Life and Death: BookMarks Update #82 May, 2025

The garden has been planted with peas, arugula, tomatoes, eggplants, and cucumbers. The asparagus patch has nearly finished providing fresh spears to the dinner table, and the rhubarb is ready for cutting. My back is sore from lugging compost from last year's bins to the gardens, but it's a glorious spring time in Vermont! Along with all that time in the garden, I enjoyed reading these books in May:

Having read rather randomly all month, it was only while sitting down to write this update that I realized that the books all addressed the two universal topics for all of literature---life and death. Some of the books focused on the end of life---- from a chronicle of the thoughts of a man about to be executed ("Notes on an Execution") to the musings on NDE's (i.e. near death experiences) by a writer who died and was resuscitated ("In My Time of Dying"); from the thoughts of a man in his mid-80's dealing with disability and the approaching end ("Essays After Eighty") to the grief work done by a widow after her husband's sudden and unanticipated death ("Memorial Days"); and finally, a children's book addressing the death of words ("The Lost Words").

In contrast, "Crusoe's Daughter" and "The Covenant of Water") narrated the stories of characters' entire lives while Maggie Nelson's strange and challenging story of her own life in "The Argonauts" describes a world forcing dualistic thinking upon questions and choices that are gray and overlapping non-binaries.

If you have the interest and stamina to read through this entire update, you'll find some wise words from Lewis Thomas, a physician-essayist whose book "The Lives of a Cell" won a National Book Award in 1975 and was ranked #11 on the Modern Library's list of 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th C. Thomas while acknowledging the finiteness of our lives, celebrates life's preciousness, focusing on the incredible odds against any of us being alive on this planet at this moment. He urges "the contented dazzlement of surprise" and to "never stop dancing". Worth a read.

Poetry brings a powerful lens with which to delve deeply into life as well as death, and "Poems to See By" offers a combination of poetry and art. Julian Peters is a Canadian comic book/graphic artist who has created graphic treatments of 24 famous poems. Poems by Wordsworth ("The world is too much with us late and soon/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers---"...), Emily Dickinson ("Hope is the thing with feathers..."), Yeats ("When you are old and grey and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire, take down this book..."), and others are incorporated into comic book-like panels with graphic images providing visual accompaniments to the words. You will find some familiar poems and some new ones, and the poem in its graphic form took on a vitality and power beyond its simple reading. Even if you are someone who develops hives at the thought of reading poetry, try this book. You'll love it.

In contrast to poetry with its laser like focus, the novel and memoir are able to convey the full arc of a person's life. Some novels like "David Copperfield" are clear about this intent, while other's sneak up on you. Jane Gardam, who died on April 25th at 96, has written such a book in "Crusoe's Daughter", the story of Polly Flint orphaned at six and dying at 87 after a life filled with colorful characters and the advice of her hero, Robinson Crusoe. Gardam was one of England's best contemporary writers, and if you haven't yet discovered her, I'd suggest you start with the "Old Filth" trilogy. Filth stands for 'failed in London, tried Hong Kong' and these three books follow a fascinating set of characters through their ups and downs of life. Voted in a BBC survey as one of Britain's 100 greatest British novels, "Old Filth" is a great read.

"The Covenant of Water", Abraham Verghese's 2023 novel also follows a young girl through her entire life providing a thread that runs through a complicated family saga. In the first chapter we meet Mariamma as she is about to be wed, a 12 year old girl living in a small village in southwest India in 1900. Some 715 pages later, Mariamma has died after a long and rich life filled with many fascinating people who we meet along the way---her husband, son, step-son, grandson, two talented doctors, and a whole cast of friends and servants. Death from smallpox, dysentery, leprosy, childhood diseases, childbirth, and accidents was never far away in 20th C. India, and this rich tale which takes us from Mariamma the child bride to her namesake granddaughter a neurosurgeon, is a fine read. It was Included in Oprah's Book Club but failed to win any major literary prize. I liked it well enough but in retrospect, not enough to have spent so much time reading it.

Maggie Nelson's "The Argonauts" explores her life with her trans husband, her IVF-conceived son, and her struggles with gender, sex, race, and the other binary dualisms that society forces upon her. I sometimes found it to be a difficult read. The startling first paragraph (included in full in my review) will give you a sense of the writing. While the Guardian's 2015 review called Nelson "one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation." this aging, white, straight reader struggled with this book.

Another book dealing with LIFE is Nathalie Cabrol's "The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life". The book is a chronicle of the amazing efforts to find life in our expanding universe, a universe populated by a gazillion stars many of which are orbited by exoplanets that are neither too cold nor too hot to support some form of life. The critical factor for life appears to be water, a substance that makes up over 60% of our human bodies but which appears to be in scarce supply on heavenly bodies other than our earth. Cabrol gets way too bogged down in details and mind-numbing acronyms, but the overall story is a fascinating one. Bottom line is that it is vanishingly unlikely that we are alone in the universe. Finding who/what is out there is one of the major scientific challenges of our time. It's a great story, though sadly, not a great book.

