The Organ

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Stoicism in a time of pandemic: how Marcus Aurelius can help

Classics

 

The Meditations, by a Roman emperor who died in a plague named after him, has much to say about how to face fear, pain, anxiety and loss

Donald Robertson

Sat 25 Apr 2020 07.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 25 Apr 2020 09.36 EDT

hares

1650

 A bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Photograph: DEA/G DAagli Orti/De Agostini via Getty Images

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last famous Stoic philosopher of antiquity. During the last 14 years of his life he faced one of the worst plagues in European history. The Antonine Plague, named after him, was probably caused by a strain of the smallpox virus. It’s estimated to have killed up to 5 million people, possibly including Marcus himself.

From AD166 to around AD180, repeated outbreaks occurred throughout the known world. Roman historians describe the legions being devastated, and entire towns and villages being depopulated and going to ruin. Rome itself was particularly badly affected, carts leaving the city each day piled high with dead bodies.

In the middle of this plague, Marcus wrote a book, known as The Meditations, which records the moral and psychological advice he gave himself at this time. He frequently applies Stoic philosophy to the challenges of coping with pain, illness, anxiety and loss. It’s no stretch of the imagination to view The Meditations as a manual for developing precisely the mental resilience skills required to cope with a pandemic.

First of all, because Stoics believe that our true good resides in our own character and actions, they would frequently remind themselves to distinguish between what’s “up to us” and what isn’t. Modern Stoics tend to call this “the dichotomy of control” and many people find this distinction alone helpful in alleviating stress. What happens to me is never directly under my control, never completely up to me, but my own thoughts and actions are – at least the voluntary ones. The pandemic isn’t really under my control but the way I behave in response to it is.

Much, if not all, of our thinking is also up to us. Hence, “It’s not events that upset us but rather our opinions about them.” More specifically, our judgment that something is really bad, awful or even catastrophic, causes our distress.

This is one of the basic psychological principles of Stoicism. It’s also the basic premise of modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), the leading evidence-based form of psychotherapy. The pioneers of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck, both describe Stoicism as the philosophical inspiration for their approach. It’s not the virus that makes us afraid but rather our opinions about it. Nor is it the inconsiderate actions of others, those ignoring social distancing recommendations, that make us angry so much as our opinions about them.

Many people are struck, on reading The Meditations, by the fact that it opens with a chapter in which Marcus lists the qualities he most admires in other individuals, about 17 friends, members of his family and teachers. This is an extended example of one of the central practices of Stoicism.

Marcus likes to ask himself, “What virtue has nature given me to deal with this situation?” That naturally leads to the question: “How do other people cope with similar challenges?” Stoics reflect on character strengths such as wisdom, patience and self-discipline, which potentially make them more resilient in the face of adversity. They try to exemplify these virtues and bring them to bear on the challenges they face in daily life, during a crisis like the pandemic. They learn from how other people cope. Even historical figures or fictional characters can serve as role models.

With all of this in mind, it’s easier to understand another common slogan of Stoicism: fear does us more harm than the things of which we’re afraid. This applies to unhealthy emotions in general, which the Stoics term “passions” – from pathos, the source of our word “pathological”. It’s true, first of all, in a superficial sense. Even if you have a 99% chance, or more, of surviving the pandemic, worry and anxiety may be ruining your life and driving you crazy. In extreme cases some people may even take their own lives.

In that respect, it’s easy to see how fear can do us more harm than the things of which we’re afraid because it can impinge on our physical health and quality of life. However, this saying also has a deeper meaning for Stoics. The virus can only harm your body – the worst it can do is kill you. However, fear penetrates into the moral core of our being. It can destroy your humanity if you let it. For the Stoics that’s a fate worse than death.

 

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 A perfectly preserved head of Marcus Aurelius unearthed by Jordanian French archeologists in the ancient Nabatean city of Petra, Jordan, in 2015. Photograph: Laurent Borel/AFP/Getty Images

Finally, during a pandemic, you may have to confront the risk, the possibility, of your own death. Since the day you were born, that’s always been on the cards. Most of us find it easier to bury our heads in the sand. Avoidance is the No1 most popular coping strategy in the world. We live in denial of the self-evident fact that we all die eventually. The Stoics believed that when we’re confronted with our own mortality, and grasp its implications, that can change our perspective on life quite dramatically. Any one of us could die at any moment. Life doesn’t go on forever.

