My last post about the “First Amendment Institutions” conference was about students. Let me put up a post just for myself. It’s a post by way of thanksgiving, and it requires a slight autobiographical note.
I’ve been dealing with chronic illness and pain issues for decades, having had arthritis since I was four. Happily, active diseases of this sort can largely burn themselves out over time, and drug therapies today are extraordinary. Unhappily, after several decades of this disease, most of the damage has already been done, and I am left with seriously deteriorated joints: in a number of my joints, there’s no “joint” left, just bone grinding against bone. For whatever reason, it’s been an unusually painful summer and fall, and by “unusually” I mean extraordinarily painful. I already have two artificial hips, each of which have been revised once, and it would now appear that I will probably have shoulder replacement surgery by the winter. (If I were to deal with every joint that is seriously troubling me, I would need four surgeries, but my surgeons are focusing on one at a time.) In the meantime, every day is its own challenge. For a while, the pain had me up at four or five each morning and plumb worn out by noon. More recently, I’ve been sleeping long and odd hours, and in some ways this is worse. I am taking a combination of morphine and codeine for the pain. They don’t always get rid of it; when they do, they can have a powerful dampening effect on one’s ability to function clear-headedly. My experience in the past few months has been one of serious disconnection–from myself, from family, from friends, from colleagues and students, in a sense from life itself. On teaching days, I am usually just able to show up, put all my energy into the class, and then collapse, and I feel profound guilt about not being able to offer my students all that they deserve. Even so, I feel grateful: others, including students, deal with worse pain and more serious illnesses. But it can be a rough time just the same.
That’s why, aside from the usual ego boost, I was so grateful for the “First Amendment Institutions” conference. I was afraid that my pain level and the drugs would prevent me from contributing to it as much as I should or getting as much out of it as I could. I was lucky; I was in fairly stable shape during this trip. But I can’t say just how lucky I was, and am. Scholars whose work I admire greatly, who influence me on an ongoing basis, volunteered their time to read the manuscript and to come across country to discuss it (and I might add that although their research funds doubtless covered it, their travel was not subsidized by Alabama, Notre Dame, or anyone else.) They were warm, friendly, engaged, critical–God, were they critical!–and, above all, helpful. Their collective and quite selfless goal was to make someone else’s manuscript as good as it could be given its author’s limitations, and they did so unstintingly and generously. I must thank them by name: Mark Tushnet, Anuj Desai, Joe Blocher, Rick Garnett and Nelson Tebbe (who together organized the conference), John Inazu, Randy Kozel, Fred Gedicks, and, although he couldn’t make it at the last minute, Paul Schiff Berman. I am humbled by and grateful for their help with the book.
Why do I bother to write any of this?
It’s hardly thanks enough, and yet it’s not just about blowing my own horn. For me, it’s about connection and community. Scholarship can be a lonely enterprise: we are all used to the closed office door, the blank page or screen, the project that begins in hope and in the middle is filled with nothing but despair and self-doubt, and so on. But so can life, particularly under conditions of chronic pain, both because of the pain itself and because of the powerful drugs we use to treat it. One can end up feeling like an atom drifting alone in the universe, wondering when one’s last real human contact took place. And then something like this happens. I felt reconnected: plugged back in to a very real community of caring individuals and committed scholars with a joint project, one in which we can join together for the sake of that project and no matter whose name happens to be on the title page. I felt both buoyed and rooted, connected to others while being hoisted on their shoulders. I felt like a human being, and felt that sometimes, sometimes, the scholarly community really exists and is profoundly human and welcoming. I cannot thank my community enough for its friendship, support, and sheer sense of connection. And I hope that somewhere out there, any one person reads this and thinks about how he or she can help others to feel that sense of connection, without regard to cliques, ideology, mutual back-scratching or empire-building, or anything else, but just because we members of this community have an obligation to make it a genuine community. I am blessed by my friends and by the community of which, I am again reminded, I am a part.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on October 3, 2011 at 10:41 AM
Comments
Dear Paul — not *that* critical, right? =-) You know I love the book! Thanks for providing the opportunity for such an affirming, community-building experience.
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Oct 3, 2011 4:53:51 PM
Great post – as a chronic pain sufferer, I really appreciate your perspective and the reminder about the crucial role that gratitude plays in all of our lives.
Posted by: Amy | Oct 3, 2011 1:05:08 PM