THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD

By David Shields

Knopf, 232 pages, $25.95

David Shields's The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (hereinafter referred to as The Thing About Life) joins a flourishing list of recent titles given to final things. Some have a bioethical slant, like Leslie Ivan's The Way We Die or Margaret Pabst Battin's Ending Life; others arise from the pathologist's slab, like Sherwin Nuland's How We Die. Or, like Allan Kellehear's A Social History of Dying (which I reviewed in these pages last July), they may be sociological constructs.

The tergiversations and allusions multiply maddeningly. They range from the Bhagavad Gita, which defines the human body as a wound with nine openings, to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." The prize must surely go to British Second World War poet Henry Reed, who observed, "As we get older, we do not get any younger."

Nabokov, of course, was not the first to suggest that life is a window between two eternities. As a chapbook, what The Thing About Life lacks is just as revealing as what it packs. Thus, pace Nabokov, Greek philosopher Epicurus and his Roman disciple Lucretius both anticipated Scottish empiricist David Hume in saying that death is nothing to be feared, no worse than contemplating the nothingness whence we came. But theirs were minority reports, and one must be alive to do the contemplating.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Death be not loud