We’re told this was what Marcus was thinking about on his deathbed. According to one historian, his circle of friends were distraught. Marcus calmly asked why they were weeping for him when, in fact, they should accept both sickness and death as inevitable, part of nature and the common lot of mankind. He returns to this theme many times throughout The Meditations.

“All that comes to pass”, he tells himself, even illness and death, should be as “familiar as the rose in spring and the fruit in autumn”. Marcus Aurelius, through decades of training in Stoicism, in other words, had taught himself to face death with the steady calm of someone who has done so countless times already in the past.

• Donald Robertson is cognitive behavioural therapist and the author of several books on philosophy and psychotherapy, including Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/25/stoicism-in-a-time-of-pandemic-coronavirus-marcus-aurelius-the-meditations

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[AdamSmith]

This properly belongs in the Politics thread...  

[AdamSmith]

For a little upturn in mood...

 

[AdamSmith]

[Sorry. Vids from elsewhere are not reposting here correctly.]

 

[AdamSmith]

WRAL WEATHERCENTER BLOG

 

50 years ago today, Apollo 13 had a problem

Tags: 

• Morehead Planetarium, 
• NASA, 
• Apollo 11

Posted April 13, 2020 11:15 a.m. EDT
Updated April 13, 2020 2:39 p.m. EDT

113

By Tony Rice, NASA Ambassador

The first The first 55 hours and 55 minutes of the Apollo 13 mission went smoothly until, shortly after the one and only TV transmission of their journey, about 3/4 of the way to the Moon, Apollo 13 had a problem.

A liquid oxygen tank exploded, pushing the flight off course, robbing the capsule of breathable oxygen and fuel for power generation.

An accident investigation board later found that upgrades to the tank, designed by American Rockwell, had overlooked thermostatic switches while being made to work with higher voltage test equipment at the Kennedy Space Center. These switches were likely welded shut during preflight tests allowing temperatures in the tank to rise to over 12 times the original design's limits.

Systems, including guidance, were shut down to conserve power. Over the next 6 hours, the astronauts with assistance from flight controllers on the ground, manually calculated a free return trajectory to get them back home.

The crew used the onboard sextant, which required no power, to determine their position looking for two stars from a list of 37 known to the guidance computer. This a common task used many times during all Apollo missions to provide updates to the guidance, but was particularly complex for Apollo 13.

Applying lessons learned at Morehead Planetarium

Planetarium director Tony Jenzano and the staff at Morehead had developed simulations for that enabled them to locate those 37 stars plus the Moon, Earth and Sun as Mercury, Gemini and Apollo crews would see them from their spacecraft.

Jenzano would later day “Carolina is the only university in the country, in fact the world, that can claim all the astronauts as alumni.”

The Apollo 13 crew of Jack Swigert, Fred Haise, and Jim Lovell collectively spent two and a half weeks at Morehead learning these celestial navigation skills.

I spoke with Jim Lovell when he visited the the planetarium to kick off the 2017 North Carolina Science Festival. He remembered well his days in Chapel Hill and the training there, recalling apparatus created by Jenzano and his staff.

Jim Lovell: Apollo 13 speaks to importance of NASA teamwork

Getting home

Back in the Apollo 13 Command Module Odyssey, Commander Jim Lovell recalled his experience correcting Apollo 8's course using the sextant.  But there was another problem, a trail of debris was following the spacecaft, creating "false stars".  They turned to the one star they could reliably see, the Sun.

Five hours after the explosion, their position well known and new course had been calculated.. After about 30 minutes of entering commands into the guidance computer and double checking everything, the engine intended to gently lower the still attached lunar module onto the Moon's surface, was burned for 34 seconds to send the crew around the Moon and on their way back to Earth.

You can experience Apollo 13 in Ron Howard’s 1995 film starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris. Look for Lovell's uncredited cameo appearance near the end of the film as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima. Lovell also recalls teaching Tom Hanks to navigate by the stars while serving as advisor on the film

You can also follow the mission in real time at an interactive website that includes video from mission control and the capsule as well as all 48 mission control audio channels.

Lovell’s words during his return to Morehead three years ago are especially true today: “No matter how bad things are, have a positive attitude.”

https://www.wral.com/50-years-ago-today-apollo-13-had-a-problem/19053191/

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

One of my favorite writers.

