"Dust to Dust," by Benjamin Busch It has never been easy to follow Hamlet quite as far as he would like to go - as far, even, as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns." Just ask Horatio, who tries to prevent his reckless friend from chasing Old Hamlet's ghost at the beginning of Shakespeare's tragedy and who counsels an intellectual restraint toward its end as the two confront mortality itself in the graveyard. When Hamlet, contemplating Yorick's skull, attempts to "trace the noble dust of Alexander" to the cork that seals a cask, the prudent Horatio admonishes, " "Twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Courtesy of the author Benjamin Busch with his father, Frederick Busch. A Memoir By Benjamin Busch Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99. "No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither," Hamlet replies. Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? This catechism is the spilling forth of the relentless melancholy Hamlet harbors. His skeptical, sometimes prolix, often vertiginous speculations on transience bespeak the preoccupations of an age in which a fashion for melancholic introspection produced projects ranging from the essays of Montaigne to Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" and Thomas Browne's "Hydrio­taphia, Urn-Burial." Such is the tradition to which Benjamin Busch's idiosyncratic new memoir, "Dust to Dust," most properly belongs. In its allusion to the English burial service and to Genesis, the book's title clearly signals its governing preoccupation, while the individual chapter headings - arms, water, metal, soil, bone, wood, stone, blood and ash - sound the keynotes of a meditation on impermanence that tends toward a Ren­aissance discursiveness. In Shakespeare's day the melancholy humor animating "Dust to Dust" would have been attributed to an excess of black bile. Busch, who in addition to being a writer and a former Marine twice deployed to Iraq is a visual artist and an actor, ascribes it to a longing "for the elemental" and a precocious self-awareness: "I knew very early that I was a solitary being." Hamlet's haunting of the book becomes explicit two-thirds of the way through, when Busch describes a pair of sheep skulls, relics from England, where the career of his father, the novelist Frederick Busch, took the family for a time: "They have become familiar in our home. I have held them like Hamlet, and though I never knew these animals while they lived, they have earned a place in our memorial, moving always with us, as present as our own skulls. Yet the ghost of Shakespeare's prince - chiefly his conviction that the "piece of work" called "man" is nothing but the "quintessence of dust" - drifts through the entire memoir. Finding himself amid the ruins of Babylon, Busch evokes Hamlet in the graveyard: "Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander were in this dust. I kneeled down and took a handful of it in my hands. He describes himself in the Iraq desert as "listening to dust." "I have always been a digger," Busch reports. As a boy, he preferred the excavation of the world around him - encircling his fort with a trench, sifting through ash heaps, roaming junkyards, exploring tunnels beneath the ruined old mills of his upstate New York hometown - to the company of others. These youthful excursions are reprised in Iraq, where Busch wanders underground through an abandoned enemy bunker, supervises the excavation of a mass grave of murdered Iraqis near the Iranian border and pauses on patrol in Kut at a World War I cemetery. The descriptions of boyhood adventure also serve to introduce what Busch calls "a fascination with damage." On one ramble through the forest he tries out his new hatchet on an inoffensive tree. The episode signifies a loss of innocence as the boy awakens to his own destructive impulses: "I had cut a hole into the center of the woodland and ruined the balance of its prose. I had revealed myself to be the enemy. Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of "Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point."