Personal History : The Art of Dyinghttps : / / www . newyorker . com / magazine / 2019 / 12 / 23 / the - art - of - dying ? source = EDT _ NYR _ EDIT _ NEWSLETTER _ 0 _ imagenewsletter _ Daily _ ZZ & utm _ campaign = aud - dev & utm _ source = nl & utm _ brand = tny & utm _ mailing = TNY _ Daily _ 122119 & utm _ medium = email & bxid = 5 d 1 c 2 ed 0 b 43 a 611337184 ad 7 & cndid = 57725603 & esrc =& mbid =& utm _ term = TNY _ Daily . .. Lung cancer , rampant . No surprise . I ’ ve smoked since I was sixteen , behind the high - school football bleachers in Northfield , Minnesota . I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish , letting people natter sagely , “ He smoked , you know . ” But at seventy - seven I ’ m into the actuarial zone . . I know about ending a dependency . I ’ m an alcoholic twenty - seven years sober . Drink was destroying my life . Tobacco only shortens it , with the best parts over anyway . . 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 . . Patsy Cline was playing on the car radio : “ Walkin ’ After Midnight . ” Not a great song , but performed in Cline ’ s way of attending selflessly to the sounds and the senses of the words . Showing how art should be done . She was thirty when she died in a plane crash , consummate . . I was at the wheel of my first brand - new car since 1962 , a blue Subaru Forester that I dote on . I wanted for nothing . I want for nothing . The other night , I dreamed that I fetched the car from a parking lot only to find that it was another Subaru Forester , with two hundred thousand miles on it , dirty and falling apart . ( That ’ s diseased me now , I suppose . ) But the real one sits gleaming on East Seventh Street today . • Twenty - some years ago , I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir . I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor . I failed for a number of reasons . . I don ’ t feel interesting . . I don ’ t trust my memories ( or anyone ’ s memories ) as reliable records of anything — and I have a fear of lying . Nor do I have much documentary material . I ’ ve never kept a diary or a journal , because I get spooked by addressing no one . When I write , it ’ s to connect . . I am beset , too , by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames . Small potatoes , as traumas go , but intensified by my aversion to facing them . . Susan Sontag observed that when you have a disease people identify you with it . Fine by me ! I could never sustain an expedient “ I ” for more than a paragraph . ( Do you imagine that writers speak “ as themselves ” ? No such selves exist . ) Playing the Dying Man ( Enter left . Exit trapdoor ) gives me a persona . It ’ s a handy mask . • I ’ ve lost the scraps of my aborted Guggenheim memoir , but I remember that it started something like this : .. I thought I ’ d braid my life into cultural history . That went nowhere . • Death is like painting rather than like sculpture , because it ’ s seen from only one side . Monochrome — like the mausoleum - gray former Berlin Wall , which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti . What I ’ m trying to do here . • Swatted a fly the other day and thought , Outlived you . • I grew up in small - town Minnesota being regarded as the rich kid , because my father ’ s firms ( first manufacturing plastic bags , then engineering inventions including the NASA Echo 1 and Echo 2 Mylar - balloon satellites ) were the biggest businesses around . I had no sense of this , thinking that the kids who sucked up to me and the others who bullied me were reacting to my true self . This left me deeply confused . Years later , I asked my mother if she had been aware of the pattern . She said yes . I asked why she hadn ’ t said anything to me about it . She said , “ Because people shouldn ’ t be like that . ”. The Midwest ! . My mother was a prairie princess , the only child of a school superintendent who doubled as a postmaster , from a tiny town in North Dakota . My father was a railroad worker ’ s son from another . I was born in Fargo . In the summer of 1945 , when I was three and a half , alone in the kitchen of my great - uncle Martin ’ s farmhouse — water by hand pump ; chamber pots and an outhouse — a grizzled man came in and tried to grab me . I ran screaming . It was Dad , home from the war . .. My mother maintained a peaceful home , and neither she nor my father was ever physically abusive . But they were wrapped up in themselves and each other to the extreme of being jealous of their five kids , of whom I ’ m the oldest . From my father ’ s point of view , God forbid my mother should waste affection on me that could go to him . Zero sum . Everything that he had went into his work , and everything that she had went into him . The one and only way I could attain his attention was to be insolent , to make my mother cry . Then he ’ d rage but at least make eye contact . . I grew up with a craving for and a resentment of authority . This bedevils me still . . In love letters , my mother addressed him as the President , and he called her the Student Body . . What my parents were doing having children mystifies , beyond the given , during the Depression and the war eras , that marriage required it . My father was a self - made extraordinary inventor and engineer and a successful but credulous — i . e . , exploitable — entrepreneur . He may have suffered lifelong post - traumatic stress from his ordeals as a grunt in the Battle of the Bulge . He wouldn ’ t talk about it except in bursts now and then . But he had nightmares . • My father ’ s fragmentary stories from the war left big gaps in time . Here ’ s what I can piece together . He was a private in a division , the 84 th , that helped to roll back the German advance . He was hunkered down in snow on the day that my sister Ann was born , two days before Christmas , 1944 . His infantry units would creep to the edge of villages to suppress any anti - tank fire ahead of armored advances . once , one of our own tanks churned across a foxhole he was in , burying him and killing the man , a close friend , next to him . My father was a radio operator until , ordered to take a radio to a cutoff platoon , he and another soldier came under mortar fire . They dived into a shell hole . The mortars zeroed in , “ like someone bouncing a basketball around the hole , ” he