“Well, Elie, nobody could ever accuse you of walking in a straight line,” said the skeleton, sitting up and visibly brightening at the change of subject.  

I’ve always been a divergent thinker, you know that.  The thing about walking a straight line, and the only thing I really dislike about it, is that the line is so fucking straight and the effort to keep to it so can be so inhibiting.  All the side trips and digressions, wiped out by staring at the path straight ahead, are too interesting to miss.  

It’s like Bruce Lee’s message to his student not to focus on the finger that points, when he slaps the kid on the top of the head to drive home the point. “It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon,” the kid looks where the finger is pointing– slap!, the finger now wagging “don’t concentrate on the finger — or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

“We could call your creative reluctance to make the effort to hew to a straight path the secret of your unsuccess,” said the skeleton.

“That’s harsh, I realize that.  If we take your life’s work as a whole, it’s possible to spin it, as you will when you turn sixty in a few weeks, as a quest for understanding.  I really do get it, even if I echo the cynical voice of our Free Market culture that only values things that are monetized.  So, cool, ‘historiography’ it is today.

“Talk about meta-narrating skeletons…” mused the skeleton.

“Well, historiography, though I applaud its goals, you know, the critical examination of sources and trying to show what actually happened, as opposed to the tendentious victors’ tales, ideologically-driven narratives and simplistic hagiographies that have been handed down to us as ‘history’ going back to ancient times, is part of our increasingly specialized culture.

“There’s the field of study and the study of an individual branch of the field of study and emerging schools of critical thought on the study of each specialized sub-field of study.  You can write a doctoral thesis nowadays on the specialized application of critical examination theories for reading unreadably jargonized doctoral thesis proposals.”  

Might this be a good time for a digression about the horrors of specialization?

“There’s no time like the present, as those who specialize in forging ahead always say,” said the skeleton. 

Harari observes in his brilliant Sapiens that the hunter gatherer homo sapiens of pre-agricultural settlement days had to know more about more things in order to survive than any Renaissance Man who ever lived.   It was a matter of life and death, knowing how to navigate by landmarks and the stars, read the sky for weather, make fire to cook and keep from freezing, fashion your own tools and weapons, tend to your own wounds, know plants and animals and how to find and consume the ones that were healthy, avoid the ones that would kill you.  They each had to know how to make clothes when it turned cold, how to make a needle and thread, or fashion some kind of straps to put the animal skins they wore together.  Every homo sapiens who survived had to be a master of many, many skills.  Plus, they had to stay in great shape, as they did by walking miles and miles every day, hunting and gathering.

“And a very old man lived to be thirty, of course,” said the skeleton.

True, not that longevity is the best measure of a good life.

“Tell that to the octogenarian who gets the diagnosis of his fatal illness,” said the skeleton.

I get that.  I’m certainly not looking forward to not waking up one day, struggle though it sometimes is to wake up some days.

“Finish making Harari’s point or we’re never going to move ahead and get back to describing mom,” said the skeleton.

Once humans discovered how to cultivate plants and domesticate animals, settlements began, and so did specialization.  It was increasingly about maximizing the use of each person’s skill, or at least of their man or woman power.  That was the beginning of culture, but in a sense, it was the beginning of the end as far as the sum of human knowledge residing in each individual.  It kicked into high gear during the age of mass over-production and excess we are still living in.  

In a way the liberation from foraging was the kiss of death for most people alive, reducing most to drones of one kind or another. Stand 14 hours a day at a loom feeding a machine that spins cotton into cloth?  Win the right to stand for only 8 hours a day doing one thing over and over and over on an assembly line?  Lecture on the same subset of a field of evolving specialization day after day?

“Then again, human history has shown that knowledge is not really the goal of most humans anyway. We’ve always gladly traded abstractions like knowledge and freedom for comfort and tangible security, homo sapiens has always done that, would be crazy not to.  In the agricultural settlement you had liberation from the terrors of daily survival, surplus, the beginning of the concepts of relaxation and leisure. The growth of civilization, if you want to call it that, which ended the constant preoccupation with physical survival, also freed the mind, of some, for the beginning of deeper thought, more serious speculation.

“On to the industrial age, in more modern times, anyway, when at the end of these days you could go home and watch TV and have a beer, instead of sleeping with one eye open for predators that were looking to eat you.  It’s always a trade off, I suppose,” said the skeleton.

But we lost something essential about the human experience when we became such narrow specialists.  Most people in industrial societies wind up specialized mostly in being alienated, fungible drones and distracted consumers.

“Well, that’s true, but it’s also harsh.  Although, look, I obviously understand your larger point.  Increasing specialization may increase expertise, but there’s often a steep price in larger knowledge to be paid,” said the skeleton.  

The doctor I saw for years could not actually diagnose anything. He’d defer to the appropriate expert.   He’d send you to the ear doctor for your ear, the abdomen doctor for your abdomen, the nose doctor for your nose, and so forth.   To make this all the sweeter, he was a teaching doctor in a teaching hospital, presumably teaching his students to be very careful to refer patients to the appropriate specialist.  Tell them about the end of your life, talk about steep prices to pay for specialized knowledge.

