Sublime

If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

(All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

A couple of months ago, he told me that if he died before he finished it, he wanted me to delete the text from his computer. Just wipe it out and forget it, he said, it’s of no importance. So you erased it? Of course I did. It’s a sin to disobey a person’s dying wish. Good, I thought to myself. Good that this woman won’t have to set eyes on Walker’

Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.

I told her about an essay by the poet Donald Hall, who, in his eighties and anticipating his own death, felt a resurgence of grief for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who had died many years earlier. Hall’s grief was compounded by the realization that his wife would not be there to comfort him at the end of his life as he had been able to comf