About Alice Read Online Free Page B

one day at the graduate center, having come directly from teaching a class, he commented on her outfit and asked if Mina’s students, virtually all of whom were strapped for cash as well as for correct verb endings, were put off by her stunning clothes. “But, Irving,” she replied. “My students know I dress up for them.”
    Apparently, she had also dressed up for doctors and nurses and medical technicians. Mina had been operated on for ovarian cancer at thirty-eight, the age Alice was when she was operated on for lung cancer, and I think it was from her that Alice learned the morale-boosting value of showing up for treatment looking your best. It also occurs to me that Alice responded to having cancer the way she and Mina had responded to what at first seemed the insurmountable academic problems of their students. Alice said in a speech once that the worst thing cancer can do is to rob you of your identity. Her identity included engagement and optimism and enthusiasm. One of the most negative words she could use in describing someone was “passive.” I don’t think I ever saw Alice just sit back and observe a group conversation; she was always a participant. After she’d had surgery and radiation at New York Hospital, she was discouraged from investigating what other treatment she could get at Memorial Sloan-Kettering; among some non-cancer doctors at that time, Memorial had a reputation for subjecting patients to debilitating protocols that might be more valuable for long-term research than for the patient’s well-being. But Alice was accustomed to attacking a problem partly by seeking out the people who knew the most about it. Looking back years later, she thought it unlikely that the additional treatment she received at Memorial made any difference in her condition, but she liked it there. Among other things, she liked being in a place where the doctors had seen some people get well. She loved telling the story of encountering a teenaged boy in the elevator on her first day of treatment at Memorial. The boy was bald, presumably as the result of chemotherapy. “Are you a nurse or a patient?” he asked Alice.
    â€œPatient,” Alice said.
    â€œWhat kind you got?”
    â€œLung,” Alice said.
    â€œAround here,” the teenager said, “they treat that like the common cold.”
    Alice’s response to having cancer was a reminder that an intellectual is not just someone who might be able to translate “heuristics” or someone who liked to spend her summers reading nineteenth-century novels or a pile of biographies of physicists. It’s someone whose instinct is to analyze anything that happens and try to make some sense out of it. “Of Dragons and Garden Peas” was not an account of the doctors Alice had seen and the procedures she’d undergone. It was an essay on how having cancer is “an embodiment of the existential paradox that we all experience: we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.” She examined the talismans people with grave illnesses use to distance themselves from death—the magic of doctors, the power of the will to live, a concentration on the details of daily life (like growing peas in Nova Scotia, where we lived in the summer). They all had limits, she concluded, mentioning a friend who “wanted to live more than anyone I have ever known. The talisman of will didn’t work for her.” The reference was to Mina, whose cancer returned and metastasized about the time that Alice had finally managed to get back to her garden peas. After a year and a half—and eight operations—Mina was dead.

V
To state the provisions of the Alice Tax simply, which is the only way Alice allows them to be stated, it calls for this: after a certain level of income, the government would simply take everything. When Alice says confiscatory, she means confiscatory.
    â€”Too Soon to Tell
    She