Headline April 26th, 2012 / The Cold Magnificence of Creation

Part 5


The Cold Magnificence
of 
Creation

Respectful dedication all Research Scientists

Thibaud De Maintenant / Global Head of Deutsche Bank

Norman Mailer, the unquenchable voice, of the page and on, would delight in a joke about a man spending a lot of time complaining to God. The man whines:'' look you are just not treating me fairly, God. Why not? What is it with you? " "And the thunder comes down from heaven," Mailer would say. "And God says 'Because you bug me, that's why.' " 

So Robin Romm's "The Mercy Papers" does reach a place of relative peace. And she does begin to truly grasp the interconnectedness of being: "I believe that we live a million lives in our one life and that they bleed together, marble and muddy and melt." 

Great writing in dealing with intractable matters. But you all find yourself moved more by the sterling sense of isolation and desolation permeating David Reiff's ''Swimming in a Sea of Death.'' In the heart rendering scenes that she weaves in dealing with intractable matters. Reading this book, you picture a hand not quite able to hang up the phone, the nagging sense that something else needs to be said, but what, and to whom? Her mother Susan Sontag who had survived breast cancer in 40s, is now told she has myelodysplastic syndrome. 

And though stricken deadly, she refuses to go through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief, instead she raises and intensifies her deflector shields and goes into a 'positive denial'. But death allows no exemptions'. 

And then we have The Smoking Diaries titled Coda, ends with Simon Gray receiving the news that his tumour has rescinded. But it is not the cigs that get him but a ruptured aneurysm. In one wrenching passage he talks with another cancer patient, ''so here we are in sheer helplessness and humiliation of it all!'' But nothing can,....ever, dislodge the lonesomeness. 

And Elaine May, director "The Heartbreak kid" summoned her inimitable wit in answering the question about death? ''I've given that question a lot of thought. There is no way I would like to die.'' 

God bless and Goodnight!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless

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