selfdivider

One of my favorite chapters in The Rest Is Noise is the Benjamin Britten chapter. Perhaps because Alex Ross, who is also a keen reader of W. G. Sebald, points out the fact that the fishing town of Aldeburgh and the surrounding regions on the east coast of the British Isles, where Britten’s Peter Grimes is set and where Britten lived for most of his life, is also the very locale that haunts Sebald in The Rings of Saturn. The desolate melancholy of Aldeburgh’s landscape is the backdrop against which Peter Grimes, a fisherman, loses his mind; the same gray landscape of Suffolk’s sea coast also causes the narrator of The Rings of Saturn to lose all his bearings, slipping into a catatonic state of total immobility. When put to the task of explaining his opera, Britten said quite succinctly, “The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.” The tenor of Britten’s comment resonates in Sebald’s prose, as well, in all of his major works, as his primary occupation.

At the end of Act III, after Peter Grimes loses his mind and sails into the sea to kill himself, the chorus sings about the eternal revolutions of the sea: “In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide… it rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep.” Ross, in his typically lucid and understated prose, notes that this ocean of sound, “neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor,” marks the fisherman’s grave.

In the third section of The Rings of Saturn, the Sebald-narrator is walking on a footpath that runs along the dunes and low cliffs, a few miles south of Lowestoft; a town, incidentally, where Britten was born. He spots a few tents along the beach, put up by some nomadic fishermen as if they have been fishing there and gazing out to the sea since time immemorial. Sebald notes that fishing no longer affords a living, as much of the fish population has been decimated by the pollution of the North Sea, whose waters bear tons of mercury, cadmium, and lead, not to mention fertilizer and pesticides. If not for fishing, then, why are they there

They say it is rare for any of the fisherman to establish contact with his neighbour, for, although they all look eastward and see both the dusk and the dawn coming up over the horizon, and although they are all moved, I imagine, by the same unfathomable feelings, each of them is nonetheless quite alone and dependent on no one but on himself and on the few items of equipment he has with him, such as a penknife, a thermos flask, or the little transistor radio that gives forth a scarcely audible, scratchy sound, as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other. I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

Alex Ross’s description of the ending of Peter Grimes, the ocean sound which marks the fisherman’s grave - “neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor” - also seems like a perfect way to characterize Sebald’s passage quoted above, don’t you think And in an indulgent flight of fancy, nothing more, I can well imagine that each fisherman as described by Sebald - each lost to his neighbor, staring out to the emptiness and the ceaseless revolutions of the sea - might as well be a Peter Grimes or one of the ghosts of the dead who haunt the fisherman into his final dementia and suicide. Peter Grimes, before he sails off to sea to sink in his own boat, asks, “What harbor shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms?” No man can answer that question, of course, and Peter Grimes sails off into the terrible ocean, the same bleak body of water that the fishermen in The Rings of Saturn fix their eyes and thoughts on.

(Last image, by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Thanks a lot for coming out to The Blue Notebooks interview with Alex Ross last night. Alex is somewhere in the photo on the left, talking and autographing; sorry about the “Where’s Waldo” effect but I couldn’t really find a picture from last night that I could use. I was quite nervous in talking to him, as I’ve been his avid reader for many years now. And it was difficult trying to find a way into the discussion, as The Rest Is Noise attempts to recount nothing less than the cultural and political history of the twentieth century by a musical path. I tried to find a way in by exploring Alex’s book through asking him about recurring themes in his book: 1. the consequence of the historical practice in aestheticizing politics, and politicizing music (Hitler, Stalin, R. Strauss, Shostakovich), 2. “anti-modern modernism” vs. avant-garde (Britten & Sibelius vs the Second Viennese School, for example), 3. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as an organizing trope of the book 4. The Book of Daniels and the “apocalypse” (Klaus Mann & the Weimar Republic, Stockhausen, Messiaen), and 5. Cross-pollination of influences and the eventual miscegenation of music, what it means today.

