“I said I think that a guy who’s always interested in the condition of the world and changing it either has no problems of his own or refuses to face them,” said the novelist Henry Miller in a talking-head segment from Warren Beatty’s much-honored 1981 biopic of the Communist journalist John Reed, Reds.
Although the film itself worked overtime to aggrandize its protagonist—he was, after all, played by Beatty, then in full command of his charm and screen presence—Miller did the opposite: The sly, devilish author of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and other once-scandalous novels was attempting to cut Reed down to size. To put it bluntly, Miller was making the case that those who become whipped up by causes—Reed was a cheerleader for the catastrophic rise of Communism—do so not out of saintliness but out of boredom with, or myopia about, their own lives. (Perhaps that is why retired, presumably well-off Boomers are said to be so well represented at those wearisome, pointless “No Kings” protests we occasionally hear about.)
Yet there is a third condition essential to those “always interested in the condition of the world”: that they be free from a migraine headache. This was brought into sharp relief to me last week when, sidelined for nearly a full day by one of my blessedly infrequent migraines, I could not stir myself to care about anything—certainly not changing the world, or walking to the mailbox, or reading the book I had to finish for a review deadline later that week. All three seemed hopelessly Herculean when compared to the pain.
If you doubt my words, please consult the late writer Joan Didion, who, in her classic essay (perhaps her single best piece of writing), “In Bed,” offered her testimony as a migraineuse. “When I am in a migraine aura…I will drive through red lights, lose the house keys, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to focus my eyes or frame coherent sentences,” Didion wrote.
In other words, a migraine soaks up all the attention in the room—which is to say, its sufferer’s head. I have been beset by migraines on days when I had been looking forward to doing something or going somewhere, but the emergence of the migraine always—always—results in not only the cessation of those plans but also the disappearance of any regret for their cessation. In her essay, Didion described the way that a migraine’s pain distracts its victim from daily physical activities, but in my experience, it also makes impossible the more intangible act of thinking: The attempt to marshal brain power to contemplate the things that I have sacrificed to the migraine—the movie I’m missing or the walk I planned to take, let alone following or becoming invested in daily news—simply intensifies the agony.
I mentioned earlier that my migraines are infrequent, and compared to earlier times in my life, that is true. I remember regularly getting them as a child, and I remember, too, the relief I felt when my parents elected to homeschool me, beginning in the third grade: Under this arrangement, if I suffered a migraine during the school day, I would have the option of retiring to my room—the march to darkness and quiet familiar to all sufferers—rather than facing multiple hours of clanging classrooms and screechy blackboards. (How eagerly I awaited the arrival of my father’s Volvo at 3 p.m. as I was powering through an awful headache in the second grade.) But, for whatever reason, my migraines waned as I entered young adulthood and remain infrequent in my middle age.
Last week’s migraine was a doozy, but my reaction to it was not what it might have been 10 or 20 years ago. Back then, upon the subsiding of the pain, I would have avidly resumed my activities and reconstituted my interests. After this last migraine, though, I felt less compelled to jump back into life than to proceed with caution. This time, I found I related to what Didion said about her condition, post-migraine: “For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties.” For her, a migraine was “a circuit breaker.”
My last migraine swept away all those worldly cares—the ones that would have been so deeply unimpressive to Henry Miller—and I have not been hasty, in the days since, to put them back. Maybe a migraine, for all its pain, is a call to meekness: a reminder that we needn’t bear the weight of the world, our profoundest ambitions, or our gravest fears, even when we feel well enough to do so. In a world so exhausting, so divisive, there are worse conditions to which to aspire.
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