'The Long Habit of Living'

“Perfect weather. And to think that on such a day people are still dying!” 

Sometimes I suspect the human imagination is by nature Gothic, though histrionic may be a better description. We like to dramatize things. Death is supposed to occur in the shadows, away from the reassuring touch of sunlight. Thunder cracks, rain fills the streets, tall trees fall.

 

The day my brother died in a Cleveland hospice was beautifully sunny, about 80 degrees, no rain, low humidity, a perfect day in August near the shore of Lake Erie. I had opened the curtains so the afternoon sunlight could fall on Ken. He had been unconscious for several days but he would have enjoyed it. I’ve just seen a characteristic photo of my brother – almost smiling, head cocked ironically, Old Testament-looking -- posted by our friend Gary Dumm.

 

The passage at the top is the April 20, 1909 entry in Jules Renard’s Journal. His tone, like Ken’s, is essentially comic but also a little cranky. Renard’s other entry that day: “My faithfulness as a husband, a comical thing, which adds to my literary reputation.”

 

Mostly for the sheer pleasure of his prose I’m reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial  (1658) again:

  

“If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; when avarice makes us the sport of death, when even David grew politickly cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age.”

 

[The Renard passages are from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]