I made a stab at meditating, but the global pain was too much. Then I tried working mentally through a blog posting on the Washington Redskins (now in progress on my computer), and then working out, from scratch, the details of the symmetry group of the square, but once I got to shaking and cramping and feeling nauseated I lost focus.

Pascal is said to have gotten through a terrible toothache by focusing on, and describing (for the first time), the properties of the cycloid. Tougher thah me.

Even in the best circumstances, a half-hour in an MRI machine is about the least natural situation in which a body will ever find itself. I had an MRI a couple a months ago and found the boredom even harder to tolerate than the immobility and the noise. (The noise, of course, excludes the body’s most natural reaction to forced inactivity, namely falling asleep). I distracted myself first by mentally reciting “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe”, a sonnet by the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé that I had memorized for an undergraduate French course and which, for better or for worse, has by now become part of my DNA; then I mentally analyzed the poem’s rhyme scheme; then I pictured the rhyme scheme in phonetic transcription. None of these mental activities was particularly challenging, but they required just enough focus to draw my attention away from thinking how bored I was.

Best wishes for a speedy return to multiple daily postings!