December 23, 2019 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his terrific “77 Sunset Me,” in this week’s issue, confronts the reality that he may soon die of lung cancer. He describes receiving the diagnosis:

I got the preliminary word from my doctor by phone while driving alone upstate from the city to join my wife, Brooke, at our country place. After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.

Facing the prospect of his own extinction, Schjeldahl doesn’t brood on his fate. He appears to accept it. He says,

Oddly, or not, I find myself thinking about death less than I used to. I thought that I might be kidding myself in my explorations of the subject while my life stretched ahead of me to an invisible horizon. But no. The thinking cut channels in which I now slip along. They involve acceptance. Why me? Why not me? In point of fact, me. 

He doesn’t brood, but he is reflective. His piece is a series of journal-like notations, some of which are brilliantly aphoristic:

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. 

Wisecracks in Chandler are existential rescues of imperilled self-possession.

My problem was not a lack of connection with the collective unconscious. I was a fucking poet. My problem was getting out of bed in the morning.

Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.

Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.

Writers can be only so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed.

The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption.

I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?

We wear as many such badges as there are dead people we admire. 

I regret my lack of the church and its gift of community. My ego is too fat to squeeze through the door.

Disbelieving is toilsome. It can be a pleasure for adolescent brains with energy to spare, but hanging on to it later saps and rigidifies. 

Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.

Nicotine stimulates and relaxes. Beat that. 

Bury me. Nix to cremation. I want an address that people know they can visit even if they never do. 

Originality is overrated, except by people who have it. 

Today, the little bit of death in me has sat up in bed and is pulling on its socks.

Memory is a liar.

Meaning is a scrap among other scraps, though stickier. 

Quit now? Sure, and have the rest of my life be a tragicomedy of nicotine withdrawal.

A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

One regrettable thing about death that Schjeldahl doesn’t mention is the ceasing of his own special brand of magic. As John Updike says in his great poem “Perfection Wasted,” “The whole act. / Who will do it again? That’s it: no one; / imitators and descendants aren’t the same.” But wait! Hold the sorrow! He’s still with us! He’s still writing! Let’s give a huzzah for his spirited, wisecracking, hard-edged “77 Sunset Me.”