Needless to say, Alex’s answers were illuminating (rather than relying on my faulty memory to recollect his responses, I’d say you’re better off reading The Rest Is Noise yourself to find out.) The highlight of the event was when Alex played audio clips of the music in discussion. There was Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians as people were walking in, and Alex played some Messiaen and Cage, and combed through his iTunes library (in vain!) for John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to compare with the Sibelius Fifth. It didn’t matter that Coltrane wasn’t played, because Alex sang the beginning of Bernstein’s “New York, New York” to demonstrate that the intervals of Bernstein’s song are also the same intervals from the beginning of the Sibelius 5, too, and that Bernstein, most likely, was appropriating Sibelius’s set of intervals with a knowing wink (UPDATE: see Alex’s update of this, here). We closed with a discussion of Britten’s artistry, his version of “modernity,” and I talked to him about the devastating performance of Jon Vickers in Peter Grimes that can be seen on YouTube, which Alex linked before on his blog. There was just no other way to discuss Grimes’s devolution into dementia, the scene in which the off-stage chorus chants “Grimes… Grimes…” seventy-three times, except by listening to it; so Alex played the excerpt when Grimes is reduced to singing his own name, his sanity and sense of self all but completely broken down. And I’m sure it scared the shit out of everybody. The audience favorite, though, was clearly the Sibelius Fourth, as many people asked me after the event what the piece was; Alex commented over the music, sensitively demonstrating Sibelius’s genius in manipulating our sense of time, how the music sounds like it’s slowing down, yet it’s not - just the notational value of each note lengthening.

Afterwards, Alex and some of us walked to Radio Perfecto to have some really greasy quesadillas and burgers and alcohol, for further conversation. About Radiohead. The Lenny Kravitz (no, not the dreadlocks + sunglasses guy but the long-defunct band). He was as open-hearted and sincere in person as he is in prose. I asked him if he might like to participate in a possible panel I’m planning on Edward Said’s On Late Style, and he seemed interested. So stay tuned.

As can be seen on the left, Papelbon is having a joyful hernia moment not only because the Red Sox are the World Series victors, but because the series finished just before The Blue Noteboooks interview with Alex Ross tonight. The event is 8 pm, 501 Schermerhorn inside Columbia University’s main campus. I’m afraid if you’d like seats, you might have to come a bit early, as the seating is limited, and I’ve been getting a ton of emails & phone calls regarding the event. But hey: the event is free. Even if you end up sitting on the steps, leaning against the wall, the talk will invigorate and illuminate, shock and awe. Sorry for this gratuitous self-promotion. You can go back to whatever you were up to, now. But see you tonight at the event.

Arthur Lubow profiles Gustavo Dudamel in NY Times Sunday Magazine, who will soon take over the helms from Esa Pekka Salonen to lead the LA Philharmonic. Like everyone else, I’m very excited at the prospect; it seems that the LA Phil is always thinking ahead of the curve these days (Esa Pekka Salonen deserves all the praise), and Dudamel’s appointment bodes well for the cultural life of the city, which is undergoing a remarkable rejuvenation. More than anything else, I hope the initiative of “Youth Orchestra LA” will thrive under Dudamel; it will be hard to replicate the phenomenal success of Venezuela’s sistema, through which Dudamel and many other musicians had been discovered as talents. But who knows I can only hope that our next Bernstein is playing kickball on a dead-end street somewhere in Inglewood, barely staying out of trouble.

My favorite section of Lubow’s profile occurs when Jose Antonio Abreu - the director of the sistema and Dudamel’s mentor - thrusts upon the 17 year-old Gustavo the task of conducting the Mahler First with the national children’s orchestra on a tour of Italy, in less than two months’ notice. What follows is a tasty account of Dudamel’s discipleship and his rapid ascent, as satisfying as a crisp montage sequence of a young disciple training under a reticent master in a great kung-fu flick -

In 1998, when Dudamel was 17, Abreu gave him less than two months’ notice that he would be conducting the national children’s orchestra in Mahler’s First Symphony on a tour of Italy. Abreu coached him personally. At one session, held on the move in typical Abreu fashion, he handed Dudamel the partiture — the full conductor’s score — and told him to mark up the first movement. Then the maestro went off to Mass. “I looked at it and kept writing, ‘This is important, this is important,’ ” Dudamel recalls. “You couldn’t read the score, I wrote so much. He came back and said, ‘O.K., conduct.’ I went to take what I had written and he said, ‘You don’t need the partiture.’ When I started, he said: ‘Where is the entrance Sing the second melody. Sing it in reverse.’ ” It was sink or swim. During the orchestra’s tour, Dudamel met the conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli in Sicily. He became the first of Dudamel’s foreign mentors, to be followed by Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle, who have all encouraged and coached him.