said . A near - hit wounded his partner . Making a break for it , my father helped the man and lugged the radio , which , when they reached the platoon , was found to be wrecked by shrapnel . He was awarded a Bronze Star and spent the rest of the war as a rifleman . . I have a photograph of him with some of his comrades outside a battered church . He grins rather maniacally and holds a lectern — inexplicable loot from the church . He brought home a German helmet and uniform , a German rifle - cleaning kit , a piece of transparent plastic from the cockpit canopy of a downed Messerschmitt , an artillery - shell casing , a large fragment of an exploded grenade , and a steel ammunition box on which he had painted , in his elegant engineer ’ s hand , his division logo and the names of the places where he had fought . I played continually with those objects as a boy , fantasizing about military glory . . Once , he spoke of being under artillery bombardment in a forest . It frightened me . His tone hinted at still - unrelieved , helpless terror . . Late in life , going dotty ( or dottier than usual ) , my father contemplated returning to the battle zone of the Ardennes and seeking out German privates who had fought on the other side . He wanted to test his theory that they had hated their officers as much as he had hated his — whose sole aim , from his perspective , was to squander the lives of their men . . I recounted this plan to the German painter Anselm Kiefer , who was born in 1945 . As I recall , though he doesn ’ t , he said , “ Don ’ t tell your father . Our men loved their officers . ” I was friends with Kiefer for a while , as I was with many artists over the years , until about twenty years ago . The friendships fell apart . Closeness is impossible between an artist and a critic . Each wants from the other something — the artist ’ s mojo , the critic ’ s sagacity — that belongs strictly to the audiences for their respective work . It ’ s like two vacuum cleaners sucking at each other . • My father was on a cutting edge — quite literally , as one of the first to discover how to simultaneously cut and seal polyethylene with a hot knife , experimenting in the basement of our modest house . He invented the plastic - lined paper sickness bag for airplanes , for which he received a dollar . ( The patent belonged to the company he was working for . ) What remained of the family fortune when he died has all but gone to the care of my mother , who is chipper at the age of a hundred and two . . Too much about my dad ? Exactly ! His charisma bleached the identities of his five children . I spent years of my childhood trying to win his approval and years of my adolescence trying to provoke his disapproval , until I had to accept that he didn ’ t care either way . When I told him on the phone , in 1998 , that I ’ d been hired by The New Yorker , there was a long silence . Then he said , “ Oh , you kids ! ”. Too little about my mother ? Exactly again . My memories of her from my childhood amount to a uniform haze of bland niceness punctuated with flares of incomprehensible anger or tears and almost no sense of emotional connection . She was , and remains , a constant reader without a trace of intellectual curiosity . She tells everybody that she ’ s proud of me . I ’ m a credit to her . . I was set up to be the tower - of - strength big brother , a surrogate parent , and my three younger sisters and my younger brother bought into it . But my heart was a loveless void . I broke free at the cost of hating myself for letting my siblings down . Estrangements ensued that now , one by one , are healing . Ann , Don , Peggy , Mary , and me : an accountant , a geographer , a massage therapist , a chef , and an art critic . We ’ ve done all right . . Still , people I know will roll their eyes — same old Peter ! — at how little of their deserved shrift they ’ re receiving from me here as , alone , I linger again with my lifelong lover : you , reader . • I was a kid crazy about language and an omnivorous reader . At breakfast , I ’ d pore over every word on a cereal box as if it were holy writ . The first poem I remember writing was at a class picnic on the last day of sixth grade . I lay back on the grass , looking up . A hawk soared overhead . This wasn ’ t unusual , but it gave me an odd feeling . I rolled over and wrote what I knew was a poem because it looked like one . All I recall of it is a chorus : “ Winged avenger from the skies ! ” I ’ m not sure that I even knew what an avenger was . I took the poem to my teacher , who said , “ Peter , this is very unpleasant . ” That smothered my literary drive for some years . • In a car with high - school classmates after a picnic party somewhere in rural Minnesota — a bottle had been passed , and I would have proof that Cheetos were on the bill of fare — I said to stop . I tumbled out and barfed beside the road . The vomit was bright orange . It puddled on bright - green grass . The summer sky was bright blue . I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful . • My rags - to - riches - to - fewer - riches father decided that his children should make their own way in the world , as he had . So no financial support beyond college and such emergency aid as was required to pay a fine , say , rather than have me spend a year in jail ( pot bust in Maine ) and , oh , yes , the funds for the little yellow Austin - Healey Sprite in which , dropping out of college in Minnesota , I drove east on a slim chance . That was in 1962 . I was twenty . . I had wanted out of school and , after a landlocked upbringing , yearned to see an ocean . In those days , cities of any size had dailies . I sent letters to papers in small cities near big ones , three on the East Coast and three on the West . only the Jersey Journal , in Jersey City , replied , offering an interview . I drove through a day and a night , my tiny car drafting behind barrelling trucks , to Journal Square , which glistened in the sun after a night rain . An editor asked where I was staying . I think I mumbled something . He said , “ You don ’ t have a place to stay , do you ? ” Then he said , “ Oh , hell , take a desk . ”• Hudson County , New Jersey , was epically corrupt . Several Jersey City mayors have gone to jail . one day , in 1963 , a reporter hung up the phone and announced , “ Tony