Eluding Death the Business of Life

Philip Roth’s short book, Everyman, is about the darker side of old age.

The central character endures a retirement in which he is becoming weaker through ill health, despondency and loneliness (even though he had been the life of the party). Now, there isn’t a year that goes when he isn’t hospitalized.

The author writes that “eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.” (p71)

A review of this book can be found at this link:

Philip Roth, Everyman (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).

Image: “and bodily decay his entire story.”

Martin Luther King Jnr.: ‘Everybody Can Be Great’

Today, the 4th April, is the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jnr. On that morning in 1968 Dr King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

His funeral services were held on 9 April in Atlanta at the Ebenezer Baptist church and on the campus of Morehouse College with the President of the United States proclaiming a day of mourning.

The area where King was entombed is located on Freedom Plaza at the Martin Luther King Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change. On his grave are the words, "Free at last."

The door of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis has the inscription, "Martin Luther King Jnr., 1929-1968 followed with Ralph Abernathy's funeral text from Genesis, "Here Comes the Dreamer let us Kill Him."

Today we remember Martin Luther King Jnr., the dreamer. We also recognise that while people can kill the dreamer they cannot kill God's dream.

While Martin Luther King Jnr. has been revered down through these years it is good to remember that genuine service is not the possession of the few but the privilege of us all.

King once said these words:

Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve.
You don't have to have a college degree to serve.
You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.
You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve.
You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve.
You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.
You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

Geoff Pound

Image: King and friends on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a few moments before he was shot.

'This will happen to you,' says Joan Didion

Charles McNulty reviews the adaptation of Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magic Thinking, into a stage play.

It does not seem to be the usual Broadway fare as the retelling of Didion’s grief in the year following the death of her husband has a naked candor:

McNulty records the scene and some of the words from the Didion reenactment by Vanessa Redgrave:

Didion, Hare [producer] and Redgrave have approached their task with a stark Beckettian determination. Stillness rules a set marked by a solitary wooden deck chair and hanging canvases of abstract patterns in muted colors that change with falling dropcloths. Nothing extraneous is allowed to distract from the ensuing trance-like contemplation.

A vision of white and gray, with her hair pulled back to reveal a pair of blue eyes that stare out with an oceanic intensity, Redgrave resembles a mythological figure who has traveled to a place of total darkness and filed a report for our collective enlightenment.

“This happened on December 30, 2003,” she says, naming the date when Didion's husband died of a heart attack while seated in the couple's New York apartment with a second pre-dinner drink. "That may seem a while ago, but it won't when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That's what I'm here to tell you.”

Source: For the entire review see Charles McNulty, Redgrave’s Séance of ‘Magical Thinking, LA Times March 30, 2007.

Image: Vanessa Redgrave