Free My Life as a Man by Philip Roth Page B

army that was wasting my valuable time. That the pain not only continued to plague me, but in the months following my discharge began to spread until it had encompassed both halves of my skull, served to bolster, in a grim way, a faltering sense of my own probity.
    Unless, of course, I was covering my tracks, “ allowing ” the headaches a somewhat longer lease on my life than might be physically desirable, for the sake of my moral well-being. For who could accuse me of falling ill as a means of cutting short my tour of army duty when it was clear that the rewarding academic life I had been so anxious to return to continued to be as marred by this affliction as my purposeless military existence had been? Each time I had emerged from another twenty-four-hour session of pain, I would think to myself, “ How many more, before I ’ ve met my obligation? ” I wondered if it was not perhaps the “ plan ” of these headaches to visit themselves upon me until such time as I would have been discharged from the service under ordinary conditions. Did I, as it were, owe the army a migraine for each month of service I had escaped, or was it for each week, or each day, or each hour? Even to believe that they might the out by the time I was fifty was hardly consolation to an ambitious twenty-four-year-old with as strong a distaste for the sickbed as I had developed in my childhood; also to one made buoyant by fulfilling the exacting demands of schedules and routines, the prospect of being dead to the world and to my work for twenty-four hours every ten days for the next thirty-six years, the thought of all that waste, was as distressing as the anticipation of the pain itself. Three times a month, for God only knew how long, I was to be sealed into a coffin (so I described it to myself, admittedly in the clutch of self-pity) and buried alive. Why?
    I had already considered (and dismissed) the idea of taking myself to a psychoanalyst, even before the neurologist at Billings informed me that a study in p sychosomatic medicine was about to be initiated at a North Shore clinic, under the direction of an eminent Freudian analyst. He thought it was more than likely that I might be taken on as a patient at a modest fee, especially as they were said to be interested particularly in the ailments that manifested themselves in “ intellectuals ” and “ creative types. ” The neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily symptomatic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding, he said, to what he took to be “ a Freudian orientation ” in the questions I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the history of the disorder.
    I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say, I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the “ meaning ” in Gogol ’ s short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev ’ s temporary loss of his nose. Whereas an ordinary man might complain, “ I get these damn headaches ” (and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as standing for something, as a disclosure or “ epiphany, ” isolated or accidental or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book. What did my migraines signify?
    The possibilities I came up with did not satisfy a student as “ sophisticated ” as myself; compared with The Magic Mountain or even “ The Nose, ” the texture of my own story was thin to the point of transparency. It was disappointing, for instance, to find myself associating the disability that had come over me when I had begun