This week I interviewed a mechanical engineer who has received a sizeable grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a rapid diagnostic test for that intractable disease, HIV – something like the COVID-19 antigen self-test many of us have already used. I was surprised to learn one didn’t already exist. As a newspaper reporter I first wrote about HIV/AIDS forty years ago – casually, from a distance, at first; later, up close, sadly close. I associate the experience with an old Latin tag: Timor mortis conturbat me. “The fear of death troubles me.” I see the verb variously translated as “distresses,” “disturbs,” “confounds.” That was my reaction and the reaction of many I interviewed who soon after were dead.
Some of us know the Latin from the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers” (c. 1500). Each of its twenty-five
quatrains is followed by the phrase, which is drawn from the Catholic Office of the Dead: “Sinning daily, and not repenting, the fear of death
disturbs me. For there is no redemption in Hell, have mercy on me, O God, and
save me.”
Tom Disch (1940-2008)
was a wonderful poet, one of the wittiest, but his anti-religious sentiments occasionally grew
tiresome. No poet was as death-haunted in his work and life as Disch, who
committed suicide. He was the poet laureate of death. He concludes “In a Time
of Plagues” (About the Size of It,
2007) with Dunbar's Latin phrase:
“Deer reck
not of the hunting season.
Sheep
can’t imagine shepherd’s pie.
Smokers
scorn the voice of reason.
No
one knows the day he’ll die.
“Gays there
were who never heeded
All
the headlines about AIDS.
Drinkers
drank, and still they speeded.
Every
color finally fades.
“Power lines are thought to kill
People
who live too close by.
Look at your
electric bill,
Then
think about the day you’ll die.
“No life’s
secure: oaks may defy
Death
for a century, but they,
Too, in the
course of time must die.
Timor mortis conturbat me.”
Reck is an old English word meaning, according to the OED, “to take care or thought for or
notice of something.”
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