A Critic at Large

May 24, 2004 Issue

Riches of Embarrassment

The comic novelist Peter De Vries was an American original.

By Jeffrey Frank

May 17, 2004

 

 

Peter De Vries once observed that “comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.” Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy. The determination and artistry with which he approached these subjects made him hard to categorize, which may be why, little more than a decade after his death, he is pretty much forgotten—a sad note on which to begin.

De Vries was certainly a very funny man, consistently and inventively; a number of his coinages long ago found their uncredited way into the language, among them “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” and “Deep down, he’s shallow.” A half century ago, his first acknowledged novel, “The Tunnel of Love,” which became a Broadway play and a movie with Doris Day and Gig Young, made him moderately famous. On the basis of that and his next novel, a suburban comedy called “Comfort Me with Apples,” Kingsley Amis, in the Times, called De Vries “the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” Soon enough, reviewers were comparing him to Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Ring Lardner, and Max Beerbohm—immensely gratifying judgments and helpful publisher’s blurbs, but somehow less than apt. Looking back at De Vries’s work (during nearly fifty years, he wrote some two dozen novels, along with parodies, poetry, short stories, and essays), one can see more clearly that his writing was informed as much by sorrow as by wit, and by the idea, as he put it, that “the rarer human sensibility becomes, the closer it gets to the logic of insanity.” And sometimes sorrow won out.

 

On the dust jacket of “Comfort Me with Apples” (1956) is a photograph of a smiling man with dark hair who appears to be in his mid-forties (De Vries was born in 1910), his arms crossed in a fashionable authorial pose. He’s wearing a dark tie and a checked tweed jacket, with a handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. At the lower left is a blond girl, his daughter Emily, who was then about six, looking pleased with herself, as if she had just sneaked into the picture. It’s the only dust-jacket photograph of the author in the company of someone else, and what is unsettling about this familial portrait is our knowledge that four years later Emily would be dead, of leukemia.

 

If it is difficult to think about Peter De Vries without his puns and wisecracks, it is impossible to do so apart from this central event, or from “The Blood of the Lamb” (1961), his sixth novel, which deals with the death of a child; the descriptions of her sickness and dying are as unbearable as anything in modern literature. There were still bursts of laughter, although darker than in any other De Vries book. (At one point, the narrator’s father rants, “Black light! Antimatter! It’s all around us. We’re all headed for it!” and adds, “The only thing that keeps me from killing myself is the will to live.”) But after that his fiction had another kind of mirthfulness. He remained a master of loopy plots and malapropisms—“I’ve been married seventeen years and never had an organism,” one character tells an advice columnist—and an observer of spoiled middle-class white America, a place populated by comfortable yet perpetually ill-at-ease heroes. But the word “humorist” no longer seemed exactly right.

I’ve recently immersed myself in De Vries’s books, and the temptation is to stop here for a bit and start repeating De Vriesisms, the written equivalent of nudging a companion as prelude to reading something aloud: “ ‘Ah, Tanglewood,’ I said, hunched over my plate. ‘The soft summer nights, the lovers strolling, the Brahms bursting in air.’ ” Or “ ‘So you’re the new personnel manager,’ I said, ogling her. ‘I trust you have a little opening for me.’ ” Then, there are the epigrams, such as “How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?” or “What I hate about writing is the paperwork.”

 

In the early books, one was carried along by De Vries’s unstoppable gags, his gift for spotting cant, fatuousness, and snobbery, and his grandly silly dialogue. When a woman at a party refers to a “real sou’wester,” the narrator replies, “I’m from the Mi’est. . . . I went to Nor’estern.” And, later, “Have you ever been to We’inster A’ey?” His best sentences were dazzling, and his ear for bad prose was infallible. In “The Tents of Wickedness” (1959), his narrator falls into parodic reveries; in a Dreiser mood, for instance, he thinks, “Now it swept over him in a rushing billow of raw emotion that caused him to thrash on his seat what he wanted to do”; and, “He had not possessed her in the orthodoxly carnal sense, only lent his flesh objectively to her special purpose.” Because many of the writers parodied—John P. Marquand, for instance—are no longer much read, some of this today may seem a little puzzling. But it is hard to regard William Faulkner in quite the same way after you read about “locking her forever in that cloistral dream from which that sex who alone must waken her must by the same token be the one most powerless to deliver her.”

