Greene is describing something that runs exactly counter to the way the wound is usually handled. The instinct — and it is an old instinct, pneumatic at its root — is to believe that the healer operates from a position of having transcended the wound, that the wisdom pours out precisely because the suffering has been resolved. The Chironic image refuses this. The arrow is still in the flesh. The infection does not clear. And from that ongoing, unresolved state something else becomes possible: not the transmission of recovered health, but the vision that comes from living at the boundary between what can be healed and what cannot.

This is why the hope Greene points to is not optimism of the cheerful kind — the kind that floats above difficulty because it has talked itself free of it. It is something harder, stranger, earned in a specific way: by continuing to practice, continuing to advise, continuing to see clearly, while carrying what will not be cured. The healer does not get to benefit from his own medicine. That asymmetry is not a cruelty to be overcome. It is the structural condition that makes the medicine real rather than merely theoretical.