Toenails
On Wall Street Journal today, there is a Page One story about a man’s triumph over his problematic toenails. Hail to Mr. Dwight Thomas, who not only defeated toenail fungus in battles but also wrote a memoir about toenails and ran ads in New Yorkers and Harpers promoting it! The latter struggle is definitely more heroic yet.
Mr. Thomas’ toenails remind me of the strange obsessive story by Borges. (Foot fetish might get a kick out of it.) It goes like this:
Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice. All they’re interested in is turning out toenails–semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against–whom? Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten pointless projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips of a Solingen…
Borges should have added that when the “pointless projectile heads” turn yellow and crumpy, they might be saved by Penlac and Lamisil (according to Mr. Thomas).
January 18th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I would like to congratulate you on saving me from going completely insane. I love Borges, and can’t find my collection of his work, and desperately needed to find Toenails for school (in a junior in high school). No where on the net can this story be found, except here, on some saint’s blog. Thank-the hell-you.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:33 am
The “Toenails” can be found in Borges’ short story collection “The Maker”. Thanks.
April 1st, 2007 at 10:16 am
and there is another version in Dreamtigers. but thanks for the post as my copy is stowed away, claimed by the bedbugs, in a storage unit somewhere in brooklyn. this was really helpful last night when i was writing a note to my friend mariana with a book i was giving to her … the version in dreamtigers is so amazing, maybe i will post it (if i remember) when i get all my books bakc, thanks
May 19th, 2007 at 4:13 am
The paragraph above from the article is GREAT! Wonderful writing!
I’d stay as far away from Lamisil as possible, that stuff can mess up your liver. Your liver isn’t worth non-yellow toenails.
I had a yellow toenails and managed to fix it without the help of the pharamceutical companies. If you’re interested, here’s how:
http://www.dangerimp.com/toe_fungus.php