From The New York Times, September 25, 2005 (Hat tip: Electric Typewriter) On the death of her husband…
After Life, by Joan Didion
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Tag Archives: death
Free Will…again
Reading the article God, Rape and Free Will in Talking Philosophy, I couldn’t help but think that these discussions have been going on for thousands of years, in one form or another, and they are not likely to ever be settled, except for people who think they have the answers.
Beware of people who think they know all the answers to life’s big questions…
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament 20 Famous Writers on Death and Mortality
From Flavorwire, their introductory remarks:
Today marks the publication of Mortality, confrontational journalist Christopher Hitchens’ posthumous work about his experiences with the cancer that killed him. We’ve lost a lot of great minds recently — Nora Ephron, Maurice Sendak, David Rakoff, and Hitch himself — and we think this end-of-life memoir in essays, full of Hitchens’ trademark wit and his clear-eyed dissection of life as he sees it, may just heal us a little bit, as books tend to do. To celebrate the book’s publication, and to help recalibrate our own perspectives on the loss of so many of our intellectual heroes, we’ve put together this selection of passages on death and mortality from a few of our favorite authors. Read through after the jump, and since there are an infinite number of these, add your own favorite to our collection in the comments.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament Updike on the Universe
Top five regrets of the dying
From the guardian:
A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life? The article:
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament How Christopher Hitchens Said Goodbye
From The Daily Beast, an essay by Simon Schama.
Christopher Hitchens confronted death with the same furious bravura that he deployed against purveyors of unreasoned pieties.
And more here.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
From Vanity Fair:
Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eyeretrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.
Hat tip: Instapundit. And here’s more from The Atlantic. And even more saying goodbye.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 James Ament Trial of the Will
From Vanity Fair:
Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 James Ament On Joan Didion
From New York Magazine, by Boris Kachka, I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I Was Now Afraid Not to Die:
The secret subject of Joan Didion’s work has always been her troubled daughter. Her wrenching new memoir tells us why.
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(Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Makeup by Fulvia Farolfi for Chanel.)
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Reading Joan Didion on any subject is like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks. You look down and pray the ice will hold. Meeting her is not a vastly different experience.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 James Ament Short Story—An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—a short story by Ambrose Bierce
Chapter I
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners — two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as ”support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest — a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 James Ament