Alive on arrival?
More Yom Kippur reading: David Shield’s The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, which the author describes as “an autobiography of my body, a biography of my father’s body, an anatomy of our bodies together.”
It’s memoir wrapped around a sobering and oddly inspiring data dump on the ways our bodies grow and then dissipate — mostly dissipate, it seems: Human life, biologically speaking, is a quick and miraculous climb followed by a slow and agonizing decline. It’s a wonder anyone over the age of 40 can do the simplest task, considering our brains are shrinking and our blood and bones imploding.
Shields:
Francis Thompson wrote, “For we are born in other’s pain, / And perish in our own.” Edward Young wrote, “Our birth is nothing but our death begun.” Francis Bacon: “What then remains, but that we still should cry / Not to be born, or being born, to die?” The first sentence of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
But it is inspiring, too. Yom Kippur is in some ways a rehearsal of our deaths — we close down normal bodily funtions like eating and sex, wrap ourselves in white shrouds, and imagine we won’t make it through the day. And when we do emerge, Scrooge-like, we’re supposed to realize the ways we’ve wasted the precious few days alotted us, and imagine ways we can make better use of our brief time in this bag of skin.
Writes Shields:
Mark Harris, trying to explain why he thought Saul Bellow was a better writer than any of his contemporaries, said Bellow was simply more alive than anyone else, and there’s something of that in my father. D.H. Lawrence was said to have lived as if he were a man without skin. That, too, is my father: I keep on urging him to don skin, and he keeps declining.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 