The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  Natalie Angier, among many other science writers, has studied the correlation between health and the capacity to experience “unfettered joy.” She notes that “sensations like optimism, curiosity and rapture . . . not only make life worth living, but also make life last longer.” The surge of awe Lessing described in acknowledging her own right to proceed in accordance with her desires is, in this sense, rightly understood as entailing an optimism about her prospects. Lessing—so we may say—felt rapture at the absence of impediments associated with anxiety or reluctance. She seemed beautiful to herself precisely in her healthy, uncomplicated understanding of strength and appetite. Angier would appear to ratify this sense of the case when she writes that “real joy, far from being merely a lack of stress, has its own decidedly active state of possession, the ripe and gorgeous feeling that we are among the blessed celebrants of life. It is a delicious, as opposed to a vicious, spiral of emotions.” If there does seem something primitive about the condition so described, health a state in which a whole range of civilized sentiments (guilt, regret, pity) are simply not in play, it aptly embodies what we witness when we are in the presence of certain kinds of beauty.

  Think, for a moment, of Stendhal’s extraordinary Sanseverina in The Charterhouse of Parma, a figure who seems to us worldly, witty, robust, and assertive, in every way a magnificent woman, indisputably beautiful while also scheming, corrupt, and openly disdainful of the standard moral sentiments. Her physical beauty we accept on the basis of the passions and transports she inspires, though, as a woman past thirty, she takes herself to be already “old” and to have passed beyond the stage at which mere looks in a woman will suffice. Stendhal is clearly in love with her, however much he pretends, playfully, to be appalled at her stratagems and duplicities. She seems to him, we feel, an epitome, the incarnation of everything that would make a woman desirable. Though she can be, at times, genuinely compassionate, she is by no means routinely so, and no one alert to the full range of her thoughts and propensities would think her conventionally nice or sweet. She is clever, to be sure, though Stendhal does not, clearly, regard her as an embodiment of spiritual beauty. Her attractiveness, all apart from the physical attributes duly noted by men and women of her acquaintance, has to do with her confident rejection of the fastidious conventions of feeling and manner associated with ordinary decent women. To be in her presence is to feel a certain uneasy gladness; our senses are preternaturally alerted to a beauty not uplifting but troubling. Though Gertrude Stein once said that to call a work of art beautiful is to say, in effect, that it is dead, there is nothing remotely dead about the Sanseverina, who is not, of course, a work of art, but who is in her way a perfected emblem of a beauty that is bracing, not at all superficial or ephemeral.

  My friend Charlie was, in his way, a much more elementary embodiment of the beautiful, his physical endowments consoling, obvious. Admirers did not need, as readers of Charterhouse do, to overcome in themselves a reluctance to submit to this beauty. And I never felt that his beauty required of me an exercise of taste presumably lacking in others. Charlie’s character simply did not play any part in our impression, perhaps because in most respects he was likable, not at all given to the plottings and subterfuges that so preoccupied Stendhal’s Sanseverina. Charlie’s was a more moderate temperament. His confidence required little in the way of testing or reinforcement. Though he was a learned and sophisticated man and knew that among educated persons the concept of the beautiful had become unpopular and retrograde, he could allow himself to take pleasure in beauty where he found it and did not regard the wish to ingratiate as a despicable sentiment. Had he been asked, he would not have agreed that the easy consolation derived by others from the contemplation of his own good looks was an unworthy satisfaction. No more would he have regarded the fact that judgments of beauty are often “subjective” as a reason to doubt their authenticity.

  Charlie was, in the true and somewhat old-fashioned sense of the term, an art lover. A gifted, sometimes brilliant fiction writer and essayist, he worried over the fate of the arts in a culture he thought he had good reason to mistrust, and he devoted a controversial book-length study to what he called The Post-Modern Aura. There he displayed his own fondness for the difficult and his suspicion of the accessible pleasures afforded by straightforward realist fiction. He was a man in search of rarefied pleasures, and he appreciated that, in art especially, persons like himself were apt to regard as beautiful what others might regard as unduly complex or self-conscious.

