When I was diagnosed with colon cancer in the fall of 2003 (not quite "in the middle of our life's journey" but disconcertingly near it), kind of like Dante's Pilgrim, I immediately started out on a forced march through unfamiliar, sometimes hostile terrain. In the process, I may have learned some things that qualify as "larger truths" (carpe diem, anyone?), but I think some of the smaller truths are actually more interesting—and most of them had to do with learning when and how to look away, not pay attention, and forget. Doctors warned me not to troll the internet for information, and they were absolutely right—as I discovered after I had ignored them. For me, reading about radiation burns, nerve damage, and metastases was—until I forced myself to stop—an irresistible compulsion that left me more and more depressed. Statistics about survival rates were all over the map; one article would convince me I was home free, another that I was as good as dead. To read them was to experience emotional drain without cognitive gain. (As it turned out, my disease was both aggressive and rather advanced; I ended up spending a year in treatment.) Patients are often encouraged to take a very active role in their own medical care. Thus, I was taken aback and maybe even offended at first when my oncologist gave me this advice: "Don't become a 'professional patient.' My job is to treat you; your job is to live your life." But I came to see what he meant, and to find it very wise. In an extreme medical situation, you are rarely in danger of forgetting how sick you are; what's often all too easy to forget is how much a part of the ordinary world you still are. From the many hours I spent in the oncologist's infusion suite, hooked up to a drip, and chatting with my "chemo buddy" Fred, a theatrical producer in his 60s or 70s with terminal lung cancer, I learned that denial is highly underrated. The last thing Fred and I wanted to talk or think about was the reason we were sitting there having our pleasant conversation; we talked about movies and plays, and we really enjoyed ourselves. Through the whole process, I was teaching Lit Hum. The extent to which it nourished and sustained me was surprising, not least because the Lit Hum syllabus is stuffed with meditations on suffering and mortality. It was actually a relief to be able to look at suffering and mortality, not from the face-squashed-up-against-the-glass perspective of the patients' forum on cancercare.org (or the inside of my own body), but from a certain distance, together with my students, as aspects of human life applicable to everyone. Private suffering can be a cage; to be inside my classroom was to be outside my cage. Eventually it all came to an end. Done with treatment, and gradually recovering my stamina, I sometimes caught myself having forgotten that this intense experience had ever happened. But every fall when I teach the Book of Job, I think about what I went through and mull over this verse (14:7-9): "For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant." At the time he speaks this line, Job means it as a damning contrast with the lot of human beings, who get no second chance to thrive if they die. But at the end of the book, he is still alive and, against all expectations, "budding and putting forth branches" himself. He never learns the meaning of what happened to him. Instead, he takes up his life where it left off and thrives again, seemingly undamaged. Every year so far, I have been pleased to note that—though I would blush to compare my trials with his—I still resemble him in that. The author is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.