(Photo of Dudamel by Gueorgui Pinkhassov for the NY Times)

Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise gets a headlining review in this week’s NY Times Sunday Book Review. It’s written by Geoff Dyer, who generously praises the book for its ambition and scope, but is curiously dispassionate and “aw-shucks” about his praise. To me, it almost read like a reviewer fishing for what is not in the book, which is probably one of the worst kinds of book reviewing in practice. It’s as if Dyer, throughout the review, kept dreaming about a similar kind of book that he might have written, the alternate-reality version. For example, he seems genuinely disappointed to not find Keith Jarrett in the book, whom Dyer designates as the culmination of the Lisztian virtuoso classical tradition in some ways. Insane.

I know Geoff Dyer to be a very elegant prose writer, whether his writing is an essay on art or a work of fiction. But there are patches of writing in this review which I found to be quite embarrassing, the metaphors straining to make sense, the sentences laboring to carry their meaning in vain. Dyer says the true test of Ross’s book will be in vivifying the various musical works for a musical agnostic through its prose. He counts himself as such a novice, and the trope he uses - in a spectacularly torturous manner - is that of an “invalid” -

When he’s treating an invalid (pronounce the word however appropriate) like me, he will have to proceed like a therapist faced with a physical inadequacy that can’t, of itself, be fixed. His prose is going to have to work on the surrounding muscle to compensate for a more deep-seated weakness. If he does this - if he succeeds in articulating what my ears have been ignorantly hearing - then he will have produced a thoroughly invigorating program of rehabilitation.

Wow. Does it have to be this hard Compare the above passage with Geoff Dyer at his absolute best: In “A Long Patience,” his essay on the photographer William Gedney, he perspicaciously links William Gedney’s photographs of Benares, India with a passage from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. In his journal, Gedney had transcribed a passage from Fielding’s novel, about barbershops coming into the pre-eminence as a place of public exchange of actions and curiosities. Gedney, in a note written later, claimed, “All of Benares is a large barbershop.” Dyer is not only perceptive enough to catch this subtle connection, but relates this detail to the images that Gedney captured -

“How do Indian streets differ from American streets” Gedney asked himself in Benares. Partly by the way that, in America, at some point, life inevitably retreats indoors, becomes hidden. But in the barbershop streets of Benares everything was on display constantly… The struggle, photographically, was to find his own space, to find quietness in the midst of perpetual bustle. Tourists photographing, people washing on the ghats of Benares saw only the event, the spectacle. Gedney had to train himself to find a pictorial equivalent of the space that each of those bathing individuals found for themselves. He had to enter that space, find room for himself.

The passage is simple, poetic, and incisive. Dyer unobtrusively realigns our gaze with the photographer’s gaze, and the graceful way with which Dyer achieves such a reorientation moves me every time I read it. (The essay appears in What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, which Dyer co-edited.)

Anyway, back to Dyer’s review of The Rest Is Noise - perhaps an editor should have exercised a firmer hand, because I know he’s too good of a writer to be writing that way. There’s also a brief interview with Alex Ross in the LA Times Book Review, with a focus on the influence that California had on many of the composers examined in The Rest Is Noise, from Arnold Schoenberg to Steve Reich. And on Monday: my interview with Alex, at 8 pm, 501 Schermerhorn inside Columbia’s main campus.

(Image by Christoph Niemann for The NY Times)

Seems like I missed a dandy one at the Zankel Hall, where the Takacs Quartet played works by Philip Glass and Arvo Part in between Philip Seymour Hoffman’s recitation of the excerpts from Philip Roth’s Everyman. That’s a lot of Philips. Also, the Takacs played Schubert’s Death and the Maiden after Hoffman read - from off-stage - Matthias Claudius’ poem “Death and the Maiden,” the words to which Schubert had set one of his songs in 1817, and had later adapted into the slow movement of the quartet. The program was the idea of Edward Dusinberre, the violinist of the Takacs, who recognized three sonata-like sections in the three cemetery scenes in Roth’s Everyman. I say give Dusinberre free rein somewhere, as a concert programmer. I’d subscribe to the Dusinberre series, even if I’m broke as a joke.

