Claro que del largo artículo de Peter Schjeldahl sobre el arte de morir me llamaron más aspectos. Aquí comparto tres puntos que quizá para mí no son demasiado llegadores pero son compartibles.
Un fragmento que no incluyo es su interacción con Susan Sontag.
• Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.
• Twice I’ve been to Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead, when the departed members of families have their favorite food, drinks, and perhaps cigarettes set out for them at meals. It’s understood that, at the table, the dead consume the immaterial goodness of these things. The families visit them overnight in graveyards. I was deeply moved by the implication that death may be a major life event, such as birth, confirmation, and marriage, but that it doesn’t mean you’re gone. We spare the dead a bit of the life in us. I shuddered suddenly during my second walk among placid, candlelit groups. It hit me that the dead were reciprocating: a bit of the death in them for us. Never fully dead, never fully alive.
• I remember, in rehab, on the Upper East Side in 1992, an alum of the place, a tough guy from Queens, addressing the nightly A.A. meeting. He told us of once showing up at some clinic, drunk and filthy and soiled with his own diarrhea, and throwing a fit because the doctor was ten minutes late. “If you’re a real alcoholic,” the guy said to us, “no matter how low you go, you will have an attitude.” He added, “If you’re a real alcoholic, you will never feel quite right. Whatever you want will be a little bit out of reach. Can’t handle that? Get the fuck out of here and get drunk.” I went up to him afterward, in tears, to thank him. He said, “You heard me?” I said yes. “Good,” he said, turning and walking away as if from some crap on a sidewalk. Saved my life.
Peter Schjeldahl ha sido un elemento del New Yorker desde 1998 y es el crítico de arte de la revista.
Link: The Art of Dying