
transcendence: those rare moments when an ungainly cargo of words
rattling down the runway pulls itself together, roars into a final
burst of speed, and meets the sky.

Sometimes, this dream gets fixed enough to become a vocation. A
disproportionate number of stutterers end up writers, actors, and
other voices of public life. They tend even to "do jobs that require
them to speak in public, which you would have thought they'd have
avoided," someone pointed out to the stuttering novelist Margaret
Drabble. This is an irony only until you realize that the labor of a
verbal craftsperson, the work of nailing words onstage or in print, is
virtually coterminous with a stutterer's inner life. Sometimes a
stuttering actor's efforts to speak smoothly in the spotlight help
shape an iconic voice. James Earl Jones found he stuttered least when
he spoke at the bottom of his register and from a script. (Otherwise,
he's said, he struggles just to get "though the conversation.")
Marilyn Monroe went breathy, probably because people generally don't
stutter when they're whispering, and used ditsy-seeming pauses to
inhale and wait for her vocal chords to relax. Rowan Atkinson, who had
trouble with B and P words, developed a method of exploding past those
consonants with comic exaggeration ("Just popped out for lunch!").
Bruce Willis says being taunted for stuttering taught him "how to
fight."

The disorder teaches different things to writers, such as how a
sentence can fly when it is freed from the requirements of speech.
Writing as a vocation tends to attract control freaks, pathological
introverts, and uneasy narcissists—the sort of people, basically, who
don't mind spending hours alone at a desk, trying to make their own
ideas sound good on a piece of paper—but for stutterers, the endless
possibilities for voice control on the blank page carry especial
appeal. Give a stutterer a pen and some practice and, suddenly, what
seems imperfectible in speech is a few scribblings and crossings-out
and rescribblings away. ("[T]his anxious guilty blockage in the
throat," Updike wrote, "I managed to maneuver several millions of
words around it.") Even a partial list of stuttering writers points to
certain correlations between the impediment and the development of
literary voice: Updike, Drabble, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert A.
Heinlein, W. Somerset Maugham, at various points Christopher Hitchens
and the Dunne brothers (John Gregory and Dominick), Philip Larkin,
John Bayley, Elizabeth Bowen—and so on, back to Henry James.

In retrospect, James' impediment seems to gape back at us from every
lavish, stylized page of his prose. Who but a speech-blocked writer
would devote so much energy and ink to writing, rewriting, and
overwriting such a body of work? Who else would dwell so hungrily on
the rhythms and refracted meanings of the social sphere? As much as
James is a literary paragon, he is the person many stutterers spend
their whole lives trying not to be: the eagle-eyed wallflower, the
brilliant nonparticipant, a man so disengaged from normal social
congress that there's been scholarly debate on the extent to which he
was straight or gay or, as one theory has it, neutered on a fence.
This is the final and most insidious way stutterers fear being
misunderstood: They worry that their speaking voice, and the behavior
that accompanies it, will be taken as a window onto something like
their personality.

Well, why not? In most cases, the way adults carry themselves in the
social world betrays at least something about who they are. They can
be loud, timid, outgoing, punctilious, nonchalant, or devastatingly
clever, and these qualities are taken as facets of the self because
they are the products of control—you choose to keep silent, to make
snotty remarks, to turn your energy to one-liners. Stutterers lack
control. Our options are to speak at the mercy of our physiology or
not speak. Our social conduct, as a result, can be baffling.
Stutterers are frequently cast or cast themselves in roles on the
periphery: the Prufrock, the arbiter, the jester, the confidant, the
third wheel, the nonthreatening best friend. (Elsewhere in Slate,
Barry Harbaugh has published a comprehensive and illuminating study of
stuttering stereotypes in film.) But these roles are seldom perfect
fits. Close friends of mine report seeing flickers of another mien
beneath my normal milquetoast awkwardness. Women I've known well have
mentioned their "surprise" (this is the word that crops up, always)
at—actually, I've never been sure at what, exactly, but the intimation
hints at my worst fear: that people expect my stutterer's cloddish
surface to be representative, to permeate my personality like a pool
of ink.

This fear of being misapprehended may in fact have some influence on
stuttering itself. Alfred Kazin stopped stuttering badly as soon as he
made a name (and voice) for himself publishing in august magazines.
Samuel L. Jackson found he was miraculously fluent when he spoke as
any character other than himself. Escape from one's stutter means
escape from misjudgment, which is to say from the expressions often
writ too clearly in a listener's face: The looks I've gotten when I
start to stutter—eyebrows raised in surprise or else cocked in pity,
pressed lips and sidelong glances of impatience—could, honestly,
furnish albums. I tend to glance away when I'm stuck, not so much in
chagrin as to avoid subjecting someone else, and especially a friend,
to my own scrutinizing gaze: They shouldn't have to be on camera in an
awkward moment. I have stuttered nearly all my conscious life, but I
still fight the urge to apologize every time it happens.

I will probably always be tempted to apologize, or else to pretend
that the problem doesn't exist. If there's pain to this disorder, it
is not from looking silly—that is easy to get used to, easy to forget.
What's harder is the difficulty breaking through, working your way
into those hidden chambers where social transcendence takes place and
lives are made. It is one thing, after all, to go passably through the
motions of everyday discussion: making small talk over lunch, putting
in phone calls, eking out a decent story at a cocktail party. It's
another to run fast through the tight, quieter, moonlit streets of
banter or seduction using speech that feels as dexterous as a loaded
bus. Of all the minor pricks and pinches stuttering has given to me
over time, the only ones that still sting are the moments when I've
watched people kick off their heels and steal into that dark maze with
the realization that I won't be able to follow them apace. To stutter
is to be perpetually caught in what some people like to call
"nostalgia for the present."

Longing is, at bottom, a creative impulse. "There's no doubt in my
mind that you're destined to end up a writer," a college teacher once
told me. "You have all the right problems." The constant wistful sense
of loss, the need to slow it all down for the capture before it drifts
away—this is why writers put things into words. The premise of The
King's Speech is that George VI speaks for his people and their plight
and for posterity. This is a stutterer's fantasy of voice, a fantasy
about the nearly cosmic virtue of fighting to get the words out. But
it's our cultural fantasy, too. There's an implication in the movie,
in the king's pleased exodus from his broadcasting room, that all has
now been said: The language is pronounced, the meaning safeguarded in
history. Maybe it is. Maybe, as so many stutterers would hope, our
public, prepared voices reach farther than our real ones, and the
words we shape still sing beyond our time.

Or maybe their effect is smaller, more specific. Several years ago, I
had my own tiny King's Speech-like moment. For various reasons, I was
expected to deliver a longish address at my high-school graduation,
and after composing it—the easy part—I turned to a speech therapist
and rehearsed as if it were a Chopin nocturne. By the time the
ceremony arrived, I knew every word and flection of that speech, which
I had printed out in 16-point font, 1.5-spaced. I read it smoothly at
the graduation, just the way a nonstuttering person might. But it is
not a victory I frequently return to. "You have such perseverance,
Bertie, you're the bravest man I know," George VI's therapist tells
him in The King's Speech—yet it's hard to see how this could possibly
be true. In the end, a stutterer's real measure of bravery is the same
as anybody else's, and it doesn't have to do with persevering to
accomplish, with effort, what other people manage effortlessly. The
far greater challenge is—and this is more frightening than any
podium—working up the strength to make a leap that even fluent
speakers wouldn't dare.

--