This article is from the public number:Book List (ID: BookSelection) author: light cloud, the original title “AIDS, cancer patients confession: more terrible than death, is someone else’s eyes,” drawing from the title: Feel China
A few days ago, the book single watched a movie in the cinema.Telling her, I am shocked.
This movie tells the story of a grandmother in a Chinese family being diagnosed with cancer. Her family decided to hide her from this fact. Billy, who grew up in New York, believes that Grandma has the right to know her condition, Chinese and Western culture. The conflict began.
Sickness is something that cannot be ignored, but is usually deliberately avoided and not discussed. We know more about it more or less, but often it looks at it through some tags and stereotypes.
Either the East or the West, people are biased against patients. What is different is that the direction of prejudice is different.
The problem presented by this movie, many families in reality have also appeared: around a seriously ill patient, why is it always around lies?
For this topic, Shudanjun introduces a book to you – “The Metaphor of Disease.”
The author of the book, Susan Sontag, has had cancer. She found that during the cancer, she was more painful than the disease. It turned out that people looked at her cancer patient.
In her view, patients with many diseases have often been “killed” by moral judgment and discrimination before they die of illness.
I have no tuberculosis, not worthy of being an artist
In the 19th century literary circle, there has been a wonderful fashion: health? It is a mediocre and vulgar thing. If you want the soul to sublimate and become a noble person, you must get sick. Cold headaches and the like are not enough, but also the terminal illness of that era – tuberculosis.
British national writer Dickens portrays tuberculosis as a disease that makes death elegant:
The body is costly and dying a little bit a day, and the spirit becomes lighter and more joyful as the body’s load becomes lighter.
This is a bit like what some people say now, they haven’t been smashed and splashed with dirty water.
But in comparison, it’s even more amazing. After all, the “elegance” that was exchanged for life was much more exaggerated than the “spending elegance” of buying brand-name bags.
In those days, tuberculosis = elegant, is a prevailing label.
In the eyes of people at the time, tuberculosis was a disease in which life was burned. The patient’s face is often pale, talking about the air, but with a strong cough, the face becomes flushed.
It’s like a flame in the body, burning the vitality of people, making people feel weak, delicate, and full of passion.
Before the invention of antibiotics that can really treat tuberculosis, doctors usually give treatments such as sunbathing, keeping a good mood, and going to clean and dry places to travel.
The book can not help but feel that the doctors at that time were all literary youth?
Artists who like to find meaning capture these characteristics of tuberculosis and find the corresponding part of tuberculosis in reality. The burning of life? This is not love. Sunshine, good mood, travel? Not just freedom.
Therefore, tuberculosis is often used in the works of artists:
In love with a beautiful girl, she doesn’t love me, then I will fall into love and suffer from tuberculosis.
Aspiration for freedom, and being caught in reality, there is a tuberculosis, and I have a perfect and sad excuse to wander the horizon and pursue freedom..
The pursuit of cowardly morbid beauty has also existed in China since ancient times.
Speaking of Xi Shi, one of the four great beauty of the ancient times, in addition to beauty, the biggest label is frail and sick. The reason why Lin Daiyu is lovable is because he is sick and beautiful.
If you want to be a high-end beauty, it’s not enough to be beautiful, temperamental, and make-up. Frail and sick must be the standard for beauty.
The heroine of the Korean drama has leukemia, and the main character in the 19th century literary works has tuberculosis, which is actually the same reason.
These two diseases give people a kind of “sweet, sad” morbid beauty, and when they die, they will not be as sick and full of scars as some diseases, so they are also dignified.
As for why tuberculosis is not possible, the answer is simple: tuberculosis is now dead. A sick person can’t die, it lacks the tragic nature of a fate.
After all, in these beautified diseases, what is truly beautified is actually death.
Cancer is actually an infectious disease
The fate of cancer is much more tragic than tuberculosis. This is a disease in which people talk about lowering their voices. It seems that the word “cancer” is already enough to kill.
The Metaphor of Disease says:
For poetry, cancer is a rare and still unrecognizable subject; it is almost unthinkable to beautify the disease.
Not decent, is the core label of cancer.
The biggest difference between cancer and tuberculosis is that cancer cells are aggressive. It is like an enemy that invades the body. It constantly expands its territory in the human body until it captures the whole body and makes the patient die. It is full of tumors, unrecognizable, and needs to suffer great pain.
And cancer often attacks some places that are ashamed of it. The breasts, rectum, bladder, testicles, uterus, prostate… The names of these organs are enough to make it difficult for us to hang on our lips, not to mention the word “cancer” at the back.
In China, once a person has cancer, the doctor will hide from the patient and tell the patient’s family about the truth and let them decide whether to tell the patient. In real life, few families choose to tell patients.
More than half of cancer patients don’t know what they are getting to death, because family members default to the patient and can’t afford the “you have cancer”.
The Western culture is just the opposite. The doctor will secretly tell the patient to let the patient decide whether to tell his family. More than half of the patients will not tell his family what illness they have.