Pro is having another press conference . ” Mysteriously , everybody laughed . “ Let ’ s send the kid , ” someone said . . At the Teamsters headquarters in Union City , Tony ( Pro ) Provenzano sat behind an immense desk , flanked by central - casting bodyguards . Other reporters lounged and smoked . only I had a notebook ready . Tony Pro told a series of obscene jokes about Attorney General Robert Kennedy , who was crusading against the Mob . And that was that . Tony Pro stood at the door shaking hands with us . Crinkle . In my palm was the first fifty - dollar bill I had ever seen . I said thanks , but I really couldn ’ t . I set the bill down when he wouldn ’ t take it back . . Staring eyes greeted my return to the paper , and the editor - in - chief called me into his office and shut the door . He said , “ I don ’ t know what you did or what you said , and I don ’ t want to know . Never do it or say it again . ”. Later that year , when Provenzano was on trial in Newark for extortion , he sat down beside me during a break and chatted amiably about something , maybe baseball . . I acquired the most useful writing discipline of my life from fat , cigar - chewing Jersey Journal copy editors — burned - out reporters — at desks in a half circle facing the city editor . With No . 1 pencils , like black crayons , they ’ d eviscerate my copy . I ’ d rewrite , and they ’ d do it again . Finally , they sent it down to the Linotype — the old racketing , reeking contraption for setting type from molten lead . Those men still sit by as I write , pencils in their itching paws . •“ Sleeping the big sleep . ” Raymond Chandler proved that the American form of Montaigne - grade aphorism is the wisecrack . . Wisecracks in Chandler are existential rescues of imperilled self - possession . Worth the risk to the detective of a punch in the gut . And conserving calm for noticing the world . .“ A slanting gray rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads . ” . “ A few windows were lit and radios were bleating at the dusk . ”• I lost my interminably heavy - petting virginity with the recently graduated fiancée of a college friend who was still at school , a senior . I had been invited to my friend ’ s parents ’ penthouse on Sutton Place South , an apartment that was deluxe beyond my dreaming . A spotlighted Willem de Kooning painting stunned me : wild but somehow purposeful , clinching an unstated argument . The woman and I left together and fell to making out in the elevator , then proceeded to a cheap hotel on Lexington Avenue . We had a frenzied affair , only about sex . It was what ’ s now termed empowering . .. I went back to college in Minnesota for a year , dropped out for good , returned to the Jersey City job for three months , unwisely married , spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris , had a life - changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy , another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris , returned to New York , freelanced , stumbled into the art world , got a divorce , which , while uncontested , entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez , Mexico , past a kid saying , “ Hey , hippie , wanna screw my sister ? , ” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol . • When I started writing criticism , in 1965 , in almost pristine ignorance , I discovered that I was the world ’ s leading expert in one thing : my experience . Most of what I know in a scholarly way about art I learned on deadlines , to sound as if I knew what I was talking about — as , little by little , I did . Educating yourself in public is painful , but the lessons stick . . In 1966 , after a few months of writing mostly one - sentence reviews for The Art News , I was hired as the art critic of the Village Voice , for the first of three stints with the often marvellous weekly . ( The others spanned 1980 - 81 and 1991 - 98 . ) I had a problem besides inexperience : a question of priorities , between meeting deadlines and doing lots of drugs — a no - brainer in more than one way . I lasted in that job for only a few weeks . Meanwhile , the poetry scene , centered on St . Mark ’ s Church , was both expanding and unravelling , as rock songs displaced poems as soul food for young hearts and minds . But the art scene boomed . Art parties were immeasurably more fun than poetry parties . . Starting in 1967 , I began writing regularly for the Times ’ Sunday Arts & Leisure section . The section ’ s editor , Seymour Peck , a flinty New Yorker , had me write columns on movies , theatre , rock music , and television as well as on art , extending my capacities , while cracking down on my flakiness . He practically invented me as a functioning professional . . My uptown feats didn ’ t impress people whom I looked up to in the downtown art scene , where anti - bourgeois hardheadedness and minimalist disdain for the “ literary ” reigned . They were contemptuous of the Times . I was Peter the poet , a relative nobody . Advice to aspiring youth : in New York , the years that you spend as a nobody are painful but golden , because no one bothers to lie to you . The moment you ’ re a somebody , you have heard your last truth . Everyone will try to spin you — as they should , with careers to think of . For about a dozen years , I hung out , drank , and slept with artists who didn ’ t take me seriously . I observed , heard , overheard , and absorbed a great deal . . One drunken night , a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning . I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started . The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me , physically . It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room . • At a time , in the early seventies , when I slept a lot , I kept track of my dreams , writing a book distilling some of them . For example , “ Conceptual Art ” : .. That prose - poetic experiment ended when I entered Jungian therapy and presented my dreams for interpretation . They all made abundant sense , which was entertaining but not terribly helpful . 