I enjoyed reading Jodi Picoult’s “Wish You Were Here”. The novel is set during the pandemic and the main character, Diana O’Toole, a young employee of Sotheby’s Auction house in their art department gets COVID. I don’t want to spoil the story, so if you have not read it yet, stop here.
The first half of the book is kind of set in Isabela, one of the Galápagos Islands. I say “kind of” because she imagined traveling to the island just as COVID swept the Americas and was trapped there. She received help from the locals and had adventures on the island for weeks. However, she was actually back in New York and on a ventilator for 5 days, fighting for her life. The book explores the power of the mind to “lucid dream” during comas, surgeries, near-death experiences, etc. Diana was planning to do the trip with her boyfriend, a resident doctor in Manhattan. She completely blacked out and dreamed she went on the trip without him while having a severe case of COVID. The experiences she had were imagined from the places she read about during the trip planning. During the dreams, she fell in love with a local, decided to drop her boyfriend and leave working as an art auctioneer and start an art therapy practice.
“The truth is, we don’t really know what happens when we medically sedate someone, and how your mind syncs your reality with your unconscious.”
Wish You Were Here, Jodi Picoult – 2021
The mind is powerful and misunderstood and I believe people have these intense, lucid dreams during times of great stress and unconsciousness. I was thinking if I ever experienced anything similar. I remember once when I was a child, I remember having an “out-of-body” experience where I left my body and watched myself play on our family’s back porch from above. I also had a period during university of intense dreams that I was flying at an incredibly fast speed over my hometown of Iron River. The dream recurred several times one summer. I’ve never had surgery and have never been put under anesthesia, and am glad I avoided it so far, but it would be a life experience and I wonder how my mind would react.
It also made me think about memory. I have a bad memory and have really forgotten a lot of details of my life. I think that is one reason I blog so much, to help me remember. My brother Jim has an amazing memory and he remembers things like what our school lunch times were like in middle school. He brings back descriptions of our childhood that most people have long forgotten. Dreams, memories, “terminal lucidity” are just some of the aspects of the human brain that are fascinating. I think medicine in the upcoming centuries will understand more about the brain and give better explanations of these. Picoult’s book triggered my thoughts about the power of the mind. Pic
Diana in the book asks her mother, a world famous photographer, “Did you always want to travel?” “When I was a girl,” my mother says, “we went nowhere. My father was a cattle farmer and he used to say you can’t take a vacation from the cows.” (I felt the same way growing up. The furthest I travelled until my senior year of high school was Minneapolis, a 5-hour drive from my hometown and following our high school football team to the state playoffs in 1977 to watch them in the Pontiac Silverdome. When I graduated from high school and college, I wanted to see the world!
I like the idea of “tsunami stones”. Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. People who experience trauma, pass it along to their children and grandchildren, but after that, the memory fades. The stones are made to warm future generations. Diana as an art therapist has her patients erect “COVID stones”. Some of the mantras on the stones are “Find Your Joy” and “No job is worth killing yourself for”. It’s understanding that an extra hour at your desk is an hour you don’t spend throwing a ball with your kid.
Some other items of interest.
- “You can’t plan your life, Finn,” I say quietly. “Because then you have a plan and not a life.”
- terminal lucidity – terminally ill patients suddenly remember and think clearly after years of dementia and their brains are destroyed
- Unlike animals, we can now sing and speak and scream… but unlike animals, we also can choke to death if our food goes down the wrong pipe.
- Djinn or Jinn – invisible mythological creatures from pre-Islamic Arabia
Diana specializes in art and in the novel, she is dealing with a painting by French artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. He had skeletal dysplasia that left him only 5 feet tall with undersized legs. He was commissioned to paint a series of posters for the Moulin Rouge caberet in 1899 Paris. My wife Nadia loved the Baz Lehrman movie about the caberet. Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings are worth millions. You can see one of the posters of the Moulin Rouge series below. He painted himself as a seated patron in the center left.
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