In his new book, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst likens his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017 to the opening of a trapdoor on which he unfortunately happened to be standing “like Wile E Coyote” at the precise moment when the lever operating it was pulled. On that day, a neurologist briskly explained to him that his recent MRI scan had revealed the existence of lesions on his spine and brain that were almost certainly the result of MS, and in that moment – whoosh! – down he plummeted. “There was,” he writes, “a creak of wood, the sharp click of a sliding bolt, and then nothing but the sensation of rushing air.” His symptoms – the struggle to get out of a hot bath; the feeling, after a long walk, that his legs could no longer carry him – had hitherto been more bothersome than distressing or painful. But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable.
Still, he wasn’t about to give up: then, or now. In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmes films, gamely waves an ankle at me. “Feel my knee!” he instructs. “Go on! Feel it.”
On Earth, there is a place called Point Nemo where one can be so far away from other humans that the closest person to encounter is 250 miles above, orbiting in the International Space Station. In the Pacific Ocean, Point Nemo is equidistant from all points of land: 1,670 miles from the Pitcairn Islands to the north; Easter Islands, to the northeast; and Maher Island, to the south. It’s so far from human habitation that it has become a convenient graveyard — artificial satellites past their purpose are de-orbited there, safe from crashing into any populated areas. As someone living in the arid and scrubby hills of the Great Basin high desert, it is hard to imagine a place more alien than that. Water in all directions, the nearest point of land far beyond the horizon. No correct direction to head toward to find shore, only any direction. I want to reconstitute the fundamentalist Evangelical Christian faith I was raised in to be like Point Nemo. Allow me to explain.
Hostility, chaos, murder and bearish gloom have been key elements of Russian prison literature. So has psychosis, in various forms. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the opening pages of “The Gulag Archipelago,” wrote that being arrested in Russia is such a “breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you” that the shock causes some to slip sideways into insanity.
Here are the crossroads where old women come
Under the quarter moon to cast their spells,