An Excerpt From “Brevity”

The following is from my friend Michael Jon Lundell’s masterful work, Brevity: A Meditation on Mortality -

I have a notebook filled with the last words of the memorable and the memorable words of the forgotten. Mostly made up, of course, by others not so pressingly engaged. On various pages I have inserted my own last words and those of my old playmates, lovers, friends, and otherwise, so everyone dies talking.

“Is this in the play?” – A. Lincoln

“I’m at my wit’s end.” – O. Wilde

“Who painted this?” – Michelangelo B.

“Why me?” – A. Hitler

“I just can’t believe it.” – J. Christ

“To be or not to be, what a choice.” – P. Hamlet

“Is this in the play?” – W. Shakespeare

 As a historian (but then aren’t we all?), I am fascinated with accounts of catastrophes. Watching from the horizon, I linger, telling stories.

I open my door to watch the bodies being collected by the hooded wardens, the priests swinging censers and chanting behind the piled clattering carts. In the pale sunlight I can see the sores on my hands. I will, after all, visit Dame Discord’s house and consort with her furious revelers, who tomorrow will be more labor for cart horses.

First the vertigo like an aura, then the trees thrashing madly, and looking up the street I see buildings ripple, widows burst, everywhere the din of struggling rock. Then that moment of silence, immense and precious, before the screaming begins.

From my perch on the world’s rim, I see the future unscrolling with a squeak and shudder. In all directions, armies marching between smoking volcanoes toward rising oceans.

I thought once of writing a book about the historical process, to be titled Catastrophe’s Arrow, about how we make a fable of the past. That sham allegory, that magical offering to confound catastrophe’s arrow. That would have been fun (and so often fun is the best the answer), but I understood that such a book, which proposed a restructuring of history studies within a department called Folk Fancy, was unlikely to advance my career. So I did not write the book, and my career did not advance, but I kept the notes, pornohistoria, to smile over in private.

I keep turning back, in my reading and the meditations rising from the pages, to the vast death panics, the mass dismissals of life: the trenches, the aerial bombardments, the concentration camps. The great truths of modern times. Guiltily, I put off my fascination, but it comes around again, a grinning wolf, to sit at my feet.