Pam Durban: Solving for X
Selected Excerpt
“Other calculations are riskier. The word problems of life, she calls them. If a seventy-year-old woman owns two boxes of five-thousand staples and her stapler holds 210 staples per strip, how many staples must she use every day in order to empty both boxes before she dies? How long will it take her to write the pages she’ll staple, because even though she’s sometimes over-tired of the great harvest that she herself desired, she keeps harvesting, but slowly, so slowly, as if she still has all the time in the world?”
Discussion Questions
How does the diagnosis of an illness, or the illness itself, affect the perception of time?
Durban writes that “the world seems full of Xs and holes she could tumble into anytime.” What are some “unsolvable Xs” that have emerged for you?
How has the pandemic or an illness altered time for you? For society?
Reflections from #MedHumChat
“Thinking about my MS diagnosis several years ago. Time moves more slowly. There's an immediate focus and all else just kind of falls away. As the narrator puts it in the essay, "her brain just went to Jamaica for the day."“ —@LReedsbooks
“#Disability community has language for this=#CripTime. “The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently - or not so silently - at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.” —@MarinaTsapliina
“Perhaps a classic 'med' trait, but I used to want to plan everything. Unsolveable Xs were the bane of my existence. With #COVID19 restructuring so much of my life, I am a lot more at peace with those 'x's now.” —@sharanauth
About this #MedHumChat
“Solving for X” was paired with “Assiduously” by Claudia Castro Luna for a #MedHumChat discussion over A Question of Time on November 18, 2020.
The pieces for this chat and the discussion questions were curated by Mary Pan (@marypanwriter).
About the Author
Pam Durban is the author of two collections of short stories, Soon and All Set About with Fever Trees, and three novels, The Laughing Place, So Far Back, and The Tree of Forgetfulness. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award. She lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and teaches at the University of North Carolina.