The Art of Dying     To the Suicides of '50 and '54     (Cesare Pavese, Herbert Leeds) Even to say something went wrong is wrong: you merely took control of your own death; and what could be more futile than trying to pin it down on some one thing, some reason, a woman lost, some form of failure, imagination dead. You had had enough of the same and somehow that absence grew large enough to swallow you. Not the woman with the hoarse voice. Not the mayhem and slaughter on the bridge at Remagen Not the hills leveled. Not the rows of hazel cut down. The rye fields gone. 1972. The Seine. A bleached summer afternoon. Paul Celan jumped in and Jean Vigo did not do himself in exactly but hurried his tubercilli by shooting L’Atalante on a barge in the hard November rain. It must be an absence at the heart, a hole that grows until it swallows you up until you are no more: it’s then, when you’re already done in, that you do yourself in: every breakdown is a catastrophe that has already occurred— a burst of anger is never sudden, the thing most feared in secret always happens. From Realm of Unknowing, first published in Raritan