I was upset to read that Jenny Diski has cancer. She is, to be honest, the real reason I subscribe to The London Review of Books; that and leaving them lying everywhere around the house to impress people.
She so exposes herself, bare, always letting truth get in the way of denial. I came to Diski late. 'Skating To Antartcica' was on our reading list before we went there on a trip organised by Aurora Expeditions (which leads me onto my next post - breath-holding not recommended), a trip arguably the most memorable ever in that it is an experience of such wonder and beauty that it isn't easy to convey a skerrick of what it is like, though Jenny Diski does well in what it meant to her.
Back to Diski. She is taking in water, if not yet listing. I can't say I'm pleased she has decided, or had it decided for her by her within-ness, to write it all down. But I am. And I can't really confess to liking reading about people dying. But I do. David Reiff's (Susan Sontag's son) Swimming in a Sea of Death, about his mother's death, for instance.
Kubler Ross started me off I suspect.
2 comments:
Writing in such circumstances is a way of warding off fading into oblivion, I often think. Also a way to make this all-too-deplorably-common experience individual, rather than generic. (In that regard, I found this statement of hers particularly striking, “I was mortified at the thought that before I’d properly started out on the cancer road, I’d committed my first platitude. I was already a predictable cancer patient.”) I wasn't sure what to think about Reiff's book, but did understand how much he must have needed to write it. He surely didn't wish for her what she wished for herself, and that must have been very difficult to bear.
On other fronts, I loved your comment, "I managed a few on-the-way-to Antarctica posts, but then collapsed under the arrogant weight of wanting to be good too. But without writing a word, there are some impossibly brilliant photographs (impossible to be anything else) and I must get onto it. I will." Oh, my, can I relate to that. I'm trying to write about Ainola and feel sometimes it's like Sibelius working at his Eighth Symphony. (Though without ANY hope of good results. Still, I have some lovely photographs, and something must be done.) I'll look forward to your photographs and whatever words you bring to bear on them, which I tend to suspect will be good.
What surprised me about Sontag, although thinking about it it shouldn't really have - live a long life - was how attached to the world she was and apparently unprepared to let it go.
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