Book by Book (18 page)

5. Keep some perspective. To think that there could be worse than, say, being afflicted with high blood pressure can reduce the shock of an unexpected medical report. The occasional bout of melancholy may be regarded as merely the changeable weather of the soul. Wait a few days, and the dark skies will clear.

6. Be prepared. We all possess what the poet Paul Eluard called
“le dur desir de durer”
—the strong desire to keep on going on. But things happen, and if we are in unbearable agony, we will
yearn for its cessation. The one help here is to plan ahead, make clear your wishes about what should and should not be done for you if worse comes to worse. Because it might.

One day we will hear the oncologist say, “I'm afraid the prognosis is discouraging.”—Donald Hall

One never knows, to paraphrase the opening sentence of Graham Greene's thriller
The Third Man
, just when or from where the blow will fall. But all of us recognize that adversity awaits each of us, sooner or later. C. S. Lewis called this the problem of pain, and the ancient philosophers, even the Stoics, agreed that pain was the chief obstacle to the serenity of heart and spirit that we should strive for during our lives.

When bad things happen to us, whether we are good people or not, we tend to lose at least some of our individuality, becoming yet another voice crying out to God or the universe: Why me? This isn't fair. How could this be happening? Isn't there anything to be done?

At such moments we find ourselves acting like little children, yearning for our mothers to make things better with a kiss or some words of comfort. As adults, we turn to our physicians or therapists and hope that they will assume that role and make the hurt go away. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't.

What is most dispiriting is our fear, or even conviction, that because
of illness or disaster we will become decrepit, machine-dependent, viewed as a medical case or a pariah, and eventually be cast aside by society and those we love. Most older people don't fear death so much as diminution, the loss of the self we have known most of our lives, the possibility that our minds and bodies will be taken from us and a dried husk left behind. We want so desperately to remain attractive and useful to the world. Cicero noted long ago that the unhappiest aspect of old age was feeling that people found one wearisome, a bore, irrelevant. Alas, no books offer a sure path through serious crisis. What works for you might not work for me, or for her, or for them. Still, reading can usually be a comfort, small but powerful.

Devout Christians have traditionally turned to the Bible or to heavenly minded thinkers for words of solace (“When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep.”—William Temple). Others often read philosophers like Marcus Aurelius or Cicero, who ask us to rise above the corporeal and focus on our true self, the spirit. Buddhist scriptures remind us that were we truly to understand that the world is illusion and our desires only a source of suffering, we would be able to escape from this endless round of pain and continue our progress toward Nirvana. Nietzsche famously proclaimed that what doesn't destroy us can actually make us stronger. Sometimes a Wodehouse or Thurber might bring a smile, however wan.

Still, as Samuel Johnson movingly wrote, “the loss of our friends and companions impresses hourly upon us the necessity of our own departure; we know that the schemes of man are quickly
at an end, that we must soon lie down in the grave with the forgotten multitudes of former ages, and yield our place to others, who, like us, shall be driven awhile by hope or fear, about the surface of the earth, and then like us be lost in the shades of death.”

Most of the time we find it simply inconceivable that we should not be. “We say,” said Proust, “that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we imagine that hour as situated in a vague and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any relation to the day already begun or that death could come this very afternoon, which is anything but uncertain—this afternoon every hour of which is filled in advance.”

In some dark hours it can help to think of all those who have come and gone before us. Not only parents and friends, but also the glorious dead, especially those who suffered more than we through what Alexander Pope called “this long disease, my life,” or succumbed far too early: Keats, Shelley, and Rimbaud in their twenties; the composers Purcell and Mozart in their thirties; D.H. Lawrence and Scott Fitzgerald in their midforties; and so many others who were doing us some good. Those of us who live out our full term of three score and ten (or more) years ought to feel grateful. For after a certain distance, said Robert Louis Stevenson (who died at forty-four), with “every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

Art, poetry, music, philosophy, religion—these can console us, if our pain or despair isn't too great, or if we still hope that we might eventually get better. But if we won't get better, it may be harder to engage with anything beyond the fact of our pain and
mortality. At such moments, one can take reliable comfort, even if never quite enough, from two sources: unconditional love from family and friends, and the knowledge that one has accomplished something good or useful in this life.

These are, in some senses, aspects of the same thing. We may be leaving this world—yet not entirely. Those who love us will remember us, talk of us, and keep alive our names. Not in any vainglorious way, but simply as a kind of thank-you for having been part of their own existences for a while, for having enriched their own lives. Similarly, to have given something of oneself to the world, even a small part of the world, makes us a part of it forever. Plato talked of this long ago in
The Symposium.
Children are the most obvious example of such giving, but they aren't the only ones. A teacher will have formed his or her pupils. To have created a garden or written a book, to have preserved a work of art from the destruction of time, to have helped the poor or the sick or the spiritually distressed, to have contributed to society more than one has taken—these are the sorts of triumphs available to any of us.

But there will always be regret, of some sort. How could there not be? In mid-career, the Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel was arrested by the secret police and never seen again. As he was hustled away, Babel was heard to shout, “But I was not given time to finish.” Who is? Whatever you intend to accomplish with your life, you'd better get a move on, before that last call unexpectedly rings out, “Hurry up, please. It's time.”

