Having seen The Fog recently, and its mis-portrayal of leprosy, I was impelled to pick up and re-read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R. Donaldson. The main character (of both trilogies) is a leper, and Stephen's father was a doctor who focused primarily on leprosy. He was well versed. I found myself very much associating with Thomas Covenant, sympathetic or empathetic or whatever you want to call it. He is a man who loved life, of which he had a wonderful one, and suddenly it was snatched away from him by a mystery of science. He spends his time trapped by twined rage and shame, shriven of his humanity by the scourge of alienation, powerless and desperately grasping for anything that will allow him to continue living, and (being the protagonist) eventually making his way through crimes and tragedies to be a hero (though never a heroic figure). However, having just restarted the book, I wanted to type the lecture that he is given by doctors. It may help you understand misanthropy, though mine has very little to do with his.

"Leprosy...is perhaps the most inexplicable of all human afflictions. It is a mystery, just as the strange, thin difference between living and inert matter is a mystery. Oh, we know some things about it: it is not fatal; it is not contagious in any conventional way; it operates by destroying the nerves, typically in the extremities and in the cornea of the eye; it produces deformity, largely because it negates the body's ability to protect itself by feeling nad reacting against pain; it may resul in complete disability, extreme deformation of the face and limbs, and blindness; and it is irreversible, since the nerves that die cannot be restored. We also know that, in almost all cases, proper treatment using DDS--diamino-diphenyl-sulfone--and some of the new synthetic antibiotics can arrest the spread of the disease, and that, once the neural deterioration has been halted, the proper medication and therapy can keep the affliction under control for the rest of the patient's life. What we do not know is why or how any specific person contracts the illness. As far as we can prove, it comes out of nowhere for no reason. And once you get it, you cannot hope for a cure.

"What we have learned from our years of study is that Hansen's disease creates two unique problems for the patient--interrelated difficulties that do not occur with any other illness, and that make the mental aspect of being a leprosy victim more crucial than the physical.

The first involves your relationships with your fellow human beings. Unlike leukemia today, or tuberculosis in the last century, leprosy is not, and has never been, a 'poetic' disease, a disease which can be romanticized. Just the reverse. Even in societies that hate their sick less than we Americans do, the leper has always been despised and feared--outcast even by his most-loved ones because of the rare bacillus no one can predict or control. Leprosy is not fatal, and the average patient can look forward to as much as thirty or fifty years of life as a leper. That fact, combined with the progressive disability which the disease inflicts, makes leprosy patients, of all sick people, the ones most desperately in need of human support. But virtually all societies condemn their lepers to isolation and despair--denounced as criminals and degenerates, as traitors and villains--cast out of the human race because science has failed to unlock the mystery of this affliction. In country after country, culture after culture around the world, the leper has been considered the personification of everything people, privately and communally, fear and abhor.

"People react this way for several reasons. First, the disease produces an ugliness and a bad smell that are undeniably unpleasant. And second, generations of medical research notwithstanding, people fail to believe that something so obvious and ugly and so mysterious is not contagious. The fact that we cannot answer questions about the bacillus reinforces their fear--we cannot be sure that touch or air or food or water or even compassion do not spread the disease. In the absence of any natural, provable explanation of the illness, people accoutn for it in other ways, all bad--as proof or crime or filth or perversion, evidence of God's judgement, as the horrible sign of some psychological or spiritual or moral corruption or guild. And they insist it's catching, despite evidence that it is minimally contagious, even to children. So many of you are going to have to live without one single human support to bear the burden with you.

"That is one reason why we place such an emphasis on counseling here; we want to help you learn to cope with loneliness. Many of the patients who leave this institution do not live out their full years. Under the shock of their severance, they lose their motivation; they let their self-treatments slide, and become either actively or passsively suicidal; few of them come back here in time. The patients that survive find someone somewhere who is willing to help them want to live. Or they find somewhere inside themselves the strength to endure. (my emphasis)

"Whichever way you go, however, one fact will remain constant: from now until you die, leprosy is the biggest single fact of your existence. It will control how you live in every particular. From the moment you awaken until the moment you sleep, you will have to give your undivided attention to all the hard corners and sharp edges of life. You can't take vacations from it. You can't try to rest yourself by daydreaming, lapsing. Anything that bruises, bumps, burns, breaks, scrapes, snags, pokes or weakens you can maim, cripple, or even kill you. And thinking about all the kinds of life you can't have can drive you to despair and suicide. I've seen it happen.

"That brings us to the other problem. It sounds simple, but you will find it devastating. Most people depend heavily on their sense of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch something they know it's real. And it is not an accident that we describe the deepest parts of ourselves--our emotions--in terms of the sense of touch. Sand tales touch our feelings. Bad situations irritate us or hurt us. This is an inevitable result of hte fact that we are biological organisms.

"You must fight and change this orientation. You're intelligent creatures--each of you has a brain. Use it. Use it to recognize your danger. Use it to train yourselves to stay alive."

So...a leper is forcibly alienated from others, with no hope of delivering death except from suicide, and loses the freedom to trust himself, while no longer having anyone upon whom he may trust. While I am forcibly alienated from others by my own inability to ignore those things which I percieve to make me unique, and each time I allow myself to be careless, while not life-threatening, takes me step by step away from being a person with whom I am not disgusted, so I cannot trust myself except through extreme conscientiousness, and I cannot trust others, not fully, because not understanding me, they cannot or will not take on part of my burden. It sounds like bullshit. Believe me, it is not. I do not have an illness that the world can see and respond to. I have a flaw which no one ever sees but I never stop feeling. I'm not a saint. I'm just willing and striving to be what no one else desires to be. Someone in whom you can trust. Someone upon whom you can place some of the weight of life and find a little succor, ease, relief or comfort. Contrary to popular belief, shrugging the weight off your shoulder does not let it go, but instead lets it fall to the floor to be dragged around by the ankle, making it harder to pick up again later. Or worse, you shrug it off onto others, unwillingly, glad for the lightened load. There is one I know who strives to never place weight on others, to always carry it herself, and for that I love her dearly. If there are others who strive for this, I do not see it in their actions. And for that reason I am a misanthropist. And I do not know if I will ever overcome it.