Calvin Trillin: About Alice

She believed in the principle of enoughness. (p42)

Calvin Trillin: About Alice

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 like 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 th edotors alice had seen and the procudures she’d undergone. It was an essay on how having cancer is “an emobiement of the existential prarodx that we all experience: we feel that we are immortal, yet we known that we will die.” (p39-40)

Calvin Trillin: About Alice

…realizations of our worse nightmares…She also said that there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. “No one would ever choose to have cancer or be raped,” she wrote. “But you don’t get to choose, and it is possible eat least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like “to live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,” or to begin understanding the line in “king Lear”—“Ripeness is all.” You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness. (p8)

Calvin Trillin: About Alice

Much of what appears to be optimism is denial. (p23)