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 . . The birth of Brooke ’ s and my daughter , Ada , on St . Patrick ’ s Day , 1976 , saw to that . When your baby cries , you ’ re out of bed before being fully awake . . Ada was present when my oncologist , at Memorial Sloan Kettering , gave me six months or so to live . Ada asked me what I wanted to do . Revisit Rome ? Paris ? I would forget that I said , “ Nah . Maybe a ballgame . ” She arranged it , with family and friends : Mets versus Braves , at Citi Field . Glorious . Grandson Oliver caught a T - shirt from the mid - game T - shirt cannon . Odds of that : several thousand to one . • Writing consumes writers . No end of ones better than I am have said as much . The passion hurts relationships . I think off and on about people I love , but I think about writing all the time . . Writing is hard , or everyone would do it . . You ’ re reading an exception , which is pouring out of me . It ’ s the first writing “ for myself ” that I ’ ve done in about thirty years , since I gave up on poetry ( or poetry gave up on me ) because I didn ’ t know what a poem was any longer and had severed or sabotaged all my connections to the poetry world . An impermeable block has crumbled , my muse being , I guess , the grim reaper . . I ’ m given pause here by my unreconstructed reverence for extreme states of mind and feeling . Think William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe . Huysmans . I ’ ve often quoted Baudelaire : “ I cultivated my hysteria with terror and delight . ” But I also thrilled to the august sanities of Paul Valéry ( “ Stupidity is not my strong suit ” ) and Auden ( “ Poetry makes nothing happen ” ) . Another extreme . . Extremity was the spirit of my drug - using , which I never really enjoyed : pot , acid , DMT , and downers taken pragmatically , in service to “ systematic derangement of the senses ” ( Rimbaud ) . Did the drugs help ? I don ’ t know . The acid taught me things about the mind by making all of its workings simultaneously perceptible , though to no one — ego dissolving like Alka - Seltzer in warm water . • I dodged the Vietnam draft by staying awake for three days and nights on speed , taking any other drugs that came to hand , rolling in dirt , presenting myself at the induction center on Whitehall Street , and trying to coöperate . The draft officials discarded me like a used condom . I felt guilty . I brooded that some guy would have to go in my place . I had faked psychosis so well that my sanity teetered for months afterward . . Baudelaire wrote of having been “ brushed by the wind of the wing of madness . ” I have felt that breeze at times , though not in a great many years now . I still have the occasional thought that what is commonly deemed sanity is absurd ; but I let that slide . • I met Susan Sontag once , at a party . She came up and praised something that I had written . Thrilled , I began chattering about I don ’ t remember what . Sontag froze . She retreated , taking backward steps before turning away . It dawned on me that receiving her blessing was supposed to have been enough : a solemn initiation . I had presumed on it . • At the end of my multi - drug sixties , I figuratively put all the chemicals in a funnel , and they came out bourbon . Jack Daniel ’ s - on - the - rocks , with a splash , except when scarce funds reduced me to Heaven Hill . Alcohol was liberating for me at first . A standard progression : great , good , fair , poor , bad , very bad , and then a phase for which any word but “ Hell ” fails . Halfway through the second drink , there may be a flicker of the old euphoria , quickly snuffed . You chase it in vain for the rest of a wretched night . It ’ s over for you . A line has been crossed . Yet you cannot imagine yourself not drinking . The obsession is at one with your core sense of self . . Brooke drinks . We keep a full liquor cabinet . I mix drinks for guests without a qualm . The booze is a different chemical in their bodies from what it would be in mine . Pleasant for them , poison for me . . Free . Sort of free . Who ’ s free ? I can see the paragraphs I ’ m writing as little jail cells , penning me into perspectives , conceits , ideas , jokes , and memories — stories ! Not an original type of anxiety , for a writer . . Writers can be only so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed . . I remember thinking in the sixties that becoming emotionally paralyzed could be cool if one were in an interesting enough position . Coolness was the holy grail then . I was hopeless at it . Sincerity is my accursed default . . I had a rage of ambition and an acrid dissatisfaction that , along with a love of the world , were bound to come out somehow . The self - centered motives have waned . It ’ s harder to pitch into writing with less to prove or avenge . To start a critical essay , I must prod myself until the old mesmerized flow resumes . . When I finish something and it seems good , I ’ m dazed . It must have been fun to write . I wish I ’ d been there . • In my drinking years , I took to saying , for a laugh , “ The only thing I want in life is a written apology from everyone I ’ ve ever met . ” Arrogant ! But , truth to tell , arrogance — as a placeholder for confidence , of which I had none — enabled me to brave the world when I was young . . The same goes for snobbery , a necessary stage for the insecure until we acquire taste that admits and reflects the variety of experience . To limber your sensibility , stalk the aesthetic everywhere : cracks in a sidewalk , people ’ s ways of walking . The aesthetic isn ’ t bounded by art , which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption . If you can ’ t put a mental frame around , and relish , the accidental aspect of a street or a person , or really of anything , you will respond to art only sluggishly . . I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works , five thousand years or five minutes old , that physically exist in the present . We look at them with contemporary eyes , the only kinds of eyes that there ever are . . I retain , but suspend , my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see . I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work : “ What would I like about this if I liked it ? ” I may come around ; I may not . Failing that , I wonder , What must the people who like this be like ? Anthropology . . I assess art by quality and significance . The latter is most decisive for my choice of subjects , because I ’ m a journalist . There ’ s art I adore that I won ’ t write about , because I can ’ t imagine it