Lance Olsen: There

Contended the writer with a t-shirt designed to make money in his name saying: Kafka didn’t have a lot of fun either .

:::: I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post.

Wrote another editor when rejecting Gertrude Stein.

:::: O. invariably begins to imagine what comes after the finish line of every race long before the homestretch rounds into view.

:::: Death is the mother of beauty.

Penciled Wallace Stevens, who in 1935 confessed to his publisher he was a Mussolini supporter and added: The Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors.

:::: Because my uncle had a heart attack on a beach in Texas while feeding the pigeons.

A good Scandinavian, he was too embarrassed to draw attention to himself, recounted his wife, who was sitting beside him at the time, and so he expired, sotto voce , on the spot.

:::: Or my cousin who went into the hospital for a routine hip replacement to fix his fullback years and caught a virulent bacterial infection. One week he was fine, the next on a ventilator, and the next his wife was emailing family and friends announcing the time and place of his memorial service.

:::: Andi’s grandmother refused to be buried, insisting on being entombed in a mausoleum instead because, went her reasoning, she didn’t want to get dirty.

:::: Or Cam Tatham, another dying friend. Another email. Another metastasis to the brain. Sorry not to have updated you sooner, he writes, but the fog is settling in so even this will have to be short. Not much news. I wish I could write something light and cheerful, at least something light and pomo-ish, but, fact is, cancer does suck. Or, rather, it’s the treatment that sucks: makes me want to do nothing but sleep all day (and night). Not much pain — occasional headaches, joint aches. What’s most scary is the felt deterioration of my mental abilities (such as they were) — each day, I get dumber and dumber, and know it. Memory loss, inability to follow conversations, inability to find words. B. finds it inevitably frustrating, seeing me standing in the middle of a room, clearly without a clue what I’m doing there; and never sure if I understand or will remember two minutes later something she asked me to do. Frustrating for me, too — feeling like a retard who needs to have notes pinned to his shirt.

:::: Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Queried Annie Dillard.

:::: Because Diane Arbus swallows barbiturates and slashes her wrists, as does Mark Rothko, as does Petronius, as does B.S. Johnson.

:::: Jerzy Kosinski swallows barbiturates and puts a bag over his head, as does Michael Dorris.

:::: Alice Bradley Sheldon, a.k.a. James Tiptree, Jr., blows out her blind and bedridden husband’s brains as he sleeps, then lies down beside him, takes his hand in hers, and blows out her own.

:::: Edwin Armstrong, inventor of the FM radio, jumps from a window, as does F.O. Matthiessen, as does Gilles Deleuze.

:::: Primo Levi leaps from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin.

:::: While I thought that I was learning how to live, Leonardo da Vinci apprehended near the end of his life, I have been learning how to die.

:::: Nietzsche, redux: The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

:::: Because each morning, as you rise from your bed, the belief hums through your head that you are going to die, going to die, going to die, yes, surely, no doubt about it, but not today — an observation that will remain correct every morning of your life, except one, because—

Because—

O. writes at the conclusion of his novel Calendar of Regrets , pretending et cetera, though what he can’t get beyond, rereading those lines now, is how bed and head form an unintentional rhyme.

:::: Every sentence is a kiss.

:::: All the Berlins.

:::: And I have come to relinquish that most modern of stances: uncertainty, Carole Maso submitted. I am certain now of what will happen.

:::: Which in the end is to understand fully by not fully understanding that no matter where we live, or for how long, no matter how we read or think or write, or in what configuration, we’re all just paying by the hour.