1. A Beginning of Some Kind

I am meant to be writing a book on death and grief, on bereavement. As it turns out, it is more a book I am meant to be writing than a book I am, in fact, writing. When I try to write it – or write at it – I lay words to page only to then lay waste to those pages. I start, then stop, then start again to stop again. The time for this, I think each time, is just not right. Today, at long belated last, I realized that the time will never be right.

 

Oh, in youth, I could surely have written a book on bereavement and perhaps even offered many a fine thought, my mental diet then robust with classical philosophy – all those unflappably wise-seeming Greeks, those fierce-seeming Roman Stoics, and those tearful, exquisitely mournful Confucians. I could have written something fat with insight harvested from sources old and long found worthwhile. It would have been a confident thing, but not, I think, especially useful.  

 

When young, you can get a sugar high off the ancients, can think that here are people who have sorted this mess out. But as the flush of youth passes, so too passes the ability to take on the simplest versions of what they offer. One gets mired in the complexities. You notice that even as Socrates decries the body as a prison from which he welcomes sweet release, he’s petting the head of a beloved companion, a physical gesture that only a person alive in his own body can make and, also, enjoy. It turns out the ancients are just people like the rest, host to contradiction and contradictory impulses. With age comes the ability to recognize the peril of ignoring this.

 

The humility that advancing age can introduce is also a reason not to write a book on death and grief. At least this is how it has been for me.  As Socrates himself would say, sincerely or not, it is a fine good to recognize when one simply does not know enough to speak. My middle years transpired in just this. Oh, I still thought then that there was a book in the later offing, a trust that I would – someday, but not just yet – find the thing that I could say of death and grief. I but needed time, study, and experience to season me, to draw me fully from the hazy hubris of youth and into something I could count mature. Thus commenced a long interregnum, a period of waiting and of turning my attentions elsewhere, a time of writing all the other things that I would need to write to earn my bread.

 

At last, some few years ago, I came to feel that my career in philosophy was approaching its last end. I am not yet entirely old, but all the same, I could not envision a life that I would like should I just go on as I had then been going on, years of academia accumulating on my person like a growth of mold.  But if one will contemplate an ending, one wants then to finish off the things postponed, use well what remains to complete what’s left. I also still retain a perhaps naïve view of the scholar’s work. If one has spent years in study and learning, there may be – really, should be – things that one knows that others do not, things that other people might like to know. In my field at least, there are loads of people who know things I do not and from whom I like to find things out. Put plainly, given that I am a relatively rare creature in academic philosophy, a person who know things about early Chinese philosophy about death and grief, I ought not keep that to myself. This is not to exalt myself or my own expertise.  I once fixed an entirely vexing problem with my tractor because of a few helpful words dropped by an old farmer in line behind me at the parts counter. Offering up the stuff you know in case others find it useful is just like that, a passing on of hardwon resources. It would be a waste of mortal human energies if we each individually had to discover the perils of mice in the wiring all on our own. With my career now in its twilight, I thought, if I am ever going to write this book, I ought get to it. And so I did.

 

I have written books before – two, to be exact – and each took just one year to write. I have been writing – more precisely, ostensibly writing – this book on death since 2019. I have no pages yet that I can call complete, nor yet even an outline on which I could rely. To be sure, I have thousands of words, hundreds of pages, dozens of outlines.  I even have ideas I would count entirely viable were they not mine. That is, among those many outlines are books I think could work, could I but locate someone not myself to write them up. Someone who has no mice in her wiring, perhaps.

 

My trouble with this book, with that book I now will never write, is that I find it exceptionally difficult to write anything honest about death and grief. The tools most at my disposal do not suit for this. Philosophy about sorrows, I find, has a tendency to explode when it comes in contact with experience. What one cannot do when young and wanting in experience, one also cannot do when old, when experience has schooled you in just how inadequate your musings really are. Write it when you’re young and you will get it wrong; write it when you’re old and you will still get it wrong, but you will know it when you do. This, at least, is how it has worked for me.  And I find that I am grown too old for writing what to me seems false. More to the point, I do not want to be writing – ostensibly writing – a book on grief when someone I love dies. Yet I have now reached an age when more and greater griefs do not dwell on some far horizon, but are on the move and closing in fast – an age when one can feel new solitudes nearing as parents age and friends begin to pass. I am the age of trepidation. I am grown too old for that book.  

 

Whatever this is, it isn’t that book. I have for months now mentally styled all the writing I can do as instead the Shadow Book. It is all and only the things that I have written about not writing That Book. It isn’t really any kind of book at all, at least not one that anyone else but me would call it so. I have accidentally, I think, embarked on a project of writing about all the ways not to write the thing that you were meant to write. I speculate that lots of actual books have shadow books, all the bits left out that are really about how the actual book is a bad idea – all the things you wish to say but can’t, about the things that would really foul up the stuff you can say. The only difference between what I’ve done and all those other books with shadow books is that I didn’t write the book, only its shadow. So that’s what all this is:  the stuff that if I had in fact written a philosophy book on grief I would have needed to leave out.