Roth readers would have been aware that there was another Roth musical connection last week that nobody mentioned; the pianist Yefim Bronfman, dressed in an orange suit, no less, played in the Grand Central Terminal at eight in the morning to throngs of bewildered and mesmerized commuters. The concert was a part of Bronfman’s initiative to fight hunger in New York (NYC, like many other cities in the U.S. now, has a crisis of shortage in its food banks - listen to Brian Lehrer’s show here.) I guess the impromptu recital at the Grand Central Terminal was to kick off an online auction at FimaForFoodBank.com. The winner will receive an in-home performance by Bronfman (whose nickname is Fima,) as well as the usage of the seven-foot Steinway for a week. (As of today, the bid is up to $7000.)

The program consisted of an intermezzo from Schumann’s “Faschingsschwank aus Wien,” Chopin’s “Revoutionary” Etude, as well as Balakirev’s “Islamey” and Scarlatti’s C-minor Sonata. I guess most of the commuters at the Grand Central Station stayed for a short duration of the performance, and Anne Midgette - in her charming article - reports that many walked by in disregard, their ears firmly plugged with earphones (which reminds me of a similar moment of recognition I had, when I looked out the window during the Beethoven Opus 131 performance by the Pacifica Quartet last month.)

One of the pieces that Yefim Bronfman played was the final movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, one of the most exhilarating and fiery last movements in the sonata repertoire. I could easily imagine the Vanderbilt Hall of the Grand Central Terminal reverberating with the thunderous sound, especially as Bronfman is somewhat of a Prokofiev specialist (his recordings of the concertos are excellent.) It must have come close to a startling, sublime experience - something to jar you out of the routine of the everyday.

But here’s the point, the Roth connection: Reading Anne Midgette’s account of the impromptu concert, I could only think of the pivotal moment in Roth’s The Human Stain, in which Zuckerman is at the Tanglewood lawn to watch the Boston Symphony rehearse. Zuckerman is caught up in thoughts about mortality (the primary occupation of all of Roth’s late novels, including Everyman), as he sees in the audience - in a moment of rhapsodic vision - their organs misfiring, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching them toward the stupendous decimation of death. “The ceaseless perishing,” Zuckerman thinks to himself, “What an idea! What maniac conceived it”

Just then, Yefim Bronfman appears on the stage to play - you guessed it - a concerto by Prokofiev. The brontosaurus, as Zuckerman calls him, Mr. Fortissimo, the sturdy barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. Zuckerman notes that Bronfman looks as if he’s arrived to knock morbidity clear out of the ring. Bronfman plays through the Prokofiev concerto, and Zuckerman marvels how they might have to throw out the piano after he plays, because he just crushes it. Then comes a rare moment, a transcendental glimpse, almost. Through Bronfman’s performance, Zuckerman (and Roth) intimates to the readers the Promethean purpose and the ephemeral but redemptive possibility which Art affords all of us, even as we are but a herd marching toward the inevitability of death and suffering -

[Bronfman] doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody - not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!

(Photos of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Yefim Bronfman, by Richard Termine and Librado Romero, respectively, for the NY Times)

Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain is a book I periodically read in spurts, from time to time. I can’t read the whole brutal thing through, though; it just wears me down emotionally. In my opinion, The Body In Pain is an invaluable work which delineates the necessity of literature in the socio-ethical context, how the worlds “unmade” by political regimes of torture are “made” again by the creation of words and literary artifacts. It is clear that W. G. Sebald read this book very carefully, cherished it: not only does he reference The Body In Pain explicitly in one of his essays in On the Natural History of Destruction, his disquisition on the nature of pain parallels many of Scarry’s assertions. Anyhow, when I read recent novels by Junot Diaz and Nathan Englander about the violent juntas and torture regimes in South America, I thought about The Body In Pain as I contemplated how each writer dealt with the historical atrocity of the past through their writing. About the aesthetic and moral necessity of their “work” -

That pain and the imagination are each other’s missing intentional counterpart, and that they together provide a framing identity of man-as-creator within which all other intimate perceptual, psychological, emotional, and somatic events occur, is perhaps most succinctly suggested by the fact that there is one piece of language used - in many different languages - at once as a near synonym for pain, and as a near synonym for created object; and that is the word “work.”

