Web

She never moved again.  Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died.  The Fair Grounds were soon deserted.  The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash.  Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all.  No one was with her when she died.

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Tough stuff, delivered in White’s typically spare, undramatic Manual of Style prose.  I dare say Jonah accepted it with greater equanimity than I did when I read it aloud to him recently; I would guess it had been at least 25 years since I’d read it to myself.  I think my mother probably read it to me the first time I heard it, but I don’t remember if I cried when Charlotte died. I wouldn’t be surprised.  I was a very soft-hearted child and I cried easily, a source of consternation in my early school days, something that turned on its head later, when at its extent I went a good few years without shedding a single tear in sadness.  Fatherhood has returned me to some of my teary nature, and I struggled through that passage as I read it aloud, my voice grown rough, the words swimming a little on the page.

For a while Jonah had many questions about death, which have quieted for the moment.  It is a balancing act.  I couldn’t see my way to tell him anything but the bottom truth: every living thing dies.  No exceptions.  When he asks if I will die, if he will die, I equivocate, and he sees that.  Periods of time are too abstract for him; my assurances (themselves lies, at least potentially) that I and his mother will not die for a very long time, that he will not die for an even longer time, do not carry the certainty of the absolute of death.  Eternity, my own complicated relationship with the Christian eschaton, more abstract and stranger still, though I have made hesitant forays into it with him.  Tough stuff.  I admire E. B. White, for not shirking the truth.  It reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s nod to White in his extraordinary introduction to his early book of short stories, Happy to Be Here, which alerted me in my teens to pay attention to the greater depth of the author of that great trilogy of enigmatic animal dramas of my childhood.

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It takes a surprisingly long time, in my rereading of Bill Holm’s The Music of Failure, to come upon my goal of the mention of a specific classical composition.  What should come as no surprise, but catches me unsuspecting anyway, is the almost immediate presence of death in the essays.  No, it shouldn’t be surprising, from an author who published a book of poetry called The Dead Get By with Everything.

We humans here have a horror of death in houses, and would not dream of going to a Lutheran church where grandmother is buried under the pew to keep you warm and alert during slow passages in the sermon when the building fund comes up.  We hide hospitals and graveyards, sanitize the interiors of churches with cheerful posters announcing that we are God’s people and he loves us lots. These posters do not mention some of the surprises God has in store for us.  I think we want a world without the dead in it, so that it can be more easily bought, sold, and used up. Our casual attitude towards disappearing topsoil is difficult to reconcile with what we profess to believe. If we imagine the corpses of a thousand people we loved making a skin on that ground, we would tend it better.

The Music of Failure, “The Grand Tour,” part II.

I suppose I wasn’t surprised so much as struck.  Because, of course, now he is on the other side of all of that talk.  Dead, forever more gone from this world, getting by with everything, and still refusing to keep quiet about it.  As, I realize while I read these passages again, he damn well always knew he would be, by and by.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com May 29, 2009 at 6:17 PM