Wit

You have cancer.

Miss Bearing, you have

advanced metastatic ovarian cancer.

Go on.

You are a professor, Miss Bearing.

Like yourself, Dr. Kelekian.

Why, yes.

Now, then you present

with a growth that unfortunately went

undetected in stages one, two, and three.

Now it is an insidious adenocarcinoma...

Insidious?

Insidious means undetectable at an early stage...

Insidious means treacherous.

Shall I continue?

By all means.

Good. In invasive epithelial carcinoma,

the most effective treatment modality is

a chemotherapeutic agent.

We are developing an experimental combination

of drugs designed for primary-site ovarian,

for the target specificity of stage three

and beyond administration.

Am I going too fast?

No.

You will be hospitalized as an in-patient

for treatment each cycle.

After the initial eight cycles,

you will have another battery of tests.

The antineoplastic will inevitably affect

some healthy cells,

including those lining the gastrointestinal tract

from the lips to the anus and the hair follicles.

We will, of course, be relying on your resolve

to withstand some of the more pernicious

side-effects.

Miss Bearing?

Oh. I beg your pardon.

Do you have any questions so far?

Please go on.

Perhaps some of these terms are new...

No, no. You're being very thorough.

I make a point of it.

And I always emphasize it with my students.

Oh, so do I.

Thoroughness. I always tell my students,

but, they are constitutionally averse

to painstaking work.

Yours, too?

Oh, it's worse every year.

Mine are blind.

Oh, well, mine are deaf.

You just have to hope.

Mm-hmm. I suppose so.

Where were we, Dr. Bearing?

I believe I was being thoroughly diagnosed.

Right.

Now, the tumor is spreading very quickly.

And this treatment is very aggressive.

So far, so good?

Yes.

Better not teach next semester.

Out of the question.

The first week of each cycle,

you'll be hospitalized for chemotherapy.

The next week, you may feel a little tired.

The next two weeks

will be fine, relatively.

Eight months like that.

This treatment is the strongest thing

we have to offer you.

And as research, it'll make

a significant contribution to our knowledge.

Knowledge... yes.

Here is the informed consent form.

Should you agree, you sign there at the bottom.

Is there a family member you want me to explain this to?

Oh, that won't be necessary.

Good.

The important thing is for you to take

the full dose of chemotherapy.

There may be times when you'll wish

for a lesser dose due to the side-effects.

But we've got to go full force.

Dr. Bearing?

Yes.

You must be very tough.

Do you think you can be very tough?

You needn't worry.

Good.

Excellent.

I should have asked more questions.

But if I knew there was going to be a test.

Hi. How you feeling today?

Fine.

Great. That's just great.

This is not my standard greeting, I assure you.

I tend toward something a little more formal,

a little less inquisitive,

such as, say, "Hello."

But it is the standard greeting here,

so I just say, "Fine."

Of course, it is not very often that I do feel fine.

I have been asked "How are you feeling today?,"

while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin.

I have been asked

as I was emerging from a four-hour operation

with a tube in every orifice:

"How are you feeling today?"

I'm waiting for the moment when someone asks me

this question and I am dead.

I'm a little sorry I'll miss that.

I have cancer,

insidious cancer, with pernicious side-effects.

No, the treatment has pernicious side-effects.

I have stage four metastatic ovarian cancer.

There is no stage five.

Oh. And I have to be very tough.

It appears to be a matter, as the saying goes...

of life and death.

I know all about life and death.

I am, after all, a professor of 17th-century poetry

specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne...

which explore mortality in greater depth

than any other body of work in the English language.

And I know for a fact that I am tough.

A demanding professor,

uncompromising,

never one to turn from a challenge.

That is why I chose to study John Donne

while a student of the great E.M. Ashford.

Oh, yes.

Your essay on Holy Sonnet VI,

Miss Bearing,

is a melodrama with a veneer

of scholarship unworthy of you

to say nothing of Donne. Do it again.

Oh. I...

Begin with the text, Miss Bearing,

not with a feeling.

"Death be not proud,"

"though some have called thee."

"Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so..."

You've entirely missed the point of the poem

because, I must say, you've used

an edition of the text

that is inauthentically punctuated.

In the Gardner edition of the text...

Well, that edition is checked out of the li...

Miss Bearing?

Oh. Sorry.

You take this too lightly.

This is metaphysical poetry,

not the modern novel.

The standards of scholarship

and critical reading which one

would apply to any other text,

are simply insufficient.

The effort must be total

for the results to be meaningful.

Do you think that the punctuation

of the last line of this sonnet is

merely an insignificant detail?

The sonnet begins

with a valiant struggle with death,

calling on all the forces

of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy.

But it is ultimately about overcoming

the seemingly insuperable barriers

separating life, death, and eternal life.

In the edition you chose,

this profoundly simple meaning

is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation.

"And Death," capital D...

"shall be no more;."

Semi-colon.

"Death," capital D, comma...

"thou shalt die!",

exclamation mark.

If you go in for this sort of thing,

I suggest you take up Shakespeare.

Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets

returns to the Westmore land manuscript

source of 1610.

Not for sentimental reasons, I assure you,

but because Helen Gardner is a scholar.

It reads: "And death shall be no more,"

comma, "Death thou shalt die!"

Nothing but a breath, a comma,

separates life from life everlasting.

Very simple, really.

With the original punctuation restored,

death is no longer something

to act out on a stage with exclamation marks.

It is a comma. A pause.

In this way... the uncompromising way...

one learns something from the poem,

wouldn't you say?

Life, death, soul, God,

past, present.