And of course, I’m also thinking about the “work” of so many writers, too: Roberto Bolano, Max Sebald, Peter Weiss, Jean Genet, Primo Levi, Isaac Babel, Jean Améry…

I’ll be conducting an interview with The New Yorker’s classical music critic, Alex Ross, to talk about his just-released history of 20th century music, The Rest Is Noise. The event will be next Monday, 10/29, at 8 pm. 501 Schermerhorn inside Columbia University on 116th and Broadway. If you are in NYC, please come. If you were too cheap to pony up the money for Alex’s event at The New Yorker festival (like me!), you should come, as the event is free and open to public. And please say hi and hang out with us after the event, as we’ll most likely be having a few drinks. (We’ll have a few copies of Alex’s book on hand for sale; you can help The Blue Notebooks, the interview series I started, by purchasing these books, so buy, buy, buy!)

The book is, by all measures, an impressive achievement. The anecdotal history that Alex relates in talking about music is consistently vibrant; my favorite is one of Arnold Schoenberg running into Marta Feuchtwanger at a supermarket in Los Angeles, yelling that he never had syphilis. Schoenberg was responding to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the protagonist of which (Adrian Leverkühn) was inspired by Schoenberg, via Adorno who had advised Mann in the writing of the novel.

Of course the writing in The Rest Is Noise about the music itself is incandescent; Alex Ross’s musical description is always illuminating and poetic. But if you are a reader of his reviews and articles at The New Yorker, that should come as no surprise. But my favorite aspect of the book is the dexterity with which Alex can juxtapose the cultural and intellectual history with the musical moment, grafting the import of the era onto the musical meaning. The limits of language which was addressed by Wittgenstein in Tractatus and by Hermann Broch in Death of Virgil is invoked in the discussion of Webern’s music. Verlaine and Turner in Debussy. Alex Ross achieves this kind of palimpsestic writing with remarkable compression and understatement; The Rest Is Noise may be the only 600-pp book of musical history which can be commended for its brevity - it reads fast. Here’s an example of the author’s inspired concision: in discussing the music of Richard Strauss, who strongly felt compelled to mine the quotidian, boring details of ordinary life for his musical subject, Alex Ross writes -

Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, observed that music could find as much pathos in the disagreements of an ordinary household as in the agonies of the house of Agamemnon. There in one sentence was Strauss’s career from Domestica to Elektra.

Brilliant.

John Cheever once said, “All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.” Perhaps he’d said such a thing after drinking one gimlet too many, railing against post-modern literature (Pynchon & DeLillo, born and bred in Long Island and the Bronx, respectively.) I don’t know if I’d like being classified as a Red Sox “literary man” if the binary means Cheever/Updike (Red Sox) vs. Pynchon/DeLillo (Yankees). Then I’d probably be a Pittsburgh Pirates man. Chances are, I’m over-reading this stupid quote. Chances are, I’m going to get to watch Papelbon do another Riverdance after a WS Game 7 save; his routine, which came during a post-game celebration after the Sox swept the Angels in ALDS, is one of the most disturbing yet compulsively watchable sights captured on tape in the annals of TV broadcasting.

Anyhoo - I hope Francona will permanently go with Ellsbury instead of Crisp for the WS, and let’s move Lester into the starting rotation and put Wakefield in the pen, who still looks a bit gimpy from his injury. Let’s win four more.

Six years ago, a guy named JW died in an apartment near Columbia University. He was a grad student, I forget which department. He had just taken the LSAT earlier in the afternoon, and with a friend, started to drink into the night. According to the investigation conducted after their deaths, a cigarette started a small fire in the room, but they were deep in their sleep, unable to awake until the room was in conflagration; the smoke detector in the apartment had run out of batteries, and it was deduced that they died from asphyxiation. He was a few years younger than me, so when he was a freshman in college, I forced a few drinks too many on him, on too many nights. A typical way to bond when you are young, stupid and male. One night, I punched him out and bashed the window of his car - I forget the reason why, now - and to apologize, took him out to a different bar and made him drink more.