The book has experienced the scenes in “Don’t tell him” when he was a child. When I was young, I saw the elderly suffering from cancer lying in bed, and asked the parents, what illness did Grandpa get? Parents usually dodge, do not want to tell the truth, just say, that is… get sick, children don’t have to know so much.
Why can’t you say that?When I was a child, I didn’t understand it. After reading the Metaphor of Disease, I clearly understood: They think that cancer is a shameful thing.
A person unfortunately suffers from cancer. This is obviously not his fault. He is already painful enough and miserable. Why do we still feel embarrassed for him? It seems that he has done something wrong with him, which makes him inferior. ?
Susan Sontag wrote in the book:
Because once you get cancer, you may be treated as a scandal that jeopardizes the patient’s sexual life, his promotion opportunities, and even his work…
Lying on cancer patients and lying on cancer patients themselves, all of which proves how difficult it is for people to face death in developed industrial societies.
When Sontag himself developed cancer, those patients who met during chemotherapy showed no dislike of their cancer and were ashamed of it.
It is a kind of self-deprecation. Not only because in most people’s eyes, cancer has basically been equated with death, but also because other people’s dodging vision is “killing.”
After the cancer healed, Sontag wrote with grief:
Cancer is like an infectious disease. Even if it is not contagious in fact, it may be morally contagious.
“Get AIDS? That must be his deserved.”
In 1981, New York and Los Angeles reported that some young homosexuals died of rare diseases, and their immune function was extremely low, which caused great concern in the medical community.
Two years later, May 1983, AIDS (HIV) was officially confirmed to be discovered. Today, more than 30 years later, nearly 20 million people worldwide have died of AIDS. The fear of this contagious “super disease” has surpassed cancer.
AIDS is terrible, but the label that people put on AIDS exposes the deepest dark side of the person.
Book Shanjun saw in an article that an AIDS patient said: “I am not afraid of death, I am afraid that others will see my discrimination.”
When too many people talk about AIDS patients, they directly regard the patient as the devil itself equivalent to HIV, and have forgotten that the patient is actually a victim.
The book has seen many people talking about AIDS patients. When they talk about cancer patients, the tone is very different. They will say, “I got AIDS? Then he must not be a good thing, deserve it. Everyone is far away from him. .”
In their mouths, AIDS does not seem to be a disease, more like a “day penalty” for some people.
In the book, Sontag talked about a strange phenomenon. If a person suffers from cancer, he will think that he is unfair and feels that he is unlucky. He will say painfully why it is me.
But if a person gets AIDS, he probably won’t be attributed to “unlucky” and will not ask “why is me.” Instead, I can probably guess why I am sick and I am ashamed of it.
She wrote:
As far as most AIDS cases are concerned, people with AIDS are found to be part of a “high-risk group”, a member of a community that is despised by society. AIDS has exposed the identity of AIDS patients, and this identity has been concealed from neighbors, colleagues, family and friends.
So, those innocent people who have accidentally infected because of blood transfusion, will everyone sympathize with them? The truth is, more will not.
People who are infected with blood transfusions because of blood transfusions are also ruthlessly alienated, thinking they may represent a bigger threat because they are not as easily identified as those who have become stigmatized. .
As HIV comes along, there is always fear, discrimination and crime.
Now, there are already many AIDS care organizations in the world, and launching public welfare activities such as “give a hug to AIDS patients”, hoping to wash away the stigma of patients, but people who fear it still try to hide far away. of.
Book Shan understands that the fear of AIDS has become a new disease identified by medical organizations, called “phobia”. It is a mental illness, a fear that AIDS is beyond common sense and disrupts normal life.
Some people say that fear of AIDS is more terrible than AIDS. The number of people suffering from fear of AIDS is almost ten times that of AIDS patients.
They have had sex with strangers, or are homosexuals, or have smoked their blood, or even just fear of not coming, and they go to the hospital for HIV testing.
Many people with phobias live on the verge of collapse every day. They worry that drinking water, kissing, going to public toilets, going to the pool with the same cup will all be AIDS.
Some of them committed suicide because of fear. The reason is: If I really get AIDS, I don’t know how to face my family and friends.
Why are they so scared? Is it because AIDS will die? If this is the case, then according to the probability, they should be more afraid of car accidents.
What makes them really scared is the moral judgment and discrimination we have against AIDS. The fear of that kind of discrimination is enough for an otherwise healthy person to give up his life.
Susan Sontag wrote in the book: “The purpose of my book is to calm the imagination, not to stimulate the imagination.“
Imagination is the cornerstone of our understanding of the world. But once we put too many labels on a thing, it gives it too much metaphor and symbolic meaning. The thing itself will often be deformed, alienated, and eventually become other. s things.
Sickness is just one of the more common and less reflexive ones. In the moment, things that are labeled and unrecognizable are too many.
We open the network every day, as if we have opened a label of the ocean. Single dog, exquisite poor, older women, scum male, green tea 婊…
We classify a complex, neutral thing into a simple label, and look at the world through the label while tagging itself.
After a long time, we will no longer see the original appearance of the world.
This article is from the public number:Book List (ID: BookSelection), author : light turbid