“Get through it, that’s all. That’s what’s to do.”

“Get through it, that’s all. That’s what’s to do” is Jim Gardener’s blunt formula for enduring what he cannot immediately change. It recurs as an inner voice during a day of drinking, pain, and mounting performance anxiety, turning simple persistence into a practical discipline—and linking Gardener’s private self-command to the remembered voices of his father and Bobbi Anderson.

Form and Function

The expression is built from short imperatives rather than explanations: endure the present, and do what endurance requires. Its plainness matters. It offers no promise that the pain will stop, only an instruction for continuing through it. Repeated as an internal response, it works less as consolation than as a command Gardener can use when his own steadiness is in doubt.

The Hotel-Room Repetition

During a long afternoon in a hotel room, Gardener tries to keep himself from abandoning his obligations and returning to Maine. He imagines taking a Greyhound bus from the Stuart Street terminal to Unity, hitching a ride to Troy, and telling Bobbi Anderson that he nearly went up in a cyclone but reached the storm cellar in time. He rejects that imagined escape with the conviction that luck must be made, then returns to the thought of getting through the day.

The effort is physical as well as mental. Gardener pours a second drink with a hand that has become remarkably steady, searches his tote bag for clothes, dresses in faded jeans and a plain white shirt, and eats Certs, drinks more alcohol, and takes aspirin. His headache worsens rather than easing. When he finally sits by the window with his notebooks, the words of his poems seem unreadable, and the dull-steel sensation above and left of his eye recalls the old scar and steel plate from a teenage skiing accident. The expression does not cure the pain; it gives him a way to continue in its presence.

The Reading and Its Inner Voice

On June 27, Gardener’s customary stage fright is intensified by the headache. After waking from a nap in a hotel-room chair, he finds that the shakes and fluttering in his stomach have passed but the pain has grown into what he thinks of as a “Genuine Class-A Thumper & World-Beater.” When his turn arrives, he hears himself as if at a distance and becomes light-headed, unable for a few moments to do more than shuffle papers while pretending to search for a poem.

The imperative returns at the point when he fears he may faint in front of the audience. Its source is not fixed: sometimes the voice sounds like his father’s, but more often it sounds like Bobbi Anderson’s. That uncertainty gives the repeated phrase its force. It is at once a survival instruction Gardener has made his own and a trace of the people whose voices remain available to him under pressure.

Recurrence and Significance

Across the two moments, the phrase links private endurance to public performance. In the hotel room, it counters the fantasy of escape; at the reading, it steadies him when bodily distress threatens to interrupt the act. Its repetition does not erase Gardener’s drinking, headache, or fear, and the evidence does not make it a cure. Instead, the words narrow the task to something immediate: continue, one moment at a time.