Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it.
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.
I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.
I dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.
Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant's stress and prevents infection and blood clots.
Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now.
...One of the side effects of (surgery, anesthesia,) X-ray..., and chemotherapy, is the suppression...of the patient's immunological defenses...A simple cold often leads to the death from pneumonia - and ('pneumonia') is what appears on the death certificate, not cancer.
Doctors...from the Office of Info. Tech. at Harvard U.(:)...Their appraisal of 46 surgical or anesthesia breakthroughs...suggested...only 13% were highly preferred (and)...in nearly half the cases the new therapy was no better than the therapy it replaced. ...About 12% of the innovations increased complications.
I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.
In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.
From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.
I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and, sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through every painful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.
People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.
There is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.
Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable (a two week transatlantic crossing) seem bearable. There's no need to do it now, there are planes. You wouldn't take a vacation where you ride on a stage coach for two months but there's all-you-can-eat shrimp. You wouldn't take a vacation where you had an old-timey appendectomy without anesthesia while steel drums play. You might take a vacation while riding on a camel for two days IF they gave you those little animal towels wearing your sunglasses.
There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.
For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.
or simply: