To paraphrase: A small concern of mine—but only small—is that, in the future, nobody will do anything else except tend to the person beside them in an infinite regress, the meaning of which will not be total help, but total helplessness. Goethe: I am eagerly looking forward to reading the third part of Herder’s book. Please keep it for me until I can tell you where to send it. I’m sure he will have set forth very well the beautiful dream-wish of mankind that things will be better some day. Speaking for myself, I too believe that humanity will win in the long run: I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse. (Italian Journey, Penguin. 316–317.) People will even begin to speak in the way they imagine a doctor speaks, but nowhere will anyone be able to find a real doctor, and if they do, the doctor will not say anything. The receptionist at the desk of the emergency room will tend to the nurses, the patients will tend to the janitors, the janitors will tend to the receptionist, the doctors will remain silent—an insurance agent will drift through the shaking yet invincible order of the waiting room, triage, the hallways, past the empty beds, like an angel. This angel in a pressed suit is subject to an inscrutable bureaucracy—they have the most comprehensive healthcare but do not ever need it—and his job is to enter the doings of this great hospital—which pours from the world into the building of the concentrated hospital itself like rainwater into a cistern out of which it will flow again, into the diffuse hospital of the world—into his register, so that he may clearly put in order, on paper, the tending of each person for the other, and so on. He carefully registers this flowing economy of care in his near-perfect hand, duplicated and pressed into fine lines, and none of the acts described, however detailed, will be disbursed more than a handful of (very clean) pocket change. These sums are arrived at using a few elegant tables and matrices our agent, our angel, has at his disposal in the back of his notebook. Really more of a ledger. He performs a calculation and enters the result—a legal-poetic remark—into the ledger via the diffuse light of this great hospital, where the patients and doctors, looking past each other, both dream of a humanity that has, in the long run, won, whatever something like that could mean.
If you enjoyed this short piece, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Among other things (like complementary print pieces, extra book reviews / recommendations and personalized feedback on your own writing), a paid subscription gets you exclusive access to manuscript excerpts and the full COM-POSIT archive.