The dentist tapped at the tooth, and looked serious.
“It will have to come out,” he said.
I was not sorry. The thing was hurting me, and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.
But Dr. McTaggart said: “I can’t give you anything to deaden the pain, you know.”
“Why not?”
“There is a great deal of infection, and the matter has spread far beyond the roots of the tooth.”
I accepted his reasoning on trust and said: “Well, go ahead.”
And I sat back in the chair, mute with misgivings, while he happily trotted over to his toolbox singing “It won’t be a stylish marriage” and pulled out an ugly-looking forceps.
“All ready?” he said, jacking back the chair, and brandishing the instrument of torture. I nodded, feeling as if I had gone pale to the roots of my hair.
But the tooth came out fast, in one big, vivid flash of pain and left me spitting a lot of green and red business into the little blue whispering whirlpool by the side of the dentist’s chair.
“Oh, goodness,” said Dr. McTaggart, “I don’t like that very much, I must say.”
I walked wearily back to school, reflecting that it was not really so terrible after all to have a tooth pulled out without novocain. However, instead of getting better, I got worse. By evening, I was really ill, and that night—that sleepless night—was spent in a fog of sick confusedness and general pain. The next morning they took my temperature and put me to bed in the sickroom, where I eventually got to sleep.
That did not make me any better. And I soon gathered in a vague way that our matron, Miss Harrison, was worried about me, and communicated her worries to the headmaster, in whose own house this particular sickroom was.
Then the school doctor came around. And he went away again, returning with Dr.
McTaggart who, this time, did not sing.
And I heard them agreeing that I was getting to be too full of gangrene for my own good. They decided to lance a big hole in my gum, and see if they could not drain the pocket of infection there and so, having given me a little ether, they went ahead. I awoke with my mouth full of filth, both doctors urging me to hurry up and get rid of it.
When they had gone, I lay back in bed and closed my eyes and thought: “I have blood poisoning.”
And then my mind went back to the sore foot I had developed in Germany. Well,
54 1.8 In the Face of Death · A THOMAS MERTON READER
I would tell them about it when they came back the next time.
Sick, weary, half asleep, I felt the throbbing of the wound in my mouth. Blood poisoning.
The room was very quiet. It was rather dark, too. And as I lay in bed, in my weari-ness and pain and disgust, I felt for a moment the shadow of another visitor pass into the room.
It was death, that came to stand by my bed.
I kept my eyes closed, more out of apathy than anything else. But anyway, there was no need to open one’s eyes to see the visitor, to see death. Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
And, with those eyes, those interior eyes, open upon that coldness, I lay half asleep and looked at the visitor, death.
What did I think? All I remember was that I was filled with a deep and tremen-dous apathy. I felt so sick and disgusted that I did not very much care whether I died or lived. Perhaps death did not come very close to me, or give me a good look at the nearness of his coldness and darkness, or I would have been more afraid.
But at any rate, I lay there in a kind of torpor and said: “Come on, I don’t care.”
And then I fell asleep.
What a tremendous mercy it was that death did not take me at my word, that day, when I was still only seventeen years old. What a thing it would have been if the trapdoors that were prepared for me had yawned and opened their blackness and swallowed me down in the middle of that sleep! Oh, I tell you, it is a blessing beyond calculation that I woke up again, that day, or the following night, or in the week or two that came after.
And I lay there with nothing in my heart but apathy—there was a kind of pride and spite in it: as if it was life’s fault that I had to suffer a little discomfort, and for that I would show my scorn and hatred of life, and die, as if that were a revenge of some sort.
Revenge upon what? What was life? Something existing apart from me, and separate from myself? Don’t worry, I did not enter into any speculations. I only thought: “If I have to die—what of it. What do I care? Let me die, then, and I’m finished.”
Religious people, those who have faith and love God and realize what life is and what death means, and know what it is to have an immortal soul, do not understand how it is with the ones who have no faith, and who have already thrown away their souls. They find it hard to conceive that anyone could enter into the presence of death without some kind of compunction. But they should realize that millions of men die the way I was then prepared to die, the way I then might have died.
They might say to me: “Surely you thought of God, and you wanted to pray to Him for mercy.”
No. As far as I remember, the thought of God, the thought of prayer did not even enter my mind, either that day, or all the rest of the time that I was ill, or that whole year, for that matter. Or if the thought did come to me, it was only as an occasion for its denial and rejection. I remember that in that year, when we stood in the chapel and recited the Apostles’ Creed, I used to keep my lips tight shut, with full deliberation and of set purpose, by way of declaring my own creed which was: “I believe in nothing.” Or
A THOMAS MERTON READER · 1.8 In the Face of Death 55 at least I thought I believed in nothing. Actually, I had only exchanged a certain faith, faith in God, Who is Truth, for a vague uncertain faith in the opinions and author-ity of men and pamphlets and newspapers—wavering and varying and contradictory opinions which I did not even clearly understand.
THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN
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