  At the same time, he was unapologetic about his own appetite for accredited masterpieces and insisted that beautiful was obviously preferable to ugly. Though he understood perfectly that works once thought to be awkward or ugly—from the poems of T. S. Eliot to the music of Igor Stravinsky—could in time come to seem “beautiful” by virtue of their familiarity or their status as revered modernist artifacts, he resisted the easy view that taste was merely a matter of convention and that efforts to differentiate between the beautiful and the ugly were hopelessly naive. Though he was an adept of interpretation, he was also drawn to Susan Sontag’s famously provocative assertion that it was “the revenge of the intellect upon art,” and he despised what she had designated the “overt contempt for appearances” that often figured so prominently in fashionably “advanced” readings of books and other artworks. In music he preferred the ravishing to the atonal and withholding, and he saw nothing limited or embarrassing in the canvases we examined together at an exhibition of Matisse’s Moroccan paintings in New York. Theoretically he was inclined to agree with the critic Clement Greenberg that beauty, as commonly understood, is mostly irrelevant to the value of art. But he was, all the same, an inveterate beauty lover, and he was loath to accept that beauty has nothing to do with the success of particular artworks.

  We were not at all surprised to learn, when Charlie died in March of 2006, that he had left his money and possessions to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, whose programs he had enjoyed for many years. Did the beauty he found in the performances of chamber works by Schubert, Haydn, Ravel, and others inspire him to feel beautiful beyond what he felt upon casually noting his own reflection in the mirror hung above his dressing table? I would imagine so. Though Elaine Scarry may well be right when she says “it does not appear to be the case that one who pursues beauty becomes beautiful,” Charlie was always inclined to Plato’s view in the Symposium that “life is worth living only in the contemplation of beauty.”

  DUDLEY CLENDINEN

  The Good Short Life

  FROM The New York Times Sunday Review

  I HAVE WONDERFUL FRIENDS. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of handcrafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

  “We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

  “Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

  I loved him for that.

  I love them all. I am acutely lucky in my family and friends, and in my daughter, my work, and my life. But I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, more kindly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, for the great Yankee hitter and first baseman who was told he had it in 1939, accepted the verdict with such famous grace, and died less than two years later. He was almost thirty-eight.

  I sometimes call it Lou, in his honor, and because the familiar feels less threatening. But it is not a kind disease. The nerves and muscles pulse and twitch, and progressively, they die. From the outside, it looks like the ripple of piano keys in the muscles under my skin. From the inside, it feels like anxious butterflies, trying to get out. It starts in the hands and feet and works its way up and in, or it begins in the muscles of the mouth and throat and chest and abdomen, and
works its way down and out. The second way is called bulbar, and that’s the way it is with me. We don’t live as long, because it affects our ability to breathe early on, and it just gets worse.

  At the moment, for sixty-six, I look pretty good. I’ve lost twenty pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

  There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological, and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in five or eight or twelve or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.

  No, thank you. I hate being a drag. I don’t think I’ll stick around for the back half of Lou.

  I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative—not governing—in order to be free.

  And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

  I began to slur and mumble in May 2010. When the neurologist gave me the diagnosis that November, he shook my hand with a cracked smile and released me to the chill, empty gray parking lot below.

  It was twilight. He had confirmed what I had suspected through six months of tests by other specialists looking for other explanations. But suspicion and certainty are two different things. Standing there, it suddenly hit me that I was going to die. I’m not prepared for this, I thought. I don’t know whether to stand here, get in the car, sit in it, or drive. To where? Why? The pall lasted about five minutes, and then I remembered that I did have a plan. I had a dinner scheduled in Washington that night with an old friend, a scholar and author who was feeling depressed. We’d been talking about him a lot. Fair enough. Tonight, I’d up the ante. We’d talk about Lou.

  The next morning, I realized I did have a way of life. For twenty-two years, I have been going to therapists and twelve-step meetings. They helped me deal with being alcoholic and gay. They taught me how to be sober and sane. They taught me that I could be myself, but that life wasn’t just about me. They taught me how to be a father. And perhaps most important, they taught me that I can do anything, one day at a time.

  Including this.

  I am, in fact, prepared. This is not as hard for me as it is for others. Not nearly as hard as it is for Whitney, my thirty-year-old daughter, and for my family and friends. I know. I have experience.

  I was close to my old cousin, Florence, who was terminally ill. She wanted to die, not wait. I was legally responsible for two aunts, Bessie and Carolyn, and for Mother, all of whom would have died of natural causes years earlier if not for medical technology, well-meaning systems, and loving, caring hands.

  I spent hundreds of days at Mother’s side, holding her hand, trying to tell her funny stories. She was being bathed and diapered and dressed and fed, and for the last several years, she looked at me, her only son, as she might have at a passing cloud.

  I don’t want that experience for Whitney—nor for anyone who loves me. Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.

