The Lexicographer's Rules

"Years after my mother died, I decided to read her medical records. There I thought I'd find the most precise evocation of her fate: the facts of her death, the hows and whys that stand independent of stories and dreams... Doing so wasn't easy. At first my mother's doctor's office fell back on confidentiality. That such facts were secrets presented a clue: a sign that they were not facts at all, but forbidden knowledge, stories none but a doctor could understand."

—Killing the Buddha. Jeff Sharlet writes about the process of dying, of not dying, and the powerfulness of the dead. "Still, I grew more determined to have the records, which in my mind had metamorphosed into a manuscript. I must have underestimated the power of such details. The records would reveal not only results but also calculations: Dosages of medicines multiplied by careful counts of red blood cells; the tumors that killed her known not only by names but by measurements; the width and depth of her disease a record of its age, a number discerned by peeling back layers of exponential growth to its origin, then tracing it back into the present. One mutant cell gives birth to two daughters, the two are mother to four, the four become forgotten ancestors of billions, a world born within my mother's breast."'

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