David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by my ninety-four-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality, I undertook an investigation of our universal physical condition. The result was The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead , which tries to look without blinking 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. I now see life entirely through that book’s Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects, and I find I can’t (after finishing the book, I couldn’t do anything for several months).

Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians goes to hell and back, just barely back, and ends with a tiny glimmer of uptick—not too much but not too little, either. It’s the only affirmation that anyone can offer: astonishingly, we’re here . The book majors in exposed nerve endings. Without which, sorry, I can’t read anything. Manguso is mourning both her friend Harris, who on p. 1 commits suicide, and herself (she’s “dead” now, too). “It doesn’t mean shit,” an Italian security guard tells her Israeli friend about his passport, which is crucial, since Manguso is always asking what, if anything, means shit? Nothing does or, rather, everything is shit. How then to put one foot in front of the other? Well, let us investigate that. Life and death are in direct tension (as are Manguso’s vow not to make anything up and her acknowledgment that, of course, she will—constantly). I did something I do when I genuinely love a book: start covering my mouth when I read. This is very pure and elemental; I want nothing coming between me and the page.

In Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World , Michael Reed, whose wife and daughter have recently died in a car accident, wants, as if he were Adam in Eden (or Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station ), to name the world in a pre-fallen world, but he realizes that the world isn’t like that, was never like that, so he becomes a war correspondent in order to have running confirmation that the world is as terrible as he thought. Wherever he goes, he’s walking across a graveyard. So are you. So am I.

Our ground time here will be brief

IN HIS EULOGY for Christina-Taylor Green, one of the victims of the Tucson shooting spree, Obama said, “If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.” However, for many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.

As baby boomers enter their/our senescence, we’re all looking for companionship in the dark. Michael Billington, reviewing Simon Gray’s Close of Play in The Guardian , wrote, “To embody death convincingly on the stage is one of the hardest things for a dramatist to do. Mr. Gray has here managed it in a way that, paradoxically, makes life itself that much more bearable.”

Greg Bottoms: “When things go wrong, when Nietzsche’s ‘breath of empty space’ moves over your skin, reminds you that you are but a blip in the existence of the world, destined from birth to vanish with all the things and people you love, to mulch the land with no more magic than the rotting carcass of a bird, it’s nice to imagine—” Imagine what, exactly?

Some people might find it anathema to even consider articulating an answer to this question, but if, as Rembrandt said, “Painting is philosophy,” then certainly writing is philosophy as well. Isn’t everyone’s project, on some level, to offer tentative theses regarding what—if anything—we’re doing here? Against death, in other words, what solace, what consolation, what bulwark? Tolstoy: “The meaning of life is life”—for which much thanks. Ice-T’s answer: “A human being is just another animal in the big jungle. Life is really short and you’re going to die. We’re here to stick our heads above the water for just a minute, look around, and go back under.” Burt Reynolds: “First, it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ Then it’s ‘Get me Burt Reynolds.’ Then ‘Get me a Burt Reynolds type.’ Then ‘Get me a young Burt Reynolds.’ And then it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ ” Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Okay, you’re going to go on, I hope and assume. Congratulations. Why, though? What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beckett’s own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart.

As a nine-year-old, I would awake and spend the entire night sitting cross-legged on the landing of the stairs to my basement bedroom, unable to fathom that one day I’d cease to be. I remember being mesmerized by a neighbor’s tattoo of a death’s-head, underneath which were the words “As I am, you shall someday be.” (Now, do I yearn for this state, the peace that passeth all understanding? What if death is my Santa Claus?) Cormac McCarthy: “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” I’m trying to do a very un-American thing here: talk about it. Why? Pynchon: “When we speak of ‘seriousness,’ ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death, how we act in its presence, for example, or how we handle it when it isn’t so immediate.” DFW: “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of a writer’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” The only books I truly love do exactly this—

In Out of Sheer Rage , Geoff Dyer tries and fails to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, but the book conveys Lawrence better than any conventional biography does, and more important, it asks the question How and why do we get up in the morning? In many ways, it’s a thinking person’s self-help book: how to live your life with passion when you know every passion is delusional. Dyer is paralyzed by the difficulty of choice, because he can always see the opposite position—a different place to live, woman to love, book to write. His conclusion: “The best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence.” By getting up in the morning, we get up in the morning. By not writing our biographies of D. H. Lawrence, we write our biographies of D. H. Lawrence. The crucial line in Dyer’s most recent book, Zona: “We never know when we’re going to die and because of that we are, at any one moment, immortal.” All of his best books are fixed on this idea—searching for such moments, trying to produce such suspensions in the work itself. Extended footnotes divide Zona in two. Digressions give us at least the illusion of breaking away from time, killing it before it kills us. The book kept reminding me of an evening Dyer and I spent together a few years ago. It was terribly important to him to find exactly the right restaurant. I didn’t understand this. I remember thinking, Who cares? We found the right restaurant, where (after mocking me for ordering Prosecco—“another drink for the homosexual gentleman?”) he devoured what he called the best hamburger he’d ever eaten. Empty praise? Full stomach? It was crucial to him to at least try to enter the Zone. Dyer is determined not to waste his time on earth, and he knows the only way not to waste it is to waste it.