At the day of Judgment we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.—Thomas à Kempis

Several hundred writers, scholars and thinkers are quoted or mentioned in
Book by Book.
Most are fairly well known, and information about them may be readily found in standard reference books or online. But in some cases a name may hold a special significance (if just to me) or be only vaguely familiar to readers, and these I have chosen to briefly identify in the following pages. That said, virtually all the people and works I mention throughout
Book by Book
will reward whatever time you can give to them.

C
HARLES
A
DDAMS
(1912-1988). Celebrated
New Yorker
cartoonist, best known for his macabre humor. Creator of the originals for
The Addams Family.

M
ORTIMER
J. A
DLER
(1902-2001). Editor of
The Great Books of the Western World
and longtime advocate of serious reading.

J
OAN
A
IKEN
(1924—2004). Prolific writer for children, revered for her adventure-packed chronicles about the Cockney waif Dido Twite. Start
with
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
, though Dido first appears in
Black Hearts in Battersea.

Y
EHUDA
A
MICHAI
(1924-2000). Major Israeli poet, wistful and sensual in his themes, plain and matter-of-fact in his Hebrew.

W
ILLIAM
A
RROWSMITH
(1924-1992). Teacher, classical scholar, and translator (of Petronius's
Satyricon
and much else).

M
AX
B
EERBOHM
(1872-1956).
A
dandy and self-confessed minor talent, “the Incomparable Max” is widely (and rightly) revered for his essays, stories, parodies, and drawings, these last mostly caricatures of his contemporaries.

E. F. B
LEILER
(b. 1920). Scholar, translator, and editor of genius, Bleiler rediscovered (and then published in Dover Books) many of the greatest works in the history of fantasy, detective fiction, horror, and science fiction.

L
OUISE BROOKS
(1906-1985). Silent screen star, and to many the ultimate vamp. Best known for
Pandora's Box.

I
TALO
C
ALVINO
(1923-1985). The major Italian writer of the 1960s and 1970s, playful and ingratiating, but always pushing against the limits of narrative form (see
If on a winter's night a traveler
and
Invisible Cities).

G
IROLAMO
C
ARDANO
(1501-1576). Renaissance mathematician and astrologer, and author of the strange and winning memoir
The Book of My Life.

J
OHN
D
ICKSON CARR
(1906-1977). The all-time master of the “locked-room mystery,” in which a crime is committed under conditions that make it seem supernatural. (See
The Three Coffins
and
The Burning Court.)

G. K. C
HESTERTON
(1874-1936). Journalist extraordinaire—and the creator of the second-greatest of all detectives, Father Brown, as well as the author of that inimitable, yet oft imitated, philosophical thriller,
The Man Who Was Thursday.

E. M. C
IORAN
(1911-1995). Romanian-born essayist, long resident in Paris, famous for such morose but deeply intelligent books as
The Temptation to Exist
and
A Short History of Decay.

K
ENNETH
C
LARK
(1903-1983). Urbane and patrician, Clark was a leading figure in the British art establishment for much of his adult life and grew internationally famous through his television program
Civilisation.

J
OHN
C
LUTE
(b. 1940). Arguably the major critic, scholar, and theorist of science fiction and fantasy of our time. See
The Encylopedia of Science Fiction
and
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy.

C
OLETTE
(1873-1954). Iconic Frenchwoman of letters; best known for her novels about love, especially
Cheri
and
Gigi.

J
OHN
C
OLLIER
(1850-1934). English short-story writer, long resident in Hollywood, specializing in tales of the macabre, most of them told in a breezy, Jazz-Age manner; see
Fancies and Goodnights.

C
YRIL
C
ONNOLLY
(1903-1974). Moody introspective English man of letters; celebrated for his wit, prose style, and hedonism.

P
ETER
C
ONRAD
(b. 1948). Wide-ranging twentieth-century scholar of English literature, modernism in all its forms, and opera.

K. C. C
ONSTANTINE
(b. 1934). Author of a series of crime novels— starting with
The Rocksburg Railroad Murders
—set in a decaying, Pennsylvania steeltown. Wonderful depiction of working-class life.

R
OBERT
C
RAFT
(b. 1923). Conductor, astonishingly learned critic of art, music, and literature, secretary and assistant for many years to the composer Igor Stravinsky.

J
OHN
C
ROWLEY
(b. 1942). American novelist, author (among other books) of
Little, Big
, often regarded as the finest American fantasy novel of our time.

E
DWARD
D
AHLBERG
(1900-1977). American novelist and essayist, master of a baroque, almost biblical prose style. His memoir of his mother,
Because I Was Flesh
, is an underrated masterpiece

G
UY
D
AVENPORT
(1927-2005). Encyclopedically learned American essayist
(The Geography of the Imagination)
, translator and short-story writer
(Tatlinl).

J
AMES
D
AVIDSON
(b. 1964). English scholar of antiquity; best known for
Fishcakes and Courtesans, a
study of self-control and the loss of such control in ancient Greek culture.

R
OBERTSON
D
AVIES
(1913-1995). Leading Canadian novelist; famous for his old-fashioned, highly theatrical personality. Key novels:
Fifth Business
and
What's Bred in the Bone.

S
USAN
D
AVIS
(1948-1999). American artist and illustrator, whose work often appeared in the
Washington Post
and the
New Yorker.

L
EO
(b. 1933) and D
IANE
D
ILLON
(b. 1933). Husband-and-wife team of artists; highly regarded for their distinctively bold and stylized illustrations for paperback covers and children's books.

D
IOTIMA
(ca. 400
B.C
). A probably fictional “wise woman” who instructed Socrates about the nature of love.