"Life," Truman Capote quipped, "is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."
Judging from what's being published these days, writers have been tackling that disappointing last act a lot lately -- analyzing, deconstructing, fiddling with the lighting -- even when they know it's futile to try to change the ending. The result is a groaning shelf of books about aging, illness, dying, grief and ruminations on what it all means.
Is this proliferation a reflection of the bleakness of the times, mirroring the doom and gloom of war and the economy? Is it exacerbated by erosion of faith in an afterlife? Do we obsessively probe mortality because we're spoiled and can't quite believe -- or accept -- that science and medicine still haven't managed to conquer it? I suspect it's all of the above, plus demographics: the aging of a generation of post-World War II writers in tandem with baby boomers coping with parents who are living longer but not necessarily better. It all adds up to an epidemic in the literature of loss.
"Birth, and copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks."
So wrote T.S. Eliot in "Sweeney Agonistes." In fact, some of the best writing about death has come from poets. Dylan Thomas raged, raged against the dying of the light in "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," his famous villanelle about his dying father, and insisted defiantly in another poem that "death shall have no dominion" -- before dying at age 39 of alcoholism.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was more sanguine: "The young may die, but the old must!" he wrote in "Christus." The great 17th century French dramatist Pierre Corneille's attitude was darker: "Every moment in life is a step towards death." Shakespeare's characters occasionally railed, but like Richard II, they eventually bowed to fate: "The worst is death, and death will have his day."
There's nothing like milestone birthdays, the loss of one's parents or scary diagnoses to stir intimations of mortality. In his essay "Illness as More Than Metaphor," Susan Sontag's son, David Rieff, wrote: "There are those who can reconcile themselves to death and those who can't. Increasingly, I've come to think that it is one of the most important ways the world divides up."