mattering enough to general readers . It pertains to my private experience as a person , without which my activity as a critic would wither but which falls outside my critical mandate . . I write for readers and not for artists , who can buy the magazine and read me like anyone else if they ’ re interested . I didn ’ t always . When I was young , I had personal and coterie loyalties . Then I decided to see how responsible a critic I could be , open to ideas but never prescriptive or proscriptive . By academic measure , this makes me not a true critic at all . I can live with that . • Family and friends are being wonderful to me in my sickness . I ’ ve toiled all my life , in vain , to like myself . Now the task has been outsourced . I can ’ t go around telling everybody they ’ re idiots . . I always said that when my time came I ’ d want to go fast . But where ’ s the fun in that ? . True story : a friend received a preliminary diagnosis suggesting advanced breast cancer . Normally shy , she took this as license to tell or show everyone in her circle how little she liked or respected them . False alarm . It was cat - scratch fever . She moved overseas . .“ When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight , it concentrates his mind wonderfully , ” per Samuel Johnson . .“ Why isn ’ t Schjeldahl ’ s copy in ? ” “ He ’ s dead . ” “ Uh , O . K . , then . ”. The best excuse . • The most delicious poem about someone dying is Auden ’ s “ In Memory of W . B . Yeats ” ( 1939 ) , with these lines : .. The poet Ron Padgett pointed out to me the technical shrewdness of the compound last line : the all - time best use of a semicolon in place of a line break . Then there ’ s the sterling “ became ” : nothing is left of Yeats but others ’ thoughts of him , and the thoughts of him enhance the others , like badges . . We wear as many such badges as there are dead people we admire . The Shakespeare badge . The Jesus one , though he cheated on Easter morning . At what hour did the Saviour reopen his eyes ? At dawn ? Before it , with time to kill ? . Seeing Hans Holbein ’ s “ Dead Christ ” ( 1520 - 22 ) shook Dostoyevsky ’ s Christian belief : a two - days - gone corpse in a warm climate , a thing . . Simone Weil said that the transcendent meaning of Christianity is complete with Jesus ’ death , sans the cherry on top that is the Resurrection . I think so . .“ I believe in God ” is a false statement for me because it is voiced by my ego , which is compulsively skeptical . But the rest of me tends otherwise . Staying on an “ as if ” basis with “ God , ” for short , hugely improves my life . 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 . After a Lutheran upbringing , I became an atheist at the onset of puberty . That wore off gradually and then , with sobriety , speedily . • I had a moment , while anticipating my diagnosis , of feeling special . But what ’ s as commonplace as dying ? Everybody does it . I also had an instant of fancying that I could drink again . That evanesced in a flash . Fellow - alcoholics know that the beast , though out of mind , survives . My thought was a foul little burp from a cave . • 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 . . Self - knowledge ! Almost better never than this late . ( I don ’ t mean that at all . But I enjoy the sound of it . ) I am endeavoring to practice self - forgiveness . I believe it ’ s recommended . . As for folks out there in resentful and envious circles who will be glad to have me out of the way , they , by their pleasure , afford me a bonus credit for increasing human happiness . .“ Everyone , it seems , loves Peter Schjeldahl , ” an art Web site opined recently . I know for dead sure that ’ s not so . To the extent that it ’ s plausible hyperbole and because I believe in a balanced universe , the people who hate me do so with enough intensity to square up the sums . • I think of righteous nonsmokers “ in the hospital dying of nothing . ” That ’ s a line for a role that Brooke played , as a chain - smoking coroner , in a not - great movie , “ Just Cause ” ( 1995 ) , with the great Sean Connery , who may or may not have had a say in cutting the line from the released film because it stole the scene . Soon after that , she proved her ability , which I ’ ve lacked , to break habits by quitting both smoking and acting . Her subsequent enterprises have ranged from an antiques - and - whatnot store , Brooke ’ s Variety , to a spectacularly unusual mini - golf course on land that we own in the Catskills . . Nicotine stimulates and relaxes . Beat that . I understand that it teaches the brain to prefer it to a natural neurotransmitter , acetylcholine , which , among other boons , promotes mental agility . Nicotine does the same , better . How many quitters never miss smoking ? ( Liars line up on the left . ) The times I tried to stop , I wondered what writers do . • L . , who is no longer alive , became pregnant on our second date , in 1963 . A backstreet abortion in Chicago left her sterile . I married her out of guilt mixed with infatuation . ( She was wild and adored me while sleeping around , as I did , too , but I couldn ’ t keep up . ) We lasted for most of five years , possibly because a man I disliked had said that he gave us three months . . Lee Crabtree . Jairus Lincoln . Jeff Giles . You don ’ t know about them . They were friends of mine who died young . I ’ ll get over Lee ’ s suicide , in 1973 , only when I ’ ve joined him . I was harsh the last time I saw him , hiding my love . . Lee was the pianist and musical arranger for the Fugs . one night after an awful fight with L . , in which for emphasis I punched out a window , I showed up at Lee ’ s , bleeding . He bandaged and calmed me . He had a big plastic toy horn that I started to toot on . Lee sat at his electric keyboard , and we jammed . Later , he showed me sheet music that he had printed of our improvised creation : “ The Red Horn Polka . ” We collaborated on a song , “ Police State , ” that became the Fugs ’ first - act closer but isn ’ t on any album , perhaps because it was too dirty , even for them . . Lee was the gentlest , most generous person amid a prevalence of shitheads , who , at the worst possible moment , included me . I knew that he was struggling with his repressed homosexuality . Having been so good a friend , he sorely needed friendship . . At a temporary job on the twelfth floor of a building in midtown , he was seen , at a window , to wave affably to a random person in another building . Then he climbed out the window and stepped into space . • Bury me . Nix to cremation . I want an address that people know they can visit even if they never do . Phooey to dust on a random sea breeze or strewn on a field of unoffending vegetation . Or in a jar ? Think about it . . Though cemeteries waste real estate . Better a Walmart parking lot ? . Really , do as you please with the corpse — not me , not mine . I believe in earnestly agreeing to deathbed wishes and then forgetting about them , unless it ’ s to satisfy those among the living . • Between bulletins from my body that say this isn ’ t so , I still feel like a kid inside . Four and a half years ago , while rushing to catch a bus ( “ Don ’ t run for a bus ” was a rule for longevity in Mel Brooks ’ s “ 2000 Year Old Man ” ) , I tripped trying to leap , gazelle - like , over a chunk of broken asphalt and must have caught a toe . When I came to on the street , surrounded by strangers , I had no memory of falling or of much else ( who I was , where I was ) . There was blood . My glasses were smashed . I said , “ I ’ m O . K . ” The strangers strenuously disagreed . An ambulance had arrived . . I was mostly conscious when wheeled on a gurney into an emergency room in Greenwich Village . A scrawny old - time Village - hipster type was driving the nurses crazy about something , likely trying to wheedle drugs . Strolling past and glancing down at me , he said tenderly , “ Die , baby . ” That didn ’ t seem like a terrible idea , right then , and it struck me in a remote sort of way as the funniest thing I ’ d ever heard . . A CAT scan to check out a suspicion that my neck was broken ( weird story short : my neck was found to have broken and healed sometime in the past , unbeknownst to me ) incidentally discovered a spot in my left lung . This later led to hospital visits for scans and tests , including a needle biopsy ( ouch ) , all of them inconclusive . Fed up with the rigmarole , I refused further investigation . Shouldn ’ t have ? Live and learn . • Shakespeare wrote of “ desiring this man ’ s art and that man ’ s scope . ” I find this comforting . But who was he thinking of ? Marlowe ? Someone forgotten although evidently fucking incredible ? . Originality is overrated , except by people who have it . It ’ s like an untamed , ungrateful beast you ’ re trapped with . If people praising you knew the half of it , they ’ d think twice . • I think of Lee Crabtree and of all suicides . What happens ? one night in the early seventies , I perched on a tenement - roof edge despite my fear of heights , legs dangling , and ordered myself to let go . It was amid a love disaster . I truly thought I ’ d jump . But something inside me laughed derisively . Who was I kidding ? Humiliated , I went downstairs . Some , in a crisis , must lack the laugh or muffle it for long enough . . Twice I ’ ve been to Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead , when the departed members of families have their favorite food , drinks , and perhaps cigarettes set out for them at meals . It ’ s understood that , at the table , the dead consume the immaterial goodness of these things . The families visit them overnight in graveyards . I was deeply moved by the implication that death may be a major life event , such as birth , confirmation , and marriage , but that it doesn ’ t mean you ’ re gone . We spare the dead a bit of the life in us . I shuddered suddenly during my second walk among placid , candlelit groups . It hit me that the dead were reciprocating : a bit of the death in them for us . Never fully dead , never fully alive . . I may have this wrong , but I ’ m savoring the idea . Today , the little bit of death in me has sat up in bed and is pulling on its socks . • I remember arriving in an Italian village by train after midnight and walking past a cemetery where candles burned at every grave , with no one around . Or I think I remember it . . We have lousy memories . Proust had a lousy memory . ( There is no “ little patch of yellow wall ” in Vermeer ’ s “ View of Delft . ” ) Memory is a liar . It ’ s a heap of dog - eared , smudged , incessantly revised fictions . The stories make cumulative lies — or , give us a break , conjectures — of our lives . This is O . K . because it had darn well better be . . Who ’ s “ we ” ? You know . . Meaning is a scrap among other scraps , though stickier . Meaning is so much better than nothing , in that it defines “ nothing ” as everything that meaning is not . Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing . The “ nothing that is not there and the nothing that is , ” Wallace Stevens noticed . The same nothing , but a difference of attitude . • A random shame : I was visited in New York by P . , a soft - souled , brilliant friend from high school and college , a concert pianist . High on speed , I was arrogant and callous , watching the effects on P . with cold - blooded detachment . Finally , he said in a hurt tone , “ I always thought you had a modesty about you . But not so . ” I could have said something , admitted my drugged state , made amends the next day . But a devil in me exulted . . Years later , a scene occurred that might work well in a novel set in the early seventies , in case you ’ re writing one . I was seeing a terrific artist , H . , at least as prone to defiance as I was . I saw that P . was giving a concert . I asked H . , my not - really , because she was so independent , girlfriend to attend with me . She got the message , which was not fully conscious but true : besides wanting to make up with P . , I relished the prospect of showing her off . Usually downtown casual , she showed up in heels , a stunning dress , diamonds or what looked like them , and a mink coat . . After the terrific music , especially Liszt , we joined P . and some other people in champagne toasts . P . facilitated introductions by asking the men — only the men — to say what they did . H . let that develop for about half a minute and detonated , “ Let ’ s start this over ! Let ’ s play What do the women do ? ” The company gawked . She was magnificent ! With a flourish , she left the theatre . I tagged along moments later , stricken . Out