=paper plate memorial=

The first paper plate I ate off of the morning after learning that Doris Lessing had died, November 17th, at 94. I came late to an appreciation of Doris Lessing, real late, reading her for the first time only two years ago, a novel I picked up on a whim from the Brooklyn Public Library..."Love, Again." Until then, the predominant feeling I had about Doris Lessing could be roughly summed up as "What could this old lady possibly have to say to me?" But she won a Nobel Prize, after all, and I figured as any supposedly well-read, intelligent ex-English major, I should have at least a passing familiarity with something the woman wrote.  "Love, Again" isn't even a major novel in the Doris Lessing canon, but after forty or so pages, I was hooked. What an idiot I was, but if there's one good thing about waking up an idiot is that you have another whole day in which to change enough to be a little less of one by the time you go to bed that night.

Since that first novel I've read "Shikasta" and a bunch of her short stories and, as synchronicity would have it, I "happened" to borrow "The Fifth Child" from the library less than a week before she died. I'm going to read it next, after I finish Colm Toibin's "The Master." At some point soon, I'll tackle "The Golden Notebook," usually considered her defining masterpiece, although Lessing herself didn't think so; she favored the Canopus in Argos series, of which the excellent and thought-provoking "Shikasta" was the first installment.

When someone dies at an advanced age, it's a commonplace to console ourselves and others by pointing out what a long full life they lived, how we were lucky to have them around so long, that everyone should only be so fortunate, etc. But that really doesn't touch the essential thing, the true loss, which is that no matter how long a person has lived—10 years or 10,000-they are gone now and gone forever and the emptiness they leave behind will last an eternity. For better and for worse, we live in the present, we feel in the present, and the memory of past fullness can never entirely satisfy a present lack. A star in the sky is gone, snuffed out, what difference does it make if it shone yesterday or a thousand yesterdays before that? The dark isn't any less dark tonight for that. 

Somehow I got a kind of comfort just knowing that somewhere in the world Doris Lessing—with her acerbic wit, her wisdom, her special brilliance—was still alive. Now she isn't and the world seems a lesser place for the erasure.

I suppose in one sense I can be thankful for the ignorance I showed in not appreciating Doris Lessing much earlier in my life—I now have enough of her books still to read and enjoy to last me the rest of my life, even if I should be so lucky as to make it to ninety-four.