Convalecencias

Physicians often feel helpless in the face of that confused and hesitant period we call convalescence: it is no longer illness, but health has not fully recovered either. A forced rest that worries and impatient moralists and bourgeois, because it makes them soon forget the benefits of active life; but a true oasis, on the contrary, for any writer: for Jane Austen and Madame de Staël, for Goethe, Tolstoy, Zola and Henry James, for Rilke, Proust, Döblin, Céline, Thomas Mann and many others. Choose the peace that the room offers -that haven for thought, for creation, for love even- or the resounding effort that the world demands? In the past, rest was seen only as an inevitable consequence of warrior ardor or as a respite intended for rigorous vital examination, for profound and exemplary conversion. However, in this century that we now inhabit, in which as a society we continue and are seriously damaged, it seems that we have become more attentive and sensitive to that pause as intense as it is limited. Because we know all too well that the fragile pleasures of convalescence barely withstand the ravages of steely modern times.