Thoughts & News

 

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.