'As though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.'

I'm reading a book in which the main character sometimes faints. I had forgotten I used to faint; I had no blood pressure in the old days. That was before spending a few years in the company of Gauloises Bleues, which helped rectify the situation somewhat. Perhaps my taste for bacon and pancetta helped a bit, as well. At any rate, sometime within the last five years I triumphantly entered the 'normal' range, and it was a happy, happy day, whichever day it was.

I remember one egregious incident. I was at college, it was autumn and still terribly hot, and our library's air conditioning either didn't exist or didn't work on the higher floors. I was somewhere back in a stuffy corner in a stuffy carrel. Lack of air circulation seems always to have been the necessary-and-sufficient catalyst.

At any rate, I started to feel less than hardy, sussed the source of the problem, and headed downstairs to the main lobby which, while hot, had at least a high ceiling, an open floor plan, and doors to the outside opening every once in a while. I chose the cluster of armchairs in front of the circulation desk and opened a book. Things had apparently progressed during the descent down the stairs, and my eyes were as unable to focus as my spine was to maintain the weight of my torso in the traditional vertical attitude of chair-users worldwide. I felt more than capable of conquering my inclinations toward unconsciousness, however, and positioned myself sideways across the chair, with my legs bent over one arm and my back resting on the other arm much in the manner of a back-and-backrest situation. I congratulated myself on my forethought as regards energy conservation and smiled at the librarian in the sort of robust and healthy manner as would befit a person in no immediate danger of passing out, and I cracked the book.

With the pressure taken off physical exertion such as sitting upright, I felt certain I could rally my mind to come back into play, so I held the book in front of me and focused on focusing. When I couldn't focus my eyes I employed my customary routine of abandoning the senses and solely focusing my diminishing mental faculties, and I thus recited a couple familiar poems in my head, concentration of any sort being a good last-ditch bulwark against unconsciousness. When it quickly became clear that even that task was now beyond my capabilities, and that that meant the possibility of sudden unconsciousness was growing ever likelier, I laid the book across my chest, to suggest a deliberate and pleasant nap to anyone who might pass by, and organized my legs, shoes, and hair to confirm the diagnosis with the remaining bits of thought I could muster as the light around me constricted to a pinprick.

But fainting cannot be entirely controlled, it turned out then, before, and subsequently. Whenever that precise point at which I completely ceded control after so many deliberate countermeasures, it seems I did not pass imperceptibly into that gentle twilight, but rather fell out the entrance side of the armchair, with the book going with me for the ride. I awoke with a squadron of firemen and EMTs circled around me, and a hook-and-ladder, not to mention the Fire Chief's special fire-chief car, outside the library, despite the unfortunate landing having taken place on the first floor of the library, just up a few stairs from the parking lot, and a scant few paces' walk from the main door.

--And directly in front of the circulation desk and the student librarian who may well have been scarred forever.

I am very grateful for being as old as I am now for so many reasons. But one of the things I most look forward to with regard to being older still is having ailments that make sense, that are typical and mundane and entirely predictable. Me, I either have Victorian pseudoailments such as fainting and vertigo, or ridiculously grandiose trauma-type ones. I have a solid tolerance for the latter type, I think, but anyway they go away or they don't and you don't have to incorporate them into your life or explain them to curious bystanders unless you feel inclined to. Either you bear the obvious marks or you don't - and if you don't, revelation is based on intimacy. A bum knee, sciatica, dermatitis, bursitis, colitis, rhinitis, allergies, migraine, high blood pressure, diabetes, bad arches, a cumin intolerance: these make sense, and friends will always accept demurrals or explanations based on them. But anything along the lines of 'Don't mind me; I'm just going to recite a few disconnected stanzas of Yeats and the preamble to the Constitution and just one or two bars of the Gettysburg Address and if I can't think of that then Molly Bloom's soliloquy or disconnected fragments of advertising jingles I can't help but remember forever to stave off a fainting spell I don't particularly care to indulge' is likely to meet with tremendous disrespect in any quarter. And for good reason: it's stupid. And it's more irritating to me than it is to you!