  If I choose to have the tracheotomy that I will need in the next several months to avoid choking and perhaps dying of aspiration pneumonia, the respirator and the staff and support system necessary to maintain me will easily cost half a million dollars a year. Whose half a million, I don’t know.

  I’d rather die. I respect the wishes of people who want to live as long as they can. But I would like the same respect for those of us who decide—rationally—not to. I’ve done my homework. I have a plan. If I get pneumonia, I’ll let it snuff me out. If not, there are those other ways. I just have to act while my hands still work: the gun, narcotics, sharp blades, a plastic bag, a fast car, over-the-counter drugs, oleander tea (the polite southern way), carbon monoxide, even helium. That would give me a really funny voice at the end.

  I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.

  Knowing that comforts me. I don’t worry about fatty foods anymore. I don’t worry about having enough money to grow old. I’m not going to grow old.

  I’m having a wonderful time.

  I have a bright, beautiful, talented daughter who lives close by, the gift of my life. I don’t know if she approves. But she understands. Leaving her is the one thing I hate. But all I can do is to give her a daddy who was vital to the end, and knew when to leave. What else is there? I spend a lot of time writing letters and notes, and taping conversations about this time, which I think of as the Good Short Life (and Loving Exit), for WYPR-FM, the main NPR station in Baltimore. I want to take the sting out of it, to make it easier to talk about death. I am terribly behind in my notes, but people are incredibly patient and nice. And inviting. I have invitations galore.

  Last month, an old friend brought me a recording of the greatest concert he’d ever heard, Leonard Cohen, live, in London, three years ago. It’s powerful, haunting music, by a poet, composer, and singer whose life has been as tough and sinewy and loving as an old tree.

  The song that transfixed me, words and music, was “Dance Me to the End of Love.” That’s the way I feel about this time. I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love. When the music stops—when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this—I’ll know that Life is over.

  It’s time to be gone.

  PAUL COLLINS

  Vanishing Act

  FROM Lapham’s Quarterly

  IN A NEW HAMPSHIRE APARTMENT during the winter of 1923, this typewritten notice was fastened squarely against a closed door:

  Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. The person in this room if he agrees that one shall come in will say “come in,” or something like that and if he does not agree to it he will say “not yet, please,” or something like that. The door may be shut if nobody is in the room but if a person wants to come in, knocks and hears no answer that means there is no one in the room and he must not go in.

  Reason. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone.

  Through the door could be heard furious clacking and carriage returns: the sound, in fact, of an eight-year-old girl writing her first novel.

  In 1923, typewriters were hardly a child’s plaything, but to those following the family of critic and editor Wilson Follett, it was a grand educational experiment. He’d already written of his daughter Barbara in Harper’s, describing a girl who by the age of three was consumed with letters and words. “She was always seeing A’s in the gables of houses and H’s in football goalposts,” he recalled. One day she’d wandered into Wilson’s office and discovered his typewriter.

  “Tell me a story about it,” she demanded.

  This was Barbara’s way of asking for any explanation, and after he demonstrated the wondrous machine, she took to it fiercely. A typewriter, her parents realized, could unleash a torrential flow of thoughts from a gifted child who still lacked the coor
dination to write in pencil.

  “In a multitude of ways,” Wilson Follett reported, “we become more and more convinced of the expediency of letting the typewriter be, so far as a machine can, the center and genesis of the first processes.”

  By five, Barbara was being homeschooled by her mother, and writing a tale titled The Life of the Spinning Wheel, the Rocking-Horse, and the Rabbit. Her fascination with flowers and butterflies bloomed from her typewriter into wild and exuberant poems and fairy tales. By 1922, at the age of seven, she was versifying upon music:

  When I go to orchestra rehearsals,

  there are often several passages for the

  Triangle and Tambourine

  together.

  When they are together,

  they sound like a big piece of metal

  that has broken in thousandths

  and is falling to the ground.

  The warning notice on her door the following year, though, marked a new project: young Barbara was attempting an entire novel. On some days the eight-year-old topped four thousand words. While her notes to her playmates and family overflowed with warmth, she was absolute in guarding her time to write. Neighboring children who didn’t understand were brusquely dismissed.

  “You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all,” she snapped in a letter to a complaining playmate.

  As 1923 passed into another year and yet another, she wrote and rewrote her tale of a girl who ventures into the woods and vanishes into nature. Friends, when needed, could always be imagined. “I pretend,” she once explained, “that Beethoven, the two Strausses, Wagner, and the rest of the composers are still living, and they go skating with me.”