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Since this blog is meant to introduce Civilized to Death, a book I'm currently completing for Simon and Schuster (due out next year), I thought I may as well begin with part of an introduction I've decided not to use in the book. I like it, but it's not a good fit. I guess I decided not to be so confessional, after all.
“God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well, myself.”
―Eugene Ionesco
Since I’m being confessional, I may as well admit that getting this book going was unusually difficult for me—despite feeling passionate about the subjects. I felt like one of those Chinese guys who pulls a truck with a rope attached to his penis. Once it gets rolling, it’s fine, but man, those first tugs are rough!
Trust me, I’m not going to whine about how hard it is to write for a living. I’ve got no patience for people who complain about how tough it is to sit around and think. “Get a job in a coal mine, or a prison, and then tell us how hard writing is,” I want to tell them. No, I mention my resistance only because I think it fits with one of the themes of this book: death.
A lot of these ideas have been swimming around in my head for most of my life. Writing them down feels a bit like pulling live fish from a river, knowing that in some sense, they’ll flop and die on the page. Once articulated, further revision and refinement are no longer possible, so they grow still.
And yet, we often hear how writing conveys some sort of immortality. In his 1988 book of essays, Prepared for the Worst, Christopher Hitchens recounts some advice he’d received from the South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. “A serious person should try to write posthumously.”
Try? Hell, there’s no getting around it; it’s all posthumous. Hitchens kicked the can in 2011, Gordimer died last year, and I’m not feeling too well, myself. Or worse, maybe I’m a goner already. I write from my present (Portland, OR, spring of 2015. It’s raining), which is already your past. I know you’re there, on the other side of a paper-thin wall. You’re reading in your present, which is, for a while, my future. But who knows how much future lies before me? Most of the books I’ve read in my life spoke to me in voices from beyond the grave. Why should mine be any different?
These words will outlive me—even if only on a dusty back shelf of a used book store in Topeka—which makes me feel both already dead and kind of immortal. But what sort of dubious immortality have I achieved? And will it have been worth the trouble? Doubtful.
Every gesture toward the illusion of immortality requires living hours. False immortality costs real life, in other words, and living consciously is the only way to cheat death. An hour well-lived and deeply experienced not only distracts us from our mortality, it robs death by spending the only currency it can rob us of: time among the living.
When someone says, “He lost his life in the accident,” I always think, “No, he just lost the part he hadn’t yet lived.” Nobody can steal what you’ve already spent. Conversely, when I read of “justice being served” when someone is finally released from prison years after being wrongfully convicted, I’m amazed that anyone finds justice in this. Those years are gone forever. No apology, handshake, or check is going to change that.
