=Books Recently Read=

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields. Given my short attention span and penchant for distraction, the library can be a dangerous place. I seem constitutionally unable to enter one without carrying something away, even if I'm in the process of reading three or four books already. 

Having finished "Don't Cry" by Mary Gaitskill, I returned it to the library and, sure enough, found something else—in fact, two something elses—to read. So Doris Lessing got put off again while I read "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead," a book-length meditation about aging and death by David Shields. It took me only two days to finish which is both a testament to its readability and also its simplicity. 

The book is basically a compendium of facts about how we age, what happens to our bodies, and how—and why—we all die. The facts are mixed in with the author's personal anecdotes about growing up and growing older. As a counterpoint to his own story, Shields relates the story of how his 97-year-old father has faced the inevitable. Basically, the elder Shields has faced mortality largely by denying it exists, which begs the question: Is denial of death the key to a long life? Should we not even be reading books like "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead? Or is it better, more enlivening, to live with the conscious goad that every day could be our last on this side of the sod?

Because the overriding fact that one comes away with after reading this book is that all roads lead to death—and they are surprisingly short roads at that. We practically start dying shortly after adolescence. Basically, what we are, to make a short story even shorter, are seedpods. The meaning of life? To produce more seedpods. Biologically speaking, we ain't nothing but biodegradable sacks for carrying genetic material. Once you've done your reproductive duty, nature has lost interest in you; even worse, it expects you to die and become fertilizer.

(David Shields)

Shields shows how we begin to fall apart at age 25. By 40, we're obsolete. From there on out, it's all an ever-accelerating decline down a steep slope to the grave. In other words, we're all a lot older a lot sooner than we think. You think 55 is middle-aged? Think again. More like 35, if you go by the raw numbers. If you go by the functional capacity of the organism, you've hit your prime about a decade earlier. 

This isn't to say that Shields's book is depressing. It isn't deep enough to be truly depressing. Nor is it light enough to be uplifting. I was a big fan of "Reality Hunger" and while this book is written in the same fragmentary, collage style, there's something that isn't quite satisfying about "One Thing About Life." A much better, deeper look into the same subject is Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death." Becker has the same message—life is pointless, death inescapable—but he makes more sense of the grim facts. He illustrates, for one thing, why the world and the people in it are so fucked up: they are acting out their unconscious death-terror on everything and everyone around them. War, patriotism, religious intolerance, the pursuit of wealth, celebrity, and power—all ways that we try to make ourselves immortal. Or, at the very least, to become part of something that will outlast us.

In spite of it all, Shields says he finds the inexorable terms of death to be "liberating," even beautiful. But he doesn't really say why—or how. It's a facile "happy" ending to a book that all along seemed admirably determined to just deliver the facts and nothing but the facts with a straight face in a deadpan voice. 

Ultimately, this was the perfect book to borrow free from the library. I didn't get a great deal out of it that I didn't already have when I came to it. But since I didn't pay a dime for it and it didn't take any more than two days to read, I can't really complain. Besides, what good would it do to complain? We're all going to die anyway.