My friends C, D, J and I drove up together for his funeral. We stayed at this girl’s house in Fort Lee, where the air was ashy from the detritus from the 9/11; across the Hudson, the black smoke enshrouding the Lower Manhattan looked like it had been there since primordial times. The funeral was held at a dank, Chinese funeral home in Flushing. JW’s parents, who had flown in a few days earlier from Korea, looked stunned beyond grief. JW’s sister, who was very pretty and whom none of us had seen before, cried throughout. At the end of the funeral, JW’s father got up to give a brief speech, to thank the funeral guests. He was remarkably composed, until, looking at me and my friends, he told us in between choking sobs, that we are his sons, too, but he was sorry that he would never hear JW call him father again.

Driving back down to Baltimore, my friends and I were pensive, but not pensive enough to stop by Atlantic City to drink and play poker. On the road back to Baltimore, my friend C drove and I was in the front passenger seat, passing a spliff back and forth, while D and J were snoring in the back. We talked about JW a great deal, and how all of us were brought closer together by his death, how we will remember. Today, I don’t stay in touch with any of them, and I forgot about JW until last night, when JW appeared in my dream.

In the dream, JW was with his girlfriend and I was the third wheel. We went to the Cheesecake Factory at the Inner Harbor. He was older than he was at the time of his death. Over bland pasta, we talked about trivial things, like cheating on the organic chemistry mid-term, and girls we had both liked. He kept calling me “hyung” (which means older brother in Korean) and I told him to stop doing that. I don’t remember the dream after that, except that I ended up swimming to Fells Point from the Inner Harbor and the water smelled really fishy.

At the end of Hydriotaphia, after contemplating diverse methods with which men bury their own, Sir Thomas Browne writes that “‘Tis all one to lye in St. Innocents Church-yard, as in the Sands of Egypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.” Of course, not many of us living in this age possess the faith of Thomas Browne; hence, the phrase “extasie of being ever” registers to us not as a promise, but as an ache that will not resolve itself. What we are left with from the Browne passage, then - at least in my opinion - is only the equalizing blight of death itself, without the consolation of eternity.

So it was with these thoughts that I started to browse through The Lives of a Cell earlier today, an essay collection by Lewis Thomas. Thomas was a doctor, a dean at NYU’s Bellevue Medical Center, as well as a science writer who wrote with the language of a poet from a forgotten era. He wrote about guinea pigs being trained to smell nitrobenzene and about Mahler’s Ninth or a Bartok quartet, with equal eloquence. In reading him again, I became more convinced that Lewis Thomas, who died in 1993, must have been the reincarnation of Sir Thomas Browne, who was also a doctor who wrote in uncannily beautiful prose.

I re-read Lewis Thomas’s essay called “The Long Habit,” which is about clinical death and mortality. The essay’s title is taken from Thomas Browne’s quote from Hydriotaphia: “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.” The essay takes a strange turn with an anecdote of David Livingston, who barely survived after being crushed by a lion’s jaws. Livingston was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of calm and total painlessness which attended his near-death experience, that he believed that a certain protective physiologic mechanism kicked in at the verge of death. Instead of debunking the myth, Thomas gives clinical examples of patients who do not feel pain at the threshold of death, but a remarkable sense of detachment, equanimity and quietude.

Fine, Lewis Thomas says, perhaps it should be no surprise to us that after millennia of evolution, the biological provision for death would be as abundant with genetic information for guidance through the death’s stages as it would be for living. But what about the permanent vanishing of consciousness Thomas approaches the question with a touching simplicity: “Are we to be stuck forever with this problem Where on earth does it go? Is it simply stopped dead in its tracks, lost in humus, wasted?” Then, Lewis Thomas, a twentieth-century man of hard science and medicine, arrives at a whimsical proposition that is at least as beguilingly hopeful and gracious as what Thomas Browne offered us centuries earlier, about the “extasie of being ever” -

I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter.

(In JW’s memory.)

keep looking »

Recently Written

• I Scream for Ice Cream!
• Ishiguro & Cross-eyed Romance
• Patagonia
• Philip Roth & Stendhal’s Nut
• Mozart’s Late Style
• Chuang Tzu & Wittgenstein
• J. M. Coetzee & J. S. Bach
• Afterlife
• Meet Ella
• Profanities

Categories

• Announcements
• Classical Music
• Feuilletons
• Fiction
• Films
• Nonfiction
• On Writing
• Poetry
• Popular Music
• Red Sox
• Today's Sentence
• Visual Art

Archives

• April 2008
• March 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007

Admin

• Register
• Login

Search