In the Observer the art critic Tom Lubbock writes about the effects of a brain tumour that is slowly killing him, and destroying language along the way:
First of all it was scary; now it's all right; it is still, even now, interesting;
My true exit may be accompanied by no words at all, all gone.
The final thing. The illiterate. The dumb.
Speech?
Quiet but still something?
Noises?
Nothing?
My body. My tree.
After that it becomes simply the world.
I succeeded Tom as radio critic of the Independent some time around 1990, and a little later took over a humorous column he had begun at Punch (not long before its inglorious end); a few years after that, when I was renting an office above a coffee shop in Islington, Tom took the studio on the floor above. So one way or another I've spent a lot of time living in his shadow. He is inordinately clever, but then so are a lot of people. What Tom has that others lack is a mind cleared of cant. The hardest thing for most critics is separating what you think from what others think and what you think you ought to think, but Tom barely registers this as a problem. (See this blog-post by Nigel Warburton, then refer to the article by Tom he's complaining about: where Warburton sees affectation, I can see only freedom.) I have always been a little bit in awe of him, but I've had the consolation of his willingness to treat me as an equal; and once he repeated a witticism of mine back to me as his own. Phew, I thought.
Reactions to his Observer piece have largely mentioned on its power to move. Well, yeah: a dying man with a three-year-old son is going to jerk a tear; and after so many repetitions of that dreary line about people "battling" cancer, at last a real battle, visible on the page (though Tom doesn't hope to "beat" his cancer, only to preserve his mind and voice while it goes about its business). But considered as prose, and as an achievement of intellect in the face of destruction, the piece is astonishing. I think/hope astonishment would suit Tom better. I visited him in hospital this week, belatedly: even with words half gone, the sheer force of mind - astonishing.
An incidental matter: that final line ("After that it becomes simply the world") could mean several things - that the end of language is also the dissolution of a barrier between the mind and the world (Graves's "cool web")? That death is a way into the world? I'm not confident of either version.
The second idea has an interesting pedigree. Cf. Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier" ("A pulse in the eternal mind, no less" - but swipe me, how does a mind get a pulse? And doesn't that "no less" feel tacked on and sloppy?). Better, cf. W. N. P. Barbellion, dying of multiple sclerosis, in The Journal of a Disappointed Man:
To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul," my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie.
(Little Toller books has published a new edition with an introduction by Tim Dee.)
And for film buffs, cf. the monologue that closes The Incredible Shrinking Man.