If humor is perishable—boy, is it perishable!—much of what De Vries wrote has a feeling of permanence; his antennae for absurdity and his verbal intelligence (like Nabokov, De Vries was reared listening to another language, the Dutch that his parents spoke) have outlasted the jokes. In many of his novels, he went over the territory explored by, among others, John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates—marriage and sex, work and family, and all the agonies and pleasures of suburban life in the twentieth century. He wrote about admen and furniture movers, writers, clergymen, and academics. De Vries’s men and women were not always perfectly drawn, but they were just as sad and baffled as, say, Cheever’s Neddy and Lucinda Merrill or Yates’s Frank and April Wheeler; the difference was that De Vries almost always made you laugh.

In 1964, in an interview for a series called “Counterpoint,” De Vries made this autobiographical declaration:

**{: .break one} ** I was born in Chicago in 1910 into a Dutch immigrant community which still preserved its old-world ways. My origins would have been little different had my parents never come to America at all, but remained in Holland. I still feel somewhat like a foreigner, and not only for ethnic reasons. Our insularity was two-fold, being a matter of religion as well as nationality. In addition to being immigrants, and not able to mix well with the Chicago Americans around us, we were Dutch Reformed Calvinists who weren’t supposed to mix—who, in fact, had considerable trouble mixing with one another. We were the elect, and the elect are barred from everything, you know, except heaven. **

Peter’s father hauled ice in the summer and coal in the winter and became a furniture mover; he eventually opened a warehouse business. He wanted his son to join the clergy, and sent him to Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, where he studied English and played basketball. After graduation, Peter returned to Chicago and sold candy on a vending-machine route. He worked for a small newspaper and acted on the radio, sometimes playing gangster parts and, at least once, a wounded gorilla. He also found part-time work, at twenty-five dollars a week, with the magazine Poetry—first as an associate editor, then as co-editor with the poet George Dillon. During the De Vries-Dillon era, the magazine published early work by, among others, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Robert Duncan, and Karl Shapiro. (Dillon and De Vries were also among the first American editors to print poems by Dylan Thomas.) Between 1940 and 1944, De Vries also wrote three novels—“But Who Wakes the Bugler?” (illustrated by Charles Addams), “The Handsome Heart,” and “Angels Can’t Do Better,” all of which quickly went out of print and which he later refused to list with his other books, because he decided they were “not good enough.” In the fall of 1943, he married Katinka Loeser, a contributor to Poetry. Their courtship, according to his son Jon De Vries, probably formed the basis for the early chapters of his 1974 novel, “The Glory of the Hummingbird” (the title from the Eliot poem “Marina”), in which a young man embarrassed by his family commits a series of social blunders while courting a woman from Chicago’s Gold Coast.

 

 

While De Vries was at Poetry, he wrote an admiring essay, “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock,” in which he seems to have been anticipating his future self. (In his novels, De Vries often referred to Eliot’s poetry, and his characters, when the mood struck, sometimes quoted it in a Chicago dialect.) “It is hard to think of anyone who more closely resembles the Prufrock of Eliot than the middle-aged man on the flying trapeze,” he wrote. “There is, for instance, the same dominating sense of Predicament. The same painful and fastidious self-inventory; the same detached anxiety; the same immersion in weary minutiae, the same self-disparagement, the same wariness of the evening’s company.”

Thurber, fifteen years older than De Vries, was flattered; he became a friend and promoter, and gave some of De Vries’s shorter pieces to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker. In June of 1944, Thurber wrote to De Vries, saying, “I had handed the whole sheaf of your stuff to Ross who had said, sighing, ‘I’ll read it, but it won’t be any good.’ Half hour later he called me in and said, ‘Jesus Christ. It is good!’ ” A job offer followed, and, in the late summer of 1944, Peter and Katinka moved to Greenwich Village.

The meeting with Ross, at the Algonquin, reads like an early De Vries story, and even if it’s not true, it has been repeated so often that one wants it to be. Ross, who thought that the name was French and pronounced it “DeVree,” asked De Vries if he could do the Race Track department, and De Vries replied, “No, but I can imitate a wounded gorilla.” To which Ross allegedly said, “Well, don’t imitate it around the office. The place is a zoo the way it is.”

