Late last year an old friend of mine in Greece sent me an email: "January 1 is the first page of a new book and I wonder what will happen in this book. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but I needed to tell you about my fear of what is inevitable soon. You are such a good friend."
Bozenna is an old friend of mine - in both senses of the world - and she was a dedicated employee when she worked for me in Greece. Perhaps I should send her a copy of Julian Barnes' book "Nothing to be frightened of" or its more bluntly titled twin "Death", a disarmingly witty book in which Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers and why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect guide to the weirdness of the only thing that binds us all.
The book may not get there in time, but in the meantime there's always "Appointment in Samarra" to console her. It's a Mesopotamian tale about the deadly inescapability of coincidence and fate and death, all bound in a parable designed to both frighten and make sense of life's madness.
At a time when we're fighting illness as if it were an invader, we're really just fighting ourselves, the bits of us that want to kill the rest of us. Towards the end - if we live long enough - we are left with the competition between the declining and decaying parts of us as to which will get top billing on our death certificate. As Flaubert put it, "No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start dropping off."
Which is perhaps not a bad thought on which to end this post. We've already had more than our three score and ten, so let's not get greedy.
