'An Ambition to Copiousness and Eloquence'

“We think too much of death and not nearly enough of dying. There is a reason for that. Dying is a mental discipline, which entails many hours of training in (among other things) the renunciation of fantasies that death will be anything other than it is—the cessation of consciousness—and the bitter facing up to the reality of that fact.” 

Only slowly have I come to accept Montaigne’s life-lesson, urged along by my friend D.G. Myers and his example. When I was young, like many of us, death seemed – though mercifully deferred -- a betrayal, an outrageous bait-and-switch. Preoccupation with dying got in the way of living. As family and friends died – sometimes swiftly, seemingly without warning, sometimes after protracted suffering – I paid attention, pondering the lessons they shared with me. The writer cited above is not Montaigne but my friend David Myers, who died eleven years ago today, on September 26, 2014. I knew him for a mere six years as proprietor of A Commonplace Blog. By profession he was a literary critic and scholar, and a university professor, though I thought of him more as a teacher in the broader sense, a reb. His blog remains in place, not erased like so many others. Explore the intellectual treasures it contains. David was always generous with his learning.

 

We shared literary loves – Nabokov, Ronald Knox, J.V. Cunningham, Whittaker Chambers, Janet Lewis, L.E. Sissman, Isaac Bashevis Singer and A.J. Liebling, among others. That brought us together. But David was not interested in collecting trophies or showing off his merit badges. He was admirably indifferent to fashion, to the bookish vogue du jour. He was an Orthodox Jew, committed to his faith, no dilettante. He could be provocative, combative with fools, and he loved a good fight. Sometimes he served as my pit bull, defending me without asking. His analytical skills far outweighed my own. He insisted I was a critic, a contention I always denied. I’m merely a reader who likes to write about what he has read. In a post he calls a “statement of principles,” David adapts Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, and includes me and himself among the foxes:

 

“These are writers united not by doctrine or ideological commitment, but by an ambition to copiousness and eloquence—and the secret handshake that passes between those who have spent a life among books. They are proud to be foxes. They don’t avoid hedgehogs; they just don’t want to be one. They are happy knowing many small tricks. Or, rather, such knowledge brings them great happiness.”

 

That’s a radical promise, one seldom voiced today. But David earned (I first wrote “learned”) his wisdom the old-fashioned way, from life as he lived it. Being a realist is not fashionable stance today. On this, his yahrzeit, David writes of the dying:

 

“To tell them that their suffering will be relieved by death—here, let me help you die—is a lie told for the benefit of the liar, because the dead do not know relief. They don’t know anything. They are dead. The relief is sought by those who must watch the dying suffer, and they will be the only ones to feel the relief. Relief of suffering, like funeral services, belong to living. The dead are excluded from them.”