 

The De Vrieses eventually settled in Westport, Connecticut; among their friends and neighbors were J. D. Salinger, Robert Penn Warren, and John Hersey. De Vries became an occasional contributor of New Yorker “casuals” (his first signed piece appeared in May of 1946), and for more than thirty years he worked part time as a cartoon doctor, improving captions and finding gags for artists—a practice that the magazine stopped some time ago. A collection of his short pieces, “No But I Saw the Movie,” came out in 1952, and two years later “The Tunnel of Love,” whose harebrained plot—of imagined and real adultery and the misfortunes of a gag writer who wants to be a full-fledged cartoonist—is narrated by someone who works at a magazine much like The New Yorker.

It was obvious from the start that De Vries was a student of comedy. Now and then, one of his characters, speaking for the author, would pronounce on the subject: “For with what does humor deal save with that which isn’t funny. Or at least isn’t funny at the time: broken bones, broken machinery, bad food, hangovers. Husbands. Wives. Brats.” A little later, he adds, “Tragedy and comedy have a common root, whose name at last I think I know. Desperation.”

Desperation—and the abject humiliation that often accompanies it—is perhaps the central ingredient in De Vries’s best books, beginning with “The Mackerel Plaza” (1958). His hero, the Reverend Andrew Mackerel, of the People’s Liberal Church, is a man of wavering faith who once preached, “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.” Mackerel is a widower (his wife died, possibly by foul play, in a boating accident), and he’s trying to publish a book with the title “Maturity Comes of Age.” As time goes by, he seems less to be in a state of mourning than in one of constant sexual longing. At one point, gazing upon a woman with whom he’s acquainted, he thinks:

**{: .break one} ** She was about twenty-five, and naked except for a green skirt and sweater, heavy brown tweed coat, shoes, stockings, and so forth, a scarf knotted at her throat and a brown beret. I regarded her breasts with melancholy, then my eyes began their ordained journey downward. **

“The Mackerel Plaza” was described by one reviewer as having “hasty characterizations and a plot that wouldn’t tax the imagination of a Cub Scout Den” (the reviewer nevertheless liked the book); and it certainly depended on the conventions of the time. When Mackerel is spotted at a seedy hotel, his reputation is nearly ruined by gossips. But it is a real novel, and Mackerel is a real character, for whom things get steadily worse, as they tend to do for the protagonists of De Vries’s fiction: Knopf rejects Mackerel’s book; his prospective mother-in-law believes that he’s a scoundrel; and he reaches a pinnacle of De Vriesian embarrassment when he’s arrested for fighting with a street preacher. There’s even a loss of faith, although Mackerel says, “It’s not such a tragedy. Like losing a wooden leg in an accident.”

“The Mackerel Plaza” was followed, the next year, by the parody-rich “Tents of Wickedness” and “Through the Fields of Clover,” a disjointed and dispirited generational saga, which was dedicated “To Emily with love.” By then, his daughter was mortally ill, and, in the summer of 1959, De Vries wrote to Salinger, “One trip through a children’s ward and if your faith isn’t shaken, you’re not the type who deserves any faith.” In what he calls a “half alcoholic screed,” he went on:

**{: .break one} ** I too have moments of faith, or assurance, or beauty—or maybe just lapses in nihilism. In the morning I’m capable of hearing the music of the spheres—it’s when the stars come out that I first hear the howling of eternal nothingness. **

When “The Blood of the Lamb,” De Vries’s most autobiographical novel, was published, the year after Emily’s death, it came as a shock to his readers, accustomed by now to a few hours of amusement. Like De Vries, the narrator of “The Blood of the Lamb” was raised in Chicago in a strict religious family. There was more overlap with the author’s life: a stay at a sanatorium for tubercular patients, a father who went a little crazy, a sibling who died young. It was also a novel filled with the forebodings of its narrator, Don Wanderhope, about an ailing lover, about his Chicago family, and, finally, about his daughter:

 

**{: .break one} ** What, I thought to myself as I gazed at [her], if anything should happen to that creature? Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle. **

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[AdamSmith]

...

The novel spills over with angry admonitions. Of a doctor treating his daughter, improvising chemotherapy in its infancy, Wanderhope asks, “Do you believe in God as well as play at him?” As the end draws near, he says, “So death by leukemia is now a local instead of an express. Same run, only a few more stops. But that’s medicine, the art of prolonging disease.”