on the street , she was gone . I limped home . I saw her only in passing after that . I didn ’ t try again to reconcile with P . . The shock of feminism came none too soon for guys , including me , who had lorded in a sixties bohemia that mandated women be doting helpmeets to their entitled — because genius — men . Those domesticities went down like a row of dominoes at the first breath of female revolt . With no new model for relationships , libertinage reigned . I guess it was fun for some people , but it piled up emotional wreckage left and right . . The art scene was always a third or more gay — often the best third . My chief poet heroes were Frank O ’ Hara and John Ashbery . John complained to me that he had thought that with success he ’ d have his pick from a meat rack of young poets . “ How come you ’ re all straight ? ”— stretching out the last word to sound like something nasty going through a mangle . . How straight was I ? I ’ d always been nervous about homosexuality . Didn ’ t that mean I was repressing it ? Given that everybody seemed to be having sex with everybody , not to mention being soused or stoned nightly , I decided to face the facts . A gay friend I approached would have nothing to do with me in that way . Well ! I hooked up with a bisexual friend , but too much to drink made whatever happened a blur . So I seduced a straight friend . It was interesting . Nice , but obvious . I didn ’ t rule out doing it again , but I never have . . There were brief affairs that I think neither the woman nor I really wanted ; but this wasn ’ t an adequate excuse then . An entropy of the heart grew in me , as did , which I didn ’ t suspect , a yen for monogamy . . My last bachelor fling was semi - scandalous , in the art world , and volcanically erotic . I like to say that it burned the carbon out of my cylinders . She broke up with me on a street corner , denouncing me and storming off . I stood there for a spell grinning from ear to ear . I figured that I had mastered swinging singledom . Then I met Brooke . • I remember , in rehab , on the Upper East Side in 1992 , an alum of the place , a tough guy from Queens , addressing the nightly A . A . meeting . He told us of once showing up at some clinic , drunk and filthy and soiled with his own diarrhea , and throwing a fit because the doctor was ten minutes late . “ If you ’ re a real alcoholic , ” the guy said to us , “ no matter how low you go , you will have an attitude . ” He added , “ If you ’ re a real alcoholic , you will never feel quite right . Whatever you want will be a little bit out of reach . Can ’ t handle that ? Get the fuck out of here and get drunk . ” I went up to him afterward , in tears , to thank him . He said , “ You heard me ? ” I said yes . “ Good , ” he said , turning and walking away as if from some crap on a sidewalk . Saved my life . . The rehab was crowded with crack addicts , some of them felons . I was the rare middle - aged , middle - class white man in the joint . It was loud at all hours . Scared , I couldn ’ t sleep . I told Brooke , on the building ’ s pay phone , that I had to get out . She said , “ Cope , ” and hung up . Saved my life . . See , Brooke is a child of alcoholics , as I ’ m not . I grew up and became one . She grew up and married one . She knew I was a mess but thought the drinking part was normal , until she got wise and kicked me out of the house . ( Note to anyone who knows an active alcoholic : never , ever sympathize . If you suspect you ’ re going to , shut your eyes , plug your ears , and hum . ). I bottomed out in the rehab , where I had gone as a condition for being allowed back home . I thought I was serious . I always had been when , previously , I was dry for periods of up to thirteen months : going to meetings at first , dewy with pity for people who plainly had been far worse off than I was . I wouldn ’ t admit that we shared the identical fate , wherever we ranked along its descending scale . . On the third or fourth of my twenty - eight days there , I was climbing stairs and paused , too exhausted for another step . I harbored a nebulous conviction that I could tolerate only so much pain , short of a red zone in which I would go mad or die or something terrible would happen . And that anyone should see as much and want me to do anything — have a drink or a drug , for starters — to make it stop . . I thought , They say one day at a time . How about one second ? I stared at my ticking watch . A black abyss opened . I was numbly aware that I wasn ’ t insane . I wasn ’ t dying . Reality was droning on as usual , with impartial sunlight streaming through a nearby window and picking out swirls of dust motes . . A perfectly demented thought blazed up . Roughly : What if they find out I ’ m not really an alcoholic and throw me out of here ? I need this place ! I believe it was the last , deepest rootlet of my denial , expelled . Not an alcoholic ? • My daughter , Ada , has told me that in her childhood she spent years trying to interest me . I hadn ’ t noticed . She was sixteen when I got sober . She said , “ Let ’ s see if I get this straight . Now you want to be my dad ? ” It took a lot of time and change and is still under way . I don ’ t know if it ’ s a consolation prize for Ada , or what it is , that she turned out to be fantastically interesting . . Meeting Brooke , having Ada , and getting sober are my life ’ s top three red - letter days . • Cigarette brands I remember smoking for at least a few months running : Alpine , Salem , Newport , Camel , Lucky Strike , Parliament , Kent , Gauloises , Benson & Hedges , Nat Sherman . Finally ( and I do mean finally ) , Marlboro Gold ( formerly Lights ) , the crack cocaine of tobacco products , containing all sorts of cunning chemicals and a somewhat insulting whisper of sugar . . Doing the math , I reckon that I have smoked about a million cigarettes — and enjoyed every one of them , not that you care . . Tried gum , patches , and e - cigarettes . Not the same . I use nicotine lozenges to not be twitchy on airplanes , while driving with family , and indoors anywhere except in my offices in our city apartment and country house , with exhaust fans in opened windows — challenging during summer heat and winter cold . Smoking today requires grit . . Quit now ? Sure , and have the rest of my life be a tragicomedy of