And that brings us to DEATH, the awareness of our own mortality being perhaps the single most unique quality that we humans bring to life on earth. Death along with birth are the two universal experiences that every person will undergo, and it's the human experience that we know the least about. While we understand that the cessation of breathing and cardiac activity leads to cessation of brain activity and death, we know nothing for certain about what happens next.

Sebastian Junger, the author of the award winning "The Perfect Storm", suffered cardiac arrest on the operating table in Cape Cod Hospital where he presented in shock with a massive intra-abdominal hemorrhage. Resuscitated and saved by the miracles of modern medicine, he has written "In My Time of Dying" to describe that event as well as what he experienced while 'dead'. He read accounts of 'near death experiences" (NDE's) and interviewed survivors learning of stories of people seeing bright lights or being visited by dead loved ones. Junger, who started out as a skeptic, becomes a believer in this phenomenon. I liked the book, but didn't love it, perhaps indicating my own degree of extreme skepticism about life after death.

"Notes on an Execution" is a very different story, a novel which alternates between the thoughts and actions of a serial killer on death row facing imminent execution and a chronicle of the events that brought him to that point. Better than I had anticipated, it's a story of some depth, probing the questions of nature/nurture and how we make the decisions that determine our life's story. It's a good companion to the recently read "Determined" in which Robert Sopolsky argues for a more humane approach to the criminal since his actions are pre-determined by genes, environment, etc. This is a good beach read if you can manage the violence.

Anyone who regularly reads BookMarks knows of my affection for Donald Hall, a distinguished American man of letters, former U.S. poet laureate, award-winning children's book author, and my pen pal for 50 years from our meeting in my medical student days in Ann Arbor until his death in 2018. In "Essays After Eighty", Hall describes his life as his body and mind begin to fail. I read this book when it was published in 2015, and in my review I wrote that "His brief essays brought forth tears, laughter, and warm affection for this man of letters in Wilmot, New Hampshire." Ten years later, I was far less taken with the book which appeared rambling, disjointed, and even self-pitying. Had the book changed? Not likely. Rather, now that I'm nearly 80, I was not particularly thrilled with the grim picture of aging that Hall paints. I'd rather remember him as the vital presence who moved to the New Hampshire farm which his great-grandparents had bought in the 1830's and where he spent his childhood summers with his grandparents, later returning with his wife to write poetry and prose there for more than 40 years. The problem may not be with the book, but with this reader.

Geraldine Brooks, the author of one of my favorite novels, "Horse", has written a beautiful and heart-wrenching book in "Memorial Days" about the sudden, unexpected death of her husband, the author and Pulitzer Prize winning international reporter Tony Horwitz. He died while walking in Chevy Chase, Maryland on a quiet morning in May, 2019, the victim at 61 of a fatal cardiac arrhythmia due to a silent case of myocarditis. In alternate chapters, Brooks takes us back to that fatal day when she learned of his death while at their home on Martha's Vineyard and her attempt to finally deal with her grief three years later by traveling to Flinders Island, Australia where she spent a month in solitude. The book is about love, marriage, sudden loss, and grief. In its specific details it describes the universal emotions that make up a life well lived. This is a wonderful book, filled with gorgeous sentences and well worth reading and re-reading.

Finally, "The Lost Words" with its oversized cover filled with drawings of birds could easily be mistaken for a children's book, but don't be fooled. Its beautiful illustrations, clever alphabet puzzles, and acrostic poems all proved 'spellbinding' for this grown up. Macfarlane is a Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Morris is a well known illustrator with 40 books in her resume. They were concerned about the worrisome trend that is distancing today's children from the natural world or as they put it, "Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children...The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker...gone!" To address that problem they wrote this "spellbook for conjuring back these lost words. To read it you will need to seek, find, and speak. It deals in things that are missing and things that are hidden, in absences and in appearances." I loved reading this book, finding the hidden letters among the alphabet strewn across a beautiful rendering of the object, reading the acrostic poems, and dwelling on the lovely illustrations. I can't wait to share it with my grandchildren. Even if you don't have any little ones to read to, you'll love sitting with this book.

The Poetry on the Charles this month features four poems that Julian Peters graphically rendered in his book, "Poems to See By". I could have picked any of the 24 poems in this volume, but these four seemed especially powerful and consistent with this month's theme.

I've shared the following quote from Lewis Thomas's "Lives of a Cell" in past updates, but it seemed appropriate to return to it given the theme of Life and Death, especially in light of Nathalie Cabrol's book about searching for life in the universe. Here are Thomas's wise words:

"Statiscally, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond.

Add to this the biological improbability that makes eadh member of our own species unique. Everyone is one of 3 billion (if updated to today, that would be more than 8 billion!) at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing."

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