March 2009
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Curtain calls:
The fever called “living” is conquered at last
Edward Hoagland is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His twentieth book, Early in the Season, will be out this month.
Believing in life, I believe in death as well, and at seventy-six look forward to my immersion in the other plane of the see-saw also. Without wishing to hasten it, in other words, I don’t dread the event. The politics will be less rancid, my dentistry at an end, and the TV off. Half a century ago I happened to work in a morgue for a while and rarely noticed on a gurney a face of an appropriate age who looked sorry he or she had set sail. If this globe is the only heaven we have, I doubt the trip will be a long one. Downward into the seethe of the soil and the sea, we landlubbers become marine again. What’s important is to remain tethered here as earthlings. The dead I saw had generally smiled a little as they crossed the bar: an Etruscan sort of smile, inward-turning. Etruscan sculptors maybe captured it best.
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| SEE ALSO: Aged men; Aging; Dreams; Family relationships; Global warming | |||||||||
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