A black hole could swallow us. An asteroid could fall crashing from the sky. The Higgs field, which permeates space and determines the properties of elementary particles, could sigh and shudder, causing and the cosmos as we know it to flicker out like a dream.
But the other half of my job consists of reminding people of all the wondrous, even miraculous, things that atoms and elementary particles can do: form stars, planets, cat videos, the aurora borealis, us.
Just because these things are not permanent doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of our awe and love.
Not long ago, I discovered a striking coincidence: thirty years earlier, my father also dressed up as a doctor to sneak into the same hospital, with a different purpose—to visit his older brother who had lung cancer, and slip him prohibited foodstuffs outside of visiting hours. My uncle’s terminal illness became the nucleus of family stories of loss and misfortune, and meant I grew up in the shadow of a corpulent man felled in his prime by a rare carcinoma at the age of forty. In time, I realized this preoccupation with cancer wasn’t limited to my family, but that it distills most of our society’s fears and obsessions. Guilt, luck, karma, heredity, suffering, and mortality are just some of the coordinates that guide or mislead us when we face the emperor of all maladies, as Siddhartha Mukherjee calls it.
My father loathes the word cancer, to which he attributes ominous powers. A taboo. On the other hand, many people overuse it, to refer not to the out-of-control proliferation of cells, but to politicians, corruption, and bad habits. Reggaetón is the cancer of our society, they say. A man recently wrote on Facebook that feminism is the cancer of our age. (If I didn’t object to the metaphor in general, I’d say guys like him are the cancer of our age.) Maybe we should all dress up as doctors to tame this word, so feared yet overused; to tame the word cancer in a cultural sense, and at the same time, through science, free ourselves from its fury.
He had his green jacket on. I know because I saw it myself. He walked in the green forest, and beside him walked a tiger. He walked in the green forest, and he looked up at the leaves. I see that the light shimmers in his hair, which is the same color as the tiger’s pelt. He walks alone. He doesn’t understand why he’s alone. But he has his tiger. He had his tiger. He lays his hand on its strong back, and I see that he’s untroubled. Now the road turns, he disappears around the bend, the path leads him deeper and deeper into the green forest. He was untroubled. He didn’t know why he was alone. Beside him walked a tiger.
It’s impossible to read about a tower block in flames without thinking of Grenfell, and while the author’s note says that the tragedy wasn’t her inspiration, she does dedicate the book to the Grenfell residents, and it brings the needlessness and horror of those events to life.