 

 

In no other novel was De Vries so personal, although, unlike his protagonist, a widower with one dying daughter, Peter and Katinka had three other children: two surviving sons—Jon and Derek—and a daughter, Jan, who died not long ago. And in no other novel did he speak so directly to his readers: “Happiness mellows us, not troubles; pleasure, perhaps, even more than happiness. The sentimental saw belongs among those canards that include also the idea that wisdom comes with age. The old have nothing to tell us; it is more commonly we who are shouting at them, in any case.”

“The Blood of the Lamb” was followed by astonishing books, astonishing in their high and low comedy and in their rich assortment of De Vries types: “Reuben, Reuben,” “Let Me Count the Ways,” “The Vale of Laughter,” “The Cat’s Pajamas,” and “Witch’s Milk.” These novels were complex and ambitious; it was as if De Vries wanted to announce a final break from the community of American humor writers like Benchley, Perelman, and his beloved Thurber, with whom he had often been grouped.

“Reuben, Reuben,” published three years after “The Blood of the Lamb,” was twice as long as any earlier De Vries novel; it had three interlocking sections, the best of these narrated by a not quite literate Connecticut chicken farmer named Frank Spofford. Spofford, who has literary ambitions and reflects that the purpose of art is “to exercise the ghost of something,” gave De Vries a voice to let loose on all sorts of things, such as the changes he didn’t like in his adopted home town, a place “filling up rapidly with ish women and sortof men”—women who make appointments for “five-ish” and their mates. The Spoffords are the natives; they refuse to sell their chickens to commuters, especially those who drive Jaguars and live in fancy Punch Bowl Hollow; they don’t bend even when one commuter’s wife pleads, “My husband gets off at Stamford.” After all, as a Spofford family member points out, “If you let them have any they’ll only cook them in red wine.” Spofford, though, becomes entranced by the social scene, by two women named Pussy, and by a Scottish poet named Gowan McGland, who is loosely based on Dylan Thomas and sounds at times a good deal like De Vries. (Swinburne’s poetry, McGland says, “always reminds me of the work of some young punk who has just read Swinburne.”)

Four more novels appeared in the space of just four years, and Derek De Vries recalls the sound of clacking typewriters in Westport, a “stereo effect,” as his father and mother wrote at opposite ends of the house. Katinka Loeser’s short stories were admired and published in several collections; her fictional account of Emily’s death, “Whose Little Girl Are You?,” appeared in The New Yorker at about the time of “The Blood of the Lamb.”

De Vries would sometimes revisit favored phrases. Gowan McGland, mulling the meaning of life, mutters, “Nobody will ever figure it out. The combination is locked up inside the safe,” and Stanley Waltz, in “Let Me Count the Ways” (1965), perfects the line: “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.” His central characters were becoming ever more hapless—Joe Sandwich, in “The Vale of Laughter” (1967), is a stockbroker with a reputation for recommending what “are known in the trade as laughing stocks”—and in 1968 he told an interviewer, “Why do we have to choose between cursing the gloom and lighting a candle? Why not a little of both?” That was the year he published “The Cat’s Pajamas” and “Witch’s Milk,” his shortest books, bound together. Their sales disappointed Little, Brown, his publisher, which blamed their brevity, and some critics were mystified (“What do we say?” Hugh Kenner, in a somewhat mean-spirited review in the Times, asked). If comic, why so bleak? And, if bleak, why all the jokes? These novels were probably his masterpieces.

The hero of “The Cat’s Pajamas,” a jaded English professor, is introduced in characteristic De Vries fashion:

 

**{: .break one} ** Tattersall’s most embarrassing moment was one for which any newspaper running such a feature would probably have paid the standard fee, but which he himself would gladly have given his life’s savings to have been spared. It was the autumn Homecoming at his college, Chichester. He was attending an afternoon musicale, one of the campus events arranged for the weekend, when he became annoyed by a woman whispering behind him. He turned and glared over his shoulder at her—to find himself looking straight into the eye of an old flame. **

For Hank Tattersall, the sensation was “like falling through ice into boiling water,” and it gets no better. His old flame’s husband is an advertising man, who tempts Tattersall to leap from academe to Madison Avenue. Tattersall’s inspiration is the “commercial of the Absurd,” inspired by Beckett and Ionesco: “Are you tired of detergents that don’t get your wash really white? Light up a Kent.” Eventually, Tattersall, well along the road to self-destruction, finds himself composing an endless commercial that asks, “Have you, along with the late Isak Dinesen, come to see man as an exquisite instrument for converting vintage claret into urine?” Toward the unnerving finale (by now the ruined Tattersall is living with an idiot child and an alcoholic dog), he briefly encounters a social worker named Tillie Shilepsky, through whom De Vries connects “The Cat’s Pajamas” to “Witch’s Milk.”

