"Historically, there is a version of this proverb going way back the earliest is from 1340 in English and probably earlier in Latin." "The original phrase being, 'A rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor,'" Zimmer told ABC News. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.It's a proverb whose meaning has changed 180 degrees from its origins, according to Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe-what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.īeyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science.
Einhorn, that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries-I believed in that. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough.
Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better-but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. “The night before brain surgery, I thought about death.
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