Wednesday, January 10, 2007
I picked up "Best American Essays 2006" in NoHo when we dropped EGA off, just in time for some airplane reading. Lauren Slater guest edited this year's edition, and once again I am struck by two things: the impressive quality of the work assembled; and the number of essays collected that I'd already read. I hadn't read Laurie Abraham's "Kinsey and Me", which leads off the collection, and was lulled into the pleasing thought that the set might contain some interesting writing about sex, but Ms. Slater's actual topic turned out to be mortality. Lots of people die in "Best American Essays" this year-- people's parents, Sam Pickering's dog, Adam Gopnik's daughter's pet fish, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow-- but the saddest of the lot is Marjorie Williams, whose first person account about dying of cancer damn near made me cry when I read it for the first time last year, and almost did it again this afternoon. Ms. Williams wrote about her own death with such clear-eyed grace that I felt like gasping at almost every paragraph. It is almost a shame that her husband's little piece on affinity bracelets isn't included as a coda. Writing in Slate, Tim Noah said, "With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion. That helps explain why my dear wife, who died of liver cancer two weeks ago, and whom I miss almost more than I can bear—and certainly more than any colored wristband could possibly express—held the awareness-bracelet movement in undisguised contempt." That paragraph belongs in this collection.
There is a larger point here though. From Gopnik's essay about his daughter's goldfish: "Everybody had had a dead-pet problem. Goldfish had floated to the tops of bowls; hamsters had been found dead in their gages, their furry feet upward; and more guruesome inter-pet homicides had taken place, too. Each family had a different tack, and a different theory. There were those who had gone the full 'Vertigo' route and regretted it; those who had gone the tell-it-to-'em straight route and regretted that. In fact, about all one could say, and not for the first time as a parent, is that whatever one did, one regretted it afterward."
Gopnik is onto something there, but he doesn't quite go the whole way, and Williams, with death a daily companion, probably gets a little closer to the weird sadness of being a parent. Driving home from our Saturday run a few weeks ago Jim was talking about how his children mispronounce some words. "Aminals" was one, I think, and there was another that escapes me. "I don't correct them," he said, because I'm not in a hurry for them to stop being kids." His children are much younger than mine, and what I should have told him is that they don't, stop, really. They get older, and become Logicians or divas or level-headed beautiful young women, but it is impossible to look at your children without realizing how crazy lucky you are, and how precarious it all is. My heart breaks every day, every time I look at them.
Williams got it. "But from almost the first instant, my terror and grief were tinged with an odd relief. I was so lucky, I thought, that this was happening to me as late as forty-three, not in my thirties or in my twenties. If I died soon, there would be some things I'd regret not having done, and I would feel fathomless anguish at leaving my children so young. But I had a powerful sense that, for my own part, I had had every chance to flourish. I had a loving marriage. I'd known the sweet, rock-breaking, irreplaceable labor of parenthood, and would leave two marvelous beings in my place. I had known rapture, and adventure, and rest. I knew what it was to love my work. I had deep, hard-won friendships, and diverse, widespread fredships of less intensity.
"I was surrounded by love.
"All this knowledge brought a certain calm. I knew intuitively that I would have felt more paniced, more frantic, in the years when I was still growing into my adulthood. For I had had the chance to become the person it was in me to be. Nor did I waste any time wondering why. Why me? It was obvious that this was no more or less than a piece of horrible bad luck. Until then my life had been, in the big ways, one long run of good luck. Only a moral idiot could feel entitled, in the midst of such a life, to a complete exception from bad fortune."
I read that and I am reminded that I should be less churlish about my good luck.
There is a larger point here though. From Gopnik's essay about his daughter's goldfish: "Everybody had had a dead-pet problem. Goldfish had floated to the tops of bowls; hamsters had been found dead in their gages, their furry feet upward; and more guruesome inter-pet homicides had taken place, too. Each family had a different tack, and a different theory. There were those who had gone the full 'Vertigo' route and regretted it; those who had gone the tell-it-to-'em straight route and regretted that. In fact, about all one could say, and not for the first time as a parent, is that whatever one did, one regretted it afterward."
Gopnik is onto something there, but he doesn't quite go the whole way, and Williams, with death a daily companion, probably gets a little closer to the weird sadness of being a parent. Driving home from our Saturday run a few weeks ago Jim was talking about how his children mispronounce some words. "Aminals" was one, I think, and there was another that escapes me. "I don't correct them," he said, because I'm not in a hurry for them to stop being kids." His children are much younger than mine, and what I should have told him is that they don't, stop, really. They get older, and become Logicians or divas or level-headed beautiful young women, but it is impossible to look at your children without realizing how crazy lucky you are, and how precarious it all is. My heart breaks every day, every time I look at them.
Williams got it. "But from almost the first instant, my terror and grief were tinged with an odd relief. I was so lucky, I thought, that this was happening to me as late as forty-three, not in my thirties or in my twenties. If I died soon, there would be some things I'd regret not having done, and I would feel fathomless anguish at leaving my children so young. But I had a powerful sense that, for my own part, I had had every chance to flourish. I had a loving marriage. I'd known the sweet, rock-breaking, irreplaceable labor of parenthood, and would leave two marvelous beings in my place. I had known rapture, and adventure, and rest. I knew what it was to love my work. I had deep, hard-won friendships, and diverse, widespread fredships of less intensity.
"I was surrounded by love.
"All this knowledge brought a certain calm. I knew intuitively that I would have felt more paniced, more frantic, in the years when I was still growing into my adulthood. For I had had the chance to become the person it was in me to be. Nor did I waste any time wondering why. Why me? It was obvious that this was no more or less than a piece of horrible bad luck. Until then my life had been, in the big ways, one long run of good luck. Only a moral idiot could feel entitled, in the midst of such a life, to a complete exception from bad fortune."
I read that and I am reminded that I should be less churlish about my good luck.
// posted by Bill @ 5:44 PM 
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