“There are few more grotesque examples of that than the last couple of years of my life.  You remember that time I picked you up at Fort Lauderdale airport and you noticed I’d become an old man in the few months since you’d seen me last?”  said the skeleton.

Yes.  It was striking.  And let me not pause to wonder how the hell you could know how shocked I was.  You were waiting by the gate and you looked, for the first time, weak, frail, tired out, old.  It was partly your general grimness as you prepared to defend yourself against whatever might be coming from me, but it was more than that.  

“I was probably already dying of liver cancer,” said the skeleton.  

Your eyes seemed watery, red, slightly unfocused.  The aura around you was grey, unhealthy.  Your outlines were faded, it was like you were fading before my eyes.  It was a shock to see you that way, you had always been such a vital man.  

“I used to run up the stairs, even as a seventy year-old.  You remember the cadence of my sprightly steps as I  hopped up the staircase?”  

I do indeed.  Then, overnight, it was an effort.  You began to drag yourself around.  

“Then I went to the doctor, I suddenly had no strength or energy, and it happened all at once,” said the skeleton.  “So naturally, I made the round of renowned specialists.  And it’s much worse in Florida, of course.  I’ve always said that Florida doctors were the worst in the world.  ‘Your old patient died?  That’s what they do, doc.  Here, watch this drive, the titanium shaft makes all the difference.’  Doctors who couldn’t practice anywhere else make a fortune in south Florida.  

“The old guy goes to the Boca Raton doctor complaining that he can’t pee.  The doctor asks how old the patient is.  The guy says ninety.  ‘You peed enough,’ says the doctor.   Jokes that killed the Borscht Belt.   

“It was no joke, though, being in the hands of these blind men feeling up the elephant.  The cardiologist, truly a world renowned guy, at least in Florida, he was a professor of cardiology, I think, gripped the elephant’s trunk and said ‘the elephant is like a snake.’  He reached the end of his expertise and I still felt like complete shit.  Sent me after a while to the bright young hematologist who felt the leg and said ‘the elephant is like a tree trunk’ and then had me in for monthly follow-ups when I wasn’t scheduled with the cardiologist.    Then I met the endocrinologist who grabbed the tail and announced, confidently, ‘the elephant is like a stick!’   I met with one or another of these geniuses continually, sometimes two a week, for the next two years.  They all had to make a living, after all, and Medicare was paying most of it anyway.  One of them gave me a B-12 shot which perked me up for about a day. 

 “You put yourself in their hands at your peril, not that you really have much choice.   None of them thought to rule out the liver cancer that none diagnosed or tested me for, the thing that killed me.  My father died of liver disease, for fuck sake.”

I was told by my former doctor that liver cancer is famously hard to diagnose.  But, of course, he would say that, he’s not a trained hepatic oncologist.  

“In the old days the G.P. would order the tests.  He’d feel your stomach, listen to your chest, ask questions, order tests, follow up.  ‘This doesn’t look right, Irv,’ he’d say after a month of this.  The doctor would get to the bottom of it, if he could, with good, old-fashioned detective work.  ‘How did your parents die?’ might be a good clue.  But today, the only person who can answer the specific question is the one with the specific training to answer that particular one.  

“Your sister called you on the first night of Passover and told you the E.R. doctor had known at a glance that I was in the final stage of liver cancer.  The genius I’d seen literally the day before, and his colleague I had an appointment to see the week after, had had absolutely no clue.  I’d be dead before my next appointment with the endocrinologist.  Diagnosis to death: six days, I think.  You could count them yourself, but I was dead before the end of Passover, you remember that.”  

Wow, I just made a strange connection, eleven years after the fact. Shortly before you died one of the Jamaican nurses in the hospital showed me your fingernails.  “It won’t be long now,” she told me,”the blue under the fingernails mean the blood is not bringing any oxygen there any more.”  Then she asked me about your religious faith, suggested if we had a prayer it was time to start saying it.  

I had no prayer, neither did you, I told her we were Jewish, but not religious.  She started singing “Dayenu”.  

“She had a nice voice, I remember,” said the skeleton.  

Yes, and she even pronounced the Hebrew pretty nicely.  She sang one chorus, and I remember feeling it was pretty surreal.  How bizarre to sing that particular song.  But thinking about it now, it was a pretty good choice.  If God had given us any one of these blessings it would have been enough for us.  True dat.  

The thing I just realized– it was still Passover and Dayenu is from the Passover Haggaddah.   Not only was the choice apt, she was singing a Passover song of thanks during Passover.

“Yeah, how ’bout that,” said the skeleton.  

We’ll have to get back to historiography next time.  I wanted to run some things by you, like the 4.5 million proud, card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan enrolled nationwide in 1924, the year you were born.  

“Sure thing.  Unlike you, I have all the time in the world,” said the skeleton with a sly wink.