David ShieldsImage: Daughter of the Circus © Michael Garlington
5. A Day Like Any Other, Only Shorter
Without religion, no one knows what to say about death—their own or others—nor does anyone know after someone’s death how to talk about (think about) the rest of their lives, so we invent diversions.
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Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by my 97-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality, I undertook an investigation of the human physical condition; the result was a book called The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, which tries to look 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; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
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Vladimir Posner says that when a Russian is asked how he’s feeling, he tends to go on and on about how he’s actually feeling, whereas when an American is asked the same question, he invariably answers, “Fine.” We’re doing fine. We’re moving forward, moving ahead, no problems, unto death.
More than what Shields says about reacting to death, I like what he has to say about literature. The need for it to be passionate and un-static. “I like art with a visible string to the world,” he writes elsewhere in the piece. This has always been pretty important to me. I’d rather read something verging, or careening, over-the-top than something else that’s a “slice-of-life” (I really hate this designation.) but gets me nowhere. Of course, a writer doesn’t have to make grand statements, subtlety is also or even more underrated. All of this seems obvious to me, but I see these things happening in all sorts of novels and stories people are reading. The good, the grand, the ugly. It’s something I think about, a lot.
(Source: lareviewofbooks)
