There was a scene in last nights episode of House, Fox’s prime time drama about a crotchety doctor who works on ‘tough’ cases, that was really well done, but not particularly happy for me to watch.
The tough case is a jazz trumpeter who has been paralyzed for months below the waist, and who suffers some sort of collapse in the studio. He thinks that he has lost his air, that even if he recovers, which no one expects, he won’t be able to play. House wants him to stay in the hospital so that he can discover what is wrong with him. The patient agrees, and when House asks why – House had ignored a Do Not Resuscitate order and saved his life – he says, because “we are the same, we’ve got one thing, and without that one thing, we are done. I play the horn, you do this.”
One thing… that also was Jack Palance’s character Curly’s advice to Billy Chrystal’s Mitch in City Slickers.
One thing. Find what it is that you love, then do it. What a fucking cliche.
The problem being that, of course, it is truer than it is false.
There are lots of things I’m good at – practically anything I have to do I can do better than anyone. I don’t love doing much at all. I don’t love very well. I don’t love doing AND I don’t love well; two different things. I love idleness, the time to be alone with my own diversions, with my thoughts, my concepts and abstractions. I don’t love well, namely I don’t reciprocate love well. I can’t balance the equation, I drift, I lose interest, I get bored. I’m probably not autistic, but I don’t think I associate people with feelings as much as I ought. I abstract people just like I abstract systems. That makes me think I understand them, and it makes me think that there isn’t much use for them once I draw their relationships to the system they inhabit. An oversimplification? Yep. But I do it anyhow – I don’t even think about it, it just happens. I see the world as the web of interconnections between nodes and the nodes aren’t really that important as long as their inputs and outputs are well defined.
Systems are my ‘one thing’ – I really really love a well built system. I think the Constitution is among the best systems ever built. So are Euclidean geometry, the Calculus, and the Internet.