The Cure is in the Cuaderno

In the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the young man himself becomes sick and is cured again. A fever, he thinks, a malady that requires electric shock therapy he thinks, but no, the fever breaks. He is cured. But he's not. He thinks he's a poet, but where's the verse? Sure he sits in Paris in the National Library and "has a poet" in his hands. But there's no rhyme or reason here. Only prose and memory, the salt poured in the wound and the ghosts of ancestors. That's what sick is: thinking you're a poet. That's what a cure is: keeping it inside and swallowing it like medicine. That's also a shame. The sound of clown on the quay, the look of tubercular old men. Getting off of the airplane and walking into the snow.