The blackboards from my class's discussion on 29 April of a passage from Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. This passage, to be precise, which is the first paragraph of the novel:
My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old,
and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I
know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the
end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my
being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at
what I do. There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after
just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for
all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not
trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they've been pleased with my
work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much
better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any
of them have been classified as "agitated," even before fourth
donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able
to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying
"calm." I've developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when
to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to
listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to
snap out of it.
-->
No comments:
Post a Comment