Some of my posts have bordered on the weird and unusual but please forgive me if this one post goes a little too far - since it is too real.
Today, January the 20th, has long been on the calendar for the inauguration of the first black American president. However, it is a date that I have had on my calendar for seven years now since the death of my brother.
I have numerous other blogs where I could post this but I write this entry here because my brother went out in the same way that David Foster Wallace went out.
Today, I hope to read my requisite pages of Infinite Jest but first I will have to finish the pages upon pages of letters my brother Paul wrote the day before he died. I do this every year. It's the least I can do - to remember a guy who gave selflessly to his community, who was a great father and had a fair bit of jest in him. He was a well liked guy. A guy you have to remember once a year, if not every day.
Who knew that he was in such pain for so long? He was a strong guy. He hid it well.
I have to add here that for me it goes without saying that Infinite Jest stands on its own as a great piece of literature but I have to admit that as I read it, I inescapably look for clues about DFW's suicide and even my brother's.
Reading...hmm...it is like staring at Yorick's skull: it is a chance to glimpse both life and death at the same time; a chance to learn something; a chance to grow, expand and so much more.
Reading is life.
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Between reading this post and now, I've thought repeatedly about it. Not too weird or out there, not at all.
ReplyDeleteJoseph Campbell--someone whose thoughts I've learned from--said that you have to say Yes to it all, or something very close to that. Yes to life, Yes to death. Yes to what he calls "the field of opposites" (and he's not talking about the soccer field--although he could be; he has a knowledge of and love & respect for sports that's all too rare in academia).
Why do I say this? Not, surely, as a comment on your brother's sad struggle. I can't say too much about that itself, never having known him--though I wish I had. I think I quote Campbell here as a comment on your musing here in this post about your brother's life & death, and as a vindication and support of such musing. I think it's OK to muse on such things--more than OK, at times. It sometimes strikes me that the worst thing that can happen in tough times is that people stop talking to each other, stop using certain words, and even try to stop certain thoughts. It may not be good to dwell on dark and negative things, but neither is it good to put them away too hastily and never return there.
I think it's noble and loving of you to read his words even just once a year. It's a cliche to say so, but this reading is a way of keeping his life alive in you. You're right--reading is life, and it's a truly amazing form of communication, across oceans, across time, and across the filament that separates ethereal from corporeal. I can walk three steps from where I sit, pick up Antigone, and in an instant Sophocles is speaking to me as if I'd been alive in Athens centuries ago. Stunning.
I wish I'd made it to the Dora this evening. Couldn't do it. Next time.
Thanks Abbot. Hey, it seems from Wikipedia, that Conrad didn't mind a bit of reading himself:
ReplyDelete"A few weeks later, the Great Depression began. Campbell would spend the next five years (1929–1934) trying to figure out what to do with his life (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:160) and he engaged in a period of intensive and rigorous independent study. Campbell discussed this period in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:52-3). Campbell states that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four hour periods, and free one of them...I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight."
I'm going to "read" a bit more about Campbell. I can relate to his decision to bail on the Ph.D thing and conventional academia and turn to independent reading and study. That's cool.