alice munro

i like alice munro. i like alice munro because she writes so much better than many other short story writers who try to write in her style. here she is in hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage writing about disease in the story comfort

The disease had three styles of onset. One involved the hands and arms. the fingers grew numb and stupid, their clasp awkward and then impossible. Or it could be that the legs weakened first, and the feet started stumbling, soon refusing to lift themselves up steps or even over carper edges. the third and probably the worst sort of attack was made on the throat and tongue. Swallowing became unreliable, fearful, a choking drama, and speech turned into a clotted flow of importunate syllables. It was the voluntary muscles that were affected, always, and at first that did indeed sound like a lesser evil. No misfirings in the heart or brain, no signals gone awry, no malicious rearrangements of the personality. sight and hearing and taste and touch, and best of all intelligence, lively and strong as ever. The brain kept busy monitoring all the outlying shutdown, toting up the defaults and depletions. Wasn' t that to be preferred?