Nobody has solved the problem of the relationship between the mind and the body, of course. From Descartes up to the present, philosophers have argued about the mind and body: Were they one physical entity, two different kinds of physical entities or two completely distinct entities working according to different laws? The debates have generated much more heat than light. Who cares? My head is connected to my body. I know that much from looking in the mirror. And I swear, every time I'm dying both my head and my body feel bad.

This week bolts of current are passing through my chest like I'm being roasted in the electric chair. I pop up from near-sleep in stark panic, clutching at my chest with both hands, and then rise up to pace rhythmically and read New Yorkers for hours. Even the cartoons don't help.

I decided to tough this one out, not drag my failing body to Dr. Waldman. I just couldn't face him again. Instead, I fixed a cup of tea and petted my cat. Seriously ill people, like my sister, who is waiting for a liver transplant, treat me with great tact and understanding, as if my neuroses were preparatory to the real thing. If the self-fulfilling prophecy thing is true, I'm in trouble, laying the groundwork for the most dramatic death of all time.

One of the things I inherited from my father was an infinite capacity for worrying. I remember once when we were having some logging done on the ranch, Dad's mantra was, "Now we've got to make sure they don't drop a tree on the water line." He repeated it endlessly throughout the preparations for cutting down the trees. Then the logger almost immediately dropped a tree on the water line, as if he were the agent of a dark force specifically sent to torment my father. Dad never admitted the inner price he was paying for his anxious temperament, though. He didn't troop regularly to the doctor in search of reassurance, at least as far as I knew. In those days men like my father only went to the doctor if they were carried there on a stretcher.

It doesn't help matters much that I worry so much about my students. Sometimes I think I've chosen a career that mandates a continual maintenance of debilitating anxiety. While my students probably walk out of my classroom thinking about what they are going to have for dinner or what the guy in the next row meant when he said, "lookin' good," I am stewing about whether my explanation of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious penetrated their consciousness. And there are always enough of them who hang around to ask, "What did you mean by that?" to make me wonder if I made any sense at all, and whether my teaching really touches their lives.

Three of my closest friends are teachers. One almost died on the operating table, another is battling recurring cancer and the other can barely speak sometimes from the pressure cooker of her job. One of the students in my evening philosophy class is an elementary school teacher who shows up with enormous stacks of papers she grades during the discussions. "Regular feedback, they need regular feedback," she said once, justifying the self-torture she puts herself through in assigning so much homework. One of my colleagues actually asks students who are not doing their work if he can stop worrying about them. He says many of them act surprised, as if the thought never occurred to them that a teacher might spend a second worrying about them. Most of the time we don't talk about our stress; we just walk around wearing strange masks that we all recognize as badges of commitment.

All the "helping professions" involve a similar kind of self-sacrifice, no doubt, but I don't think there is anything particularly noble about such career-induced suicide. We may even be hurting the people we are trying to help by burning ourselves up and then disappearing into our own self-involved stress, thinking somehow that we are paying the logical price for human compassion. And what kind of a role model is the person who seems to suffer so much from the act of service? Everybody would be better served if we simply relaxed and had more fun. Easier said than done. In the meantime, I do wish I could get this lump out of my throat. It seems to have been stuck there forever.