Thoughts & News

 

The Thing About Life

blog date 12/10/2007

I recently turned 51—which is hardly old—but I’m newly aware of my mortality in a way I wasn’t when I was, say, 43. And being the father of an annoyingly vital 14-year-old girl only deepens these feelings. I think of The Thing About Life as being both utterly personal and utterly universal: an expression of astonishment at being mortal, of the enormous effect that one’s physiology has upon one’s psychology at a given time. The Thing About Life is about seeing one’s own body as mortal clay, seeing the power and beauty and pathos in my own body and my father’s body: the animal joy of childhood, adolescence’s sexual frenzy, the physical breakdown of middle age, old age’s confrontation with oblivion.

It’s, of course, a commonplace of contemporary discourse that the body is the “site” of all personality, all politics. Wittgenstein said, “Our only certainty is to act with the body.” Martha Graham: “The body never lies.” How, then, is this book significantly different from so many other recent books that explore the body? The Thing About Life is much more personal, emotionally risky and nervous-making than theoretical work that declaims airily without any sweat emerging from its pores. On the other hand, The Thing About Life avoids, I think, the solipsism that marks many memoirs; the excitement of the book for me lies in its juxtaposition between the radically subjective and clinically objective.

We are all thrillingly different animals, and we are all, in a sense, only the same animal. The seventeenth-century French moralist Jean de la Bruyère said, “There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.” Through eight books of fiction and nonfiction, my work has tended to explore the nature of consciousness and identity via the vehicle of self. Here, now, in this book, self is by no means dissolved but has been recontextualized in a richer, larger, more “universal” realm. It feels simultaneously like capstone and liberation.

2007 National Book Award speech

blog date 11/27/2007

I was the chair of the nonfiction panel for the 2007 National Book Award. This is the speech I gave when I presented the award on November 14:

First of all, thanks to my fellow panelists: Deborah Blum of the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism, Caroline Elkins of the History Department at Harvard University, Annette Gordon-Reed of New York Law School, and James Shapiro of the English Department at Columbia University.

Congratulations to the five finalists: Edwidge Danticat, for Brother, I'm Dying, published by Alfred A. Knopf; Christopher Hitchens, for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, published by Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA; Woody Holton, for Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, published by Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Arnold Rampersad, for Ralph Ellison: A Biography, published by Alfred A. Knopf; and Tim Weiner, for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, published by Doubleday/Random House.

How did we choose these five books? How did we get along? We got along famously, for the first several months. We made the usual jokes about how we would ever make it up to our respective mail carriers, how the floor boards and ping-pong tables in our houses and apartments groaned under the weight of so many books, what in the world we were going to do with so many tomes. When it came to crunch-time, though, the last couple of months and today, we quarreled, we tussled, we cajoled, we pleaded, we tossed verbal brickbats, we walked out, we walked back in. But so what? To quote the poet, “Writin’ is fightin’.” I’ve never felt more directly and vividly that books matter. And the book that we judged to matter the most—that we thought told us the most about our low, dishonest decade (and the several low, dishonest decades preceding)—the winner of this year’s National Book Award in nonfiction is Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.