Thoughts & News

 

Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

blog date 01/15/2008

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead began several years ago as a somewhat amorphous book called Positions: The Arc of the Body, which was only vaguely connected by its focus on the body. I got rid of the chapters that didn’t impinge directly upon the body, but I realized I needed to sharpen the focus further. I attended a nonfiction conference, where I realized what should have been obvious: writers whose work I responded to had found a way to anchor their abstract observations. Their work had (mirabile dictu!) people and not just ideas. I had just come from visiting my father on his 94th birthday; he became the book’s anchor, principal subject, star, anti-star, death star, antipode, blocking figure, hero, anti-hero, life force, Energizer Bunny, counterpoint to my death-haunt. I then realized the book needed to be awash in biological data, to universalize the personal narrative. I did an enormous amount of research about the body, and the book started falling into chronological stages: childhood, adolescence, middle age, old age, death. The data led to research of a more philosophical kind; the book was now awash as well in the most beautiful and heartbreaking things I’d ever read about life and death. I think of the book as a meditation on the brute fact of mortality—“our birth is nothing but our death begun,” as one of the chapter titles has it—but all anyone wants to talk about is my dad.

Meditation on mortality

blog date 01/02/2008

 A friend recently asked me what my new book was about; when I told her (quoting the flap copy!) that it was a “meditation on mortality,” she wondered if it was depressing to write. To her surprise, and perhaps my own as well, I said that writing it has made me, and continues to make me, oddly joyous. Why? Melville, upon finishing Moby-Dick, wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as the lamb.” I’m not Herman Melville, and I haven’t written a wicked book exactly (the wickedness of Moby-Dick: announcing in 1851 that God is dead), but I have written a book that looks without blinking at our blood-and-bones existence, at the fact that each of us is just an animal walking the earth for a brief time, a bare body housed in a mortal cage. Some people might find this perspective demoralizing, but I don’t, truly. Honesty is the best policy: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. Life, in my view (as The Thing About Life attempts to demonstrate), is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful.