Free The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe Page B

impossible. His family and friends and doctors urge him to take painkillers, but he refuses anything stronger than aspirin and the occasional hot-water bottle. “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly,” he says.
    The decision to refuse painkillers is difficult to watch; it appears to some to be stubbornness. One of his doctors writes, “What he really requires is some psychological treatment to enable him to make a pact with some other medicament similar to that which he has with aspirin, but I dare not suggest that to him.” And it’s true that the old man is not exactly suggestible. He has made up his mind about this last stretch. He wants to be able to consider and analyze what remains to be considered and analyzed.
    In blooming health, he had written: “Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude—something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.” And the accomplishment here, the work, is apparent. The necrosis in his mouth has begun to give off an unpleasant smell. There is a hole in his cheek, as if a bullet has passed straight through. His elaborate prosthesis, which he and his daughter Anna privately refer to as “the Monster,” chafes in his mouth. At night, because insects are drawn to the smell, his bed is covered in mosquito netting, which gives it an exotic, transporting, colonial feel, as if he is in India or Thailand.
    His dog, Lun, will not come near him; the reddish chow cowers under the table. Freud says that what he loves about dogs istheir lack of ambivalence, how they, unlike people, can love without hate, but Lun’s unambivalent love has now turned into unambivalent fear. Lun, who lay on the floor of Freud’s study as his patients went on with their streams of talk, who lay under his desk as he was writing, who had become, through her presence, almost a part of his work, part, almost, of his thinking, is now out of reach.
    This rejection is terrifying, because it is the rejection of the living world, of nature itself. The dog will act on knowledge that the people who love Freud will not act on; they will suppress, overcome, but the dog will not. This is the evidence that death is already in the room. The smell is of rotting, of corpses; it would more decently have waited, but it does not wait.
    On nice days, Freud still lies on a chaise longue in the garden. There is a breeze, so he is covered in a wool blanket and wears a hat and vest. He looks distinguished even swaddled in the blanket, somehow manages even now to project some of his famous authority, to impose. He wears his round-frame black glasses, his face bone white. In his novel he reads, “For him the universe existed no longer; the whole world had come to be within himself. For the sick, the world begins at their pillow and ends at the foot of the bed.” But this is exactly what Freud will not allow. He will not allow the world to begin and end at the foot of his bed. He will not allow that shrinking, or will allow it only up to a point. He listens to the radio reports of the war. He reads the newspaper and follows the march of the Germans through Europe. He reads letters from his friends and from strangers. Letters find their way to his door atMaresfield Gardens, in London, addressed only “Dr. Freud, London,” which amazes him. There is something magical in this, something enchanted; after the elaborate and petty persecutions of the Nazis, this is part of the way England has welcomed him in.
    The novel he is reading, Balzac’s dark, hallucinatory
La Peau de Chagrin
, lies folded on his lap. “This is just the book for me,” he tells his personal physician, Max Schur. “It deals with shrinking and starvation.”

    In his head, Freud had been working for many decades on ideas of how to die. When his friend and disciple Anton von Freund died of abdominal cancer, he wrote in a letter, “He bore his hopelessness with heroic clarity, did