Illustration by Calef Brown Fiction "A Death in the Family," James Agee. This deeply moving tale about the effect of a father's death on a little boy is prefaced with one of the great set pieces of prose in the English language, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." "We are talking now of summer nights in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child..." --GK "The Divine Comedy," Dante Alighieri. Although every other character in this epic is already dead, our hero -- who begins the story in a bewildering crisis of purpose -- reaps plenty of lessons on how to live from his encounters in Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Despite the fire-and-brimstone iconography, Dante's actually showing us how our delusions create a hell on earth: For example, hypocrites are condemned to march in weighty cloaks of lead, the angry burn in their own rage, and those who never made a commitment to either good or evil aren't even entitled to the stature of damnation -- they're just buffeted mournfully this way and that on the banks of the Styx. --LM
"The Epic of Gilgamesh," Anonymous. This Sumerian epic, at least 1,500 years older than Homer, presents the first tragic hero in world literature: King Gilgamesh, haunted by the death of his friend, which opens his eyes to the reality of his own mortality, sets out to attain wisdom and achieve immortality by crossing the "waters of death." In his doomed quest a human voice reaches across the ages: "I thought my friend would come back because of my weeping. Since he went, my life is nothing ... How can I be silent, how can I rest? He is dust and I too shall die and be laid in the earth for ever." --GK "To The Wedding," John Berger. The climactic wedding scene in this slim novel is a lengthy, ecstatic celebration of life, thrown into the very teeth of death itself. It's joyous, agonizing, funny and deeply satisfying. --LM "Japanese Death Poems," edited by Yoel Hoffman. A moving testament to the human ability to remain calm and aware, even creative, at the very moment of death. --FB "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens. The prototype for inferior tear-jerkers like "It's a Wonderful Life," this is simply the greatest sentimental (friendlier critics would say transformational) work ever written. Scrooge must stare at his own tombstone before he changes his life. --GK "U.S.A.," John Dos Passos. (Houghton Mifflin) Jean-Paul Sartre famously cited the death of Joe in a barroom brawl ("He tried to swing around, but he didn't have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was out.") as evidence that Dos Passos was the greatest writer of the age. That assessment might have been a shade too high, but the author of this great trilogy remains one of the century's underrated realists. His flat, stream-of-consciousness account of the death of Charley after a car wreck ("He was dropping spinning being sucked down into") remains indelibly in the mind. --GK "The Brothers Karamazov," Fyodor Dostoevsky. God-and-death-obsessed Dostoevsky, who once looked down the barrels of a firing squad before countermanding orders were given, enacts one of the supreme dramatic dialogues about life and death in his masterwork, with the intellectual Ivan, who, like Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment," dares to live out a self-torturing version of atheism, set against the saintly Alyosha, who naively affirms life, and the passionate Mitya, who loves well but knows not what he does. The nominal winner is Alyosha, but Ivan gets the best speeches. --GK "Deep River," Shusaku Endo. A group of Japanese tourists and seekers converges on India's holy Ganges River, propelled by spiritual hunger, the death of loved ones and visions of their own mortal precariousness in this novel by the great Japanese Catholic writer. In the face of life's torments and its inevitable conclusion, all that matters, suggests Endo, is faith. --DT "Jesus' Son," Denis Johnson. Jagged, overpowering tales of spiritual (and literal) death and rebirth. Here is the narrator, a lost, drug-addled soul, looking down on an unconscious, dying man in "Car Crash While Hitchhiking": "He wouldn't be taking many more (breaths). I knew that, but he didn't, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real." --GK "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats. The previous December, Keats had watched his younger brother die. One morning in the spring of 1819 the poet sat in a friend's garden for several hours listening to a nightingale and composed this meditation on eternity, art and death. "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death ..." --GK "A River Runs Through It," Norman Maclean. The title story in Maclean's collection concludes with a passage of haunting beauty about the inexplicability of death and the solace that can be found in the timelessness of nature. --DT "The Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann. The strangest night of death-haunted passion on record takes place between hero Hans Castorp and the mysterious Clavdia Chauchat in their tuberculosis sanitarium, which becomes an emblem of all of our lives under the shadow of death. --GK "The Father," Sharon Olds. In this unsentimental but emotionally powerful collection, the celebrated poet maintains a death watch at her father's