At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. —R. L. Stevenson, " Requiem " or more than a century, readers have pondered the strange beginning to one of the most haunting poems in the English language, " Requiem. " Who has not wondered how a poet can seem to welcome his own death? Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson died of a disease so poorly understood in his day that over a few decades its preferred name changed three times, from "phthisis" to "consumption" to "tuberculosis. " A century later, we have reliable scientific facts on this "old" poet-killing disease—we know for one that Mycobacterium tuberculosis now infects 1.9 billion people, nearly a third of the world's population (nearly 2 million deaths each year). But human suffering is still difficult to quantify. Two million deaths each year. How can we grasp such statistics of misery? Reduced to numbers stacked up in columns and cut up in pie charts, tuberculosis patients don't seem like us. They live in faraway places, come from obscure cultures, speak incomprehensible languages, have disreputable comor-bid disease, or exhibit antisocial behavior. They are " the other. " Maybe they do not even exist. To grasp the human suffering brought about by tuberculosis , we may need to recall the past when, incurable and incomprehensible , the disease had to be deciphered by metaphors— metaphors that changed as societal views of the disease changed over time. We may need to recall the lives of dying artists and the work they created and let art paint their faces, sculpt their shapes and contours, and compose leitmotivs. Perhaps such past images will help fix the gazes of today's victims , whose faces we do not seem to be able to see. The arts (the novel, the play, the poem, the musical composition , the operatic production) have always helped us understand , given us perspective, invoked compassion, and argued a purpose and meaning for life. We listened to the molto adagio of Barber's string quartet (opus 11), and came together at President Roosevelt's death. We read the poems of Walt Whitman and taught our children about the soldier's sacrifice. We studied the works of Petrarcha and Guillaume de Machaut and revisited the terror of Black Death, nearly 700 years ago. Now, we must turn to art again to grasp human suffering because