nicotine withdrawal . • Mishaps . I had polio when I was eleven , in one of the last big epidemics before the Salk vaccine . I remember riding my bike home from school , every bump like a knife through my brain . Rushed to the local hospital for a spinal tap — every bit as horrible as you may imagine , but the one sure means of diagnosis then — and throwing up in the back of the family station wagon on the way to the polio - specializing Sister Kenny Institute , in Minneapolis . . I had a bed , but there were too many kids , so some were laid out in halls . Screaming all night . Dying . And always the mechanical sucking noise of iron lungs . I had no paralysis , but I was much weakened , spending seven weeks in the hospital and subject to physical therapy for months . Meanwhile , my family was quarantined at home . Food was left at the doorstep . . For a summer just out of high school , I worked at a resort in Glacier National Park , in the Montana Rockies . I hitchhiked on days off with a copy of “ On the Road ” in my back pocket and a big jackknife that I practiced opening in a flash in preparation for the lethal fights that I fantasized about . I told one truck driver , in what I imagined to be the right accent , that I was from Lexington , Kentucky . He said , “ Lexington , Kentucky , boy , my home town ! ” I feigned sleep . . Another time , I climbed a manageable - looking mountain , setting out at dawn with pockets full of candy bars . It became steep , then close to vertical . As I clung to a rockface , an eagle launched , shrieking , from a ledge just above me and sailed into the blue distance . Higher up , there was snow , and there were bear tracks in the snow . I thought the mountaintop was a sloping ridge . I crawled up it and found a sheer drop facing the inaccessible summit . Had I had acrophobia before , or did my subsequently lifelong case of it begin then and there ? I hugged rock and sobbed . The next thing I remember is striding and tumbling down a side of the mountain covered in deep gravel , grabbing bushes to slow myself . I alighted in brambled woods , disoriented . I had the sense to follow a trickling stream , and I was kept on course by the feel of the water as night fell . I emerged , a tattered scarecrow , on the park ’ s one highway . Cars sped up at the sight of me in their headlights until one stopped . • I ’ m not in physical pain as I write , though I tire quickly and nap often . I have been receiving , every three weeks , an immunotherapy infusion — not chemo , and not a cure — which , at the outset , the doctor said had a thirty - five - per - cent chance of slowing the disease . ( At those odds in Vegas , you ’ re broke within an hour , but in baseball you ’ re a cinch for the Hall of Fame . ) A recent scan shows marked improvement , likely extending my prospect of survival . But I have to wonder if , whatever betides , I can stay upbeat in spirit . A thing about dying is that you can ’ t consult anyone who has done it . No rehearsals . No mulligans . • At a bar when I was first in New York , I smirked dandyishly at my reflection in the mirror behind the bottles . I looked handsome ! I was stirring my drink , Scotch - on - the - rocks , with my right index finger , which in the mirror became my left one . The moment seemed ineffably cool . Clown ! . I ordered coffee at a diner . The guy said , “ Regular ? ” I said , “ Well , sure . ” Surprise : milk and sugar . In the Midwest , coffee was black , no sugar . Brooke remembers being a Texan newbie in New York and seeing a store sign that read “ COFFEE RICE & BEANS . ” Fascinated , she asked for a pound of coffee rice . You get to be clueless in a new place only briefly . Don ’ t waste the chance to have truths , great and small , burst upon you . • Brooke was an actress and standup comic from Dallas . Introduced at a Whitney Museum opening by A . , a woman connected to both the art and the entertainment worlds , we despised each other immediately . I deemed Brooke a bubblehead , and she noticed that I was a jerk . Then she attended a poetry reading I gave , which , whatever its quality , turned out to be the best of my life , because she liked it . Next , A . invited me out to dinner and then , perhaps getting cold feet at what it implied , asked if she could bring Brooke . I said something like “ Sure , why not ? ”. It ’ s forty - six years later . Brooke is in bed rereading “ Pride and Prejudice , ” as she does two or three times a year , with a Mets game muttering on the radio . I have no doubt that our two cats cuddle beside her . It ’ s night at our place in the Catskills , moonless and clear . I could turn off my office light and look out a window at the sky choked with stars . . Brooke has Texas grit : respecting everyone and taking no shit from anybody , least of all her spouse . When she ’ s mad , it ’ s scary , tapping a rage that once fuelled her escape from an awful family . There ’ s no recourse but to duck and wait for it to pass , which it does . The sun began to shine on my life when I gave up arguing with Brooke . She is also very funny and brings out the fun in others , her spouse not excluded . . Ada asked her mother how to stay married . Brooke said , “ Don ’ t get divorced . ” If you don ’ t divorce , you are a hundred per cent married no matter what ’ s going on . I am so glad we stayed together that , for once in my verbose life , words to express it fail me . • 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 . Dying is my turn to survey life from its far — now near — shore . These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use . “ To have put . ” See ? While here , not here . Like a camera situated nowhere and taking in every last detail of the pulsating world . . God creeps in . Human minds are the universe ’ s only instruments for reflecting on itself . The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it . ( Do we behave badly ? We are gifted with the capacity to think so . ) We may be accidents of matter and energy , but we can ’ t help circling back to the sense of a meaning that is unaccountable by the application of what we know . If God is a human invention , good for us ! We had to come up with something . . Take death for a walk in your minds , folks . Either you ’ ll be glad you did or , keeling over suddenly , you won ’ t be out anything . ♦..