hospital bed, minutely recording his physical passage to the other side and the complicated anatomy of their relationship. --DT "The Yearling," Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' exquisite 1938 classic about a boy's love for a yearling deer and the loss of his innocence when he must kill it far transcends the genre of children's literature. The movie version is first-rate too, with scenic tableaux that beautifully recreate N.C. Wyeth's majestic paintings. --GK "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Leo Tolstoy. Certainly one of the single most moving and unforgettable works of fiction to explore the psychology of mortal illness and the act of dying, Tolstoy's novella plunges us into the confused mind of a milquetoast lawyer who wakes up one day with a pain that just won't go away. --SR Nonfiction "Life Sentences," edited by Thomas Avena. A powerful collection of writings, some almost impossible to read (David Wojnarowicz's piece is a pure scream of horror) by writers and artists about AIDS. --GK
"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker. In this marvelously readable and magisterially persuasive reinterpretation of the work of Otto Rank, Becker argues that our repression of the knowledge of our own mortality is the fundamental problem of human psychology. You can disagree with him, but you must read him. --SR "This Way To the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," Tadeusz Borowski. What makes these stories by a Polish survivor of the Nazi death camps truly horrific -- and more disturbing than more pious versions -- is their deliberately light, casual tone: The narrator revels in his food packages and clean linen as women are clubbed apart from their children. Borowski later committed suicide. --GK "Life Against Death," by Norman O. Brown. The classic philosophical inquiry into death, offering a '60s-tinged interpretation of the centrality of "eros" in human behavior. --FB "Intoxicated By My Illness," Anatole Broyard. A funny, wry, consummately urbane account of what it feels like to have a terminal illness -- and the strange enchantment it lends life. "It seemed to me that my existence, whatever I thought, felt, or did, had taken on a kind of meter, as in poetry or taxis." --GK "This Wild Darkness," Harold Brodkey (forthcoming from Metropolitan/Holt in October). Judging by his essay in the New Yorker, the late novelist's meditations on death and dying promises to be an extraordinary literary event. --GK "Death and Western Thought," Jacques Choron. A fascinating overview of philosophers' thoughts on death from Socrates to Sartre. --FB "Ritual for Living and Dying," David Feinstein and Peg Elliott Mayo. This important book gives 18 "living and dying rituals" that allow readers to work on their own anxiety about death. --FB "Sometimes My Heart Goes Numb," by Charles Garfield. Moving accounts by AIDS caregivers. --FB "Beyond Death," by Stanislav and Christina Grof. A historical study of attitudes toward death including teachings from Egyptian, Tibetan and Western culture. --FB "The Human Encounter with Death," by Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax. An extremely useful and interesting study of attitudes toward death by terminally-ill cancer patients, including some taking therapeutic doses of LSD. --FB "On Death and Dying," Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. This classic work explores the basic stages of dealing with death: denial, acceptance, depression, anger, acceptance. --FB "Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying," by Stephen Levine." A beautifully written rebuttal to Becker's view, based on Levine's work with the dying. "She was not her body. Who she was never dies. Because awareness simply is." --FB "The Working-Class Majority," by Andrew Levinson. Still think death and class aren't inextricably linked? Imagine the universal outcry, Levinson writes in this remarkable book, "that would occur if every year several corporate headquarters routinely collapsed like mines, crushing sixty or seventy executives ... [or] if thousands of university professors were deafened every year or lost fingers, hands, sometimes eyes, while on their jobs." If you don't face death or maiming at work, you're among the world's lucky ones. --DG "Doors Closed, Doors Open," by Morton Lieberman. An important study of bereavement in widows, showing that a confrontation with death can be life-transforming. --FB "Only Spring," Gordon Livingston. A father's unsparing, beautifully written journal about the illness and death of his beloved 6-year-old son. --GK "The American Way of Death," Jessica Mitford. Americans could never experience a traditional funeral in quite the same way again after Mitford's wonderfully readable and depressingly vivid exposé of the excesses and profiteering of the U.S. death industry. --SR "Blood on the Nash Ambassador," by Eric Mottram. A brilliant, occasionally fetishistic exploration of "technology [read: cars] as apparatus for dream and murder." Mottram, a British academic, shares America's kinky, apocalyptic obsession with automobiles and death, and he fixates on moments of dark cinematic transcendence -- the sinking car in "Psycho," the bullets that riddled Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway's black sedan in "Bonnie and Clyde." --DG "How, Then, Shall We Live?" by Wayne Muller. A useful set of observations from an author grappling with the central question: "How shall I live, knowing I will die?" --FB "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter," Sherwin B. Nuland. The author offers the sharp clarity of the medical perspective: Where others talk of the spirit, he explores the body in remarkable detail, describing just what happens organically during the complex process we call death. --SR "In the Shadow of the Epidemic," Walt Odets. Offers fascinating insights into HIV-negative men's confrontation with mortality. --FB "The Oxford Book of Death." A cheerful anthology of morbidity: quotations and observations from the earliest scriptures of the Fertile Crescent to the ironies of pop culture. --SR "The Meaning of Omega," by Kenneth Ring. An account of near-death experiences by those who had them. --FB "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying," by Sogyal Rinpoche. An interpretation of Tibetan wisdom on death extremely useful to the modern reader. --FB "Living Beyond Limits," David Spiegel. Featured in Bill Moyers' "Healing and the Mind," PBS series, this is an account of how cancer patients meet the challenge of their illness. --FB "Existential Psychotherapy," by Irvin Yalom. A clearly written, accessible explication of Ernst Becker's thought, drawing on the author's extensive clinical experience and deep philosophical understanding. --FB Movies "The Seventh Seal," directed by Ingmar Bergman. Known mostly for its surreal imagery of knights playing chess with Death and silhouetted scythes leading the Dance of Death along barren hillsides, Bergman's masterpiece is also a vision of a medieval society that had no choice but to live with the everyday presence of death. --SR "Defending Your Life," directed by Albert Brooks. As the nebbishy, deceased protagonist, Brooks discovers that the afterlife looks (hilariously) like a spic-'n'-span industrial park, where the rich food has no calories and he'll be called upon to justify his progression to the next stage of ... whatever. The criteria for moving on proves both surprising and entirely apt. --LM "Ikiru (To Live)," directed by Akira Kurosawa. Opening with a shot of an X-ray, this searing tale of a minor official who discovers that he has only six months left, realizes the utter futility of his existence hitherto and sets about trying to learn how to live, moves from despair to hard-won affirmation. --GK "Fearless," directed by Peter Weir. In this flawed but at times unbearably powerful film, Jeff Bridges survives a plane crash and finds that integrating the experience of mortality into his daily life is all but impossible. --SR Music "Wreck on the Highway," Roy Acuff, "Wreck on the Highway," Bruce Springsteen, "Siren," Joe Henry. Three stunning songs, a virtual trilogy, about blood and glass and helplessness. "I went to the scene of destruction," Acuff sings, as if for all of them, "and a picture was stamped on my heart." --DG
"Tomorrow Never Knows," the Beatles. "Turn off your mind/Relax and float downstream ..." Was it about the great void beyond all existence, or just the acid? Whatever, this astonishing eruption of modal shrieks, hypnotic rhythm and Zen-like lyrics ("So play the game existence to the end ... of the beginning") may be the most avant-garde pop song ever recorded. Pure, unadulterated genius by the lads who had been turning out Top 40 pablum just three years earlier. (P.S. The Grateful Dead covered "Tomorrow Never Knows." See, it was about death.) --GK "Don't Fear the Reaper," Blue Oyster Cult. A macabre, jokey takeoff on the Byrds' "Eight Miles High," substituting vampire/suicide imagery for bombs and bongs. Stephen King got the joke; the song was used in the opening scenes of bubonic death and panic in the miniseries version of his epic "The Stand." --JM "This Is Hell," Elvis Costello. A portrait of eternal unrest, where the damned are tormented with an endless blooper reel of the "small humiliations" and faux pas of their callow youth. Lilac leisure suits, cloddish come-on lines, hideous record collections, stale debauchery -- this song gives you every reason in the world to fear the reaper. --JM "The End," Jim Morrison's death lust was already in full bloom on the Doors' first album. Francis Coppola took full advantage of the song's strange, seductive strains to set the mood for "Apocalypse Now." --DT Mahler's Symphony No. 9. The always death-haunted composer's most direct confrontation with the subject takes place here in his final symphony, completed shortly before his own death and riddled with the sweet pain of farewell. As the piece voyages from the stormy majesty of its opening movement to the achingly slow final movement's long fade toward silence, it carries you across rare aural and emotional terrain. --SR "Tuesday Afternoon," the Moody Blues. "The trees are drawing me near/I've got to find out why/Those gentle voices I hear/explain it all with a sigh." A lush and alluring imagining of a near-death experience, disguised as a mid-'60s head trip. --JM "The Wall of Death," Richard and Linda Thompson (from the "Shoot Out the Lights" album). A disillusioned yet rousing anthem, adopting life-is-a-carnival imagery, to living spiritedly in the shadow of death. --SR Add to this list in the Post Mortem section of Table Talk. |
