David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

A day like any other, only shorter

KAREN SHABETAI, dead at forty-four.

When you were around her, you sometimes felt like a bit of a jerk, because you knew you weren’t as good a person as she was. You weren’t as generous, as kind, as civilized, as communal, as energetic, as fun (Karen riding the elevator seated atop her bike with her helmet still on). She gave the best parties in Seattle, at least the Seattle that I know. She made belonging to part of something larger than yourself—a discipline, a city, a religion—seem like a possibility. She had the most and best tips for what school to send your children to, what summer camps, where to travel (Rome, Rome, and Rome, apparently), what to see, what to read.

Once, masquerading as a scholar, I applied for an NEH fellowship, and I swear Karen spent more time on the application than I did (still no luck!). Having her students in my creative writing classes was a distinctly mixed blessing: they were inevitably among the most well-prepared students in the course, but they expected me to be as dedicated a teacher as Karen was. She believed in the continuity of culture in a way that I pretend to but don’t, and one of my most luminous memories is of her daughter, Sophie, playing the violin at a party at their house (Karen’s concentration matching Sophie’s).

It’s important to remind myself that Karen was sweet but not too sweet. The loving and challenging contentiousness between Karen and Ross was and is to me a model of a successful marriage. One night, Laurie and I and Karen and Ross saw Il Postino , and afterward we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The waiter at the restaurant was so Italian, so obviously an extra who had somehow ( Purple Rose of Cairo– like) escaped from Il Postino , that Karen and I virtually—no, not virtually; literally—had to stick napkins in our mouths every time he came by to inquire about us. Laurie and Ross were considerably more composed, but Karen and I were beyond rescue.

Our ground time here will be brief

RAY KURZWEIL BELIEVES that in twenty years, medical and technical advances will produce a robot small enough to wander throughout your body, doing whatever it’s been programmed to do, e.g., going inside any cell and reversing all the causes of aging by rebuilding the cell to a younger version of itself. If you do that to every cell in your body and keep doing this on a regular basis, you could (theoretically) live forever.

By 2030, Kurzweil believes, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We will have “eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the other hormone-producing organs, kidney, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and bowel. What we’ll have left at that point will be the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

Kurzweil’s father died of heart disease at fifty-eight. His grandfather died in his early forties. At thirty-five, Kurzweil himself was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, which he “cured” with an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills and intravenous treatments. He now takes 150 supplements and drinks eight to ten glasses of alkaline water and ten cups of green tea every day. He drinks several glasses of red wine a week (gotta love that resveratrol).

On weekends, he undergoes IV transfusions of chemical cocktails, which he believes will reprogram his biochemistry. He undergoes preemptive medical tests for many diseases and disorders, keeps detailed records of the content of his meals, and routinely measures the chemical composition of his own bodily fluids.

Kurzweil, now sixty-four, has joined Alcor Life Extension, a cryonics company. In the unlikely event of his death, his body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him.

Asked if being a singularitarian (someone who believes that technological progress will become so rapid that the near future will be qualitatively different and impossible to predict) makes him happy, he said, “If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would have consisted of getting a fire to light more easily, but we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge—casting a wider net of consciousness—is the purpose of life.”

He wants not so much to live as never to die.

He seems to me the saddest person on the planet.

I empathize with him completely.

A day like any other, only shorter

ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF: “All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.”

BEN SHEPHARD: “In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up ‘Crackers or Coffins.’ Thereafter, their time in the air was rationed.”

DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG: “ ‘Frozen on the stick’: paralyzed with fear.”

PAUL FUSSELL: “The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.”

MICHEL LEIRIS: “If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.”

SHEPHARD: “From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of ‘flying personnel who will not face operational risks.’ This sanction was known as ‘LMF’ or ‘Lack of Moral Fibre.’ Arthur Smith ‘went LMF’ after his twentieth ‘op.’ The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr, and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English Channel, he had lost control of his fear. His ‘courage snapped and terror took over.’ ‘I couldn’t do anything at all,’ he later recalled. ‘I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak.’ ”

JÖRG FRIEDRICH: “The Allies’ bombing transportation offensive of the 1944 pre-invasion weeks took the lives of twelve thousand French and Belgian citizens, nearly twice as many as Bomber Command killed within the German Reich in 1942. On the night of April 9, 239 Halifaxes, Lancasters, Stirlings, and Mosquitoes destroyed 2,124 freight cars in Lille, as well as the Cité des Cheminots, a railroad workers’ settlement with friendly, lightweight residential homes. Four hundred fifty-six people died, mostly railroaders. The survivors, who thought they were facing their final hours from the force of the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, ‘Bastards, bastards.’ ”

DOUGLAS BOND (PSYCHIATRIC ADVISER TO THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE IN BRITAIN DURING WWII): “Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretense that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.”