We often find ourselves sitting on beds trying to persuade wayward people to courses of preventive action which will clearly benefit them, usually at some distant time in the future. We think this very clarity should be enough to persuade the person to act. But, as we dismally stamp our feet on the bare boards of our impatience, we resign ourselves to the fact that action will not follow. Why is this so often the case?
The first person to know the answer to this question was the world's worst patient and our own greatest poet: great not because of his mastery of his world, but because, as the world used him, often cruelly, and as his London doctors gave him up as a hopeless addict, he took on all our petty confusions and made them human, compelling, and universal. Samuel Taylor Coleridge answers our question in this way:
To love our future Self is almost as hard as to love our Neighbour it is indeed only a difference of Space & Time. My Neighbour is my other Self, othered by Spacemy old age is to my youth and other Self, othered by Time
See Coleridge ii 225 R Holmes
By being consumed by the fires of his addictions this poet becomes the burning wick in the lamp we now use to illuminate our patients frailties and hence our own.
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