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though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile. The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work.
I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.
I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.
If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down. A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that.
To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of
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That he not busy being born is busy dying.
not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.
It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory.
But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less.
stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.
And a mercy for sleep purposes … but all the sleep-aids and blissful dozes seem somehow a waste of life—there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious.
well, in another country. The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.
Though—how can I put this?—a stern literary critic might complain that his story lacked compactness toward the end …
Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from. Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
Vertiginous feeling of being kicked forward in time: catapulted toward the finish line.
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
See Szymborska’s poem on torture and the body as a reservoir of pain.
With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts … and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own … Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
