Discussion - Week Three - Death Kit - p. 208 - 312

[Jim]

This discussion covers Page 208 – 312, begins: Monday. Two days after the
and Conclusions/Book as a whole.


Back in NYC, Diddy and Hester shack up. Xan has to go ‘cause dog-walking time is cutting into Hester-walking time. After their first fight, Diddy starts to deteriorate again, but it doesn’t seem to interfere with their sex life. Diddy brings Hester to the scene of his crime and discovers that sax and violins* go together. Deeper in the tunnel Diddy finds Death’s warehouse in need of some serious organizing… and a dust mop.


(*aka “sex and violence”)



Were you able to pinpoint when - if at all - Diddy died?

[Nicole]

Jim wrote: "Were you able to pinpoint when - if at all - Diddy died?"

I was wondering if Hester, like, existed at all. There is a narrowing, where they go out less and less and his apartment gets more and more like the train car, that made me wonder if anything happened outside of Diddy's head.

Also, I collected some more passages about time, but they don't explain the (now) tic.

On the one hand, living entirely in the present (or being dead entirely in the present, if that's what it is) has its pitfalls:

Unlike yesterday, when sitting at the oval table was a continual eerie struggle. Today Diddy able to keep his mind on his work. So much so that after a heated argument on discount policies in which Diddy eloquently championed the unpopular position and finally brought a majority around to his view, he passed on to lunch in the cafeteria on the second floor without looking at his watch. Not until he was spooning out a second helping of creamed chicken did Diddy notice the time. Already ten minutes to two. So there hadn't been a real decision. Instead Diddy had let the funeral fall out of his head....Diddy horrified reviles himself for his absence of mind.

And yet, planning ahead isn't working out so well either, and this just a few pages later:

Diddy wishes that what's scheduled for tonight after he leavs the hospital weren't happening tonight; because it's preventing him from being wholly present with Hester this afternoon. Open to her, nourished by her. Diddy trying to be in this room only, but he can't. He's already rehearsing in some remote bastion of his mind how he will enter the next space.

There are other passages, where he vows to make of his life a continual present, reject all of his past, or regrets that the objects in his apartment make a museum, a shrine to his own past, but I am too lazy to type them all out. Plus, I don't know that they solve anything, they're just more evidence about the same questions.