In “Witch’s Milk” (a movie version, “Pete ’n’ Tillie,” starred Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau), De Vries revisited almost every recurring nightmare of his earlier fiction, including the death of a child. Pete Seltzer, a skilled doubletalker who calls himself “a sonofabitch manqué,” is a charming guy, but one mostly roots for Tillie, who has the misfortune of falling for him. Pete, like his creator (De Vries was called Pete by friends), is absorbed by language and its possibilities, slipping at times into Jabberwockian meditations:

**{: .break one} ** They would imagine themselves to be the first family, commissioned by the Almighty the great task of nomenclature. There were no names for anything yet, in Paradise. What would they call those things with spreading boughs? The creatures twittering among them? The beasts whose skins they wore and whose haunches they gnawed as they squatted around the first of human fires, in the semantic dawn? Their yard became full of quormels and sleeths and whappinstances, all flumping through the sweem, or manganating in the queeglestocks. **

“Witch’s Milk” covered an astounding range of character and emotion in just a hundred and fifteen pages—at which point Tillie is grateful to Pete for seeing her through “the disillusionments of marriage”—and in it De Vries may have reached the perfect balance of comedy and despair.

After that, De Vries’s best work was behind him, although there were terrific sections in many of the dozen novels that followed—especially the first half of “The Glory of the Hummingbird.” (The book was disastrously padded, at the urging of his editor at Little, Brown, who told De Vries, “Whoever heard of a novel 114 pages long? Whaddya trying to do, write ‘Love Story’? . . . Is there any chance of lengthening this without destroying it?”) But more often, by the late seventies, De Vries was repeating himself, and seemed less familiar with his own characters and with the world beyond Westport, which itself was no longer the same. His first-person narrators remained in many ways the children of Midwestern Calvinists, sometimes barely able to finish an adulterous liaison or even to stick with a divorce. At the same time, there was an increasing, sometimes obsessive interest in sex, though he was usually funny about it: in “Madder Music,” after many episodes of athletic adultery, his unfaithful narrator confesses, “She’s a great lay, but she needs an editor.”

 

 

To the end, De Vries kept on being incorrect, amusing, and quotable. There are probably writers who ought to count themselves lucky that he didn’t do literary criticism—not when he could write a mock reader’s report saying, “Every sentence [is] like a mother cat nursing a litter of cozily squirming subordinate clauses.” But the jokes did not seem so spontaneous, and it didn’t help his reputation that these later novels were often overpraised, which may have had the unintended effect of persuading new readers not to bother and encouraging older ones to wonder why they loved his work in the first place.

De Vries never had much of a public face and probably subscribed to the observation he’d made in “The Mackerel Plaza”: “One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.” Before he began to be recognized by the residents of Westport, he would sometimes wander about and stand in front of storefronts, a blank look on his face. He was eavesdropping, according to his son Jon, picking up conversations for his fiction. He was markedly shy; he hated speaking in public and wouldn’t appear on television, although he was invited by Johnny Carson. “He told me, ‘Do you want me to come home in a bag?’ ” Jon recalled.

 

In the early sixties, a journalist asked De Vries for help in arranging an interview with Salinger, who by then had moved to New Hampshire and was determined to avoid all such encounters. De Vries refused and wrote back, saying, “But why do I limit my feeling to solicitude for Salinger’s privacy? After other sorties than your own in recent weeks, by way of my telephone and mailbox, my mood has shifted rather to a concern for my own.” He wanted the correspondent to understand the “lust for privacy of some people, and the horror of interrogation.” And he recalled a line of Kafka’s that Salinger had once quoted, about what “a writer himself does when encouraged to flap away: ‘He begins to talk a stench.’ ” To a question about the “wellsprings of humor,” De Vries went on, a little impatiently:

**{: .break one} ** I cannot honestly recall or retrace the conception or development of a single comedic idea I ever had or developed. They vanish from memory after they are written out. Don’t ask a cow to analyze milk. One sits in a corner and secretes the stuff. One— But you see how right Kafka is? You have lured me into using the word “comedic,” which makes me sick. **

De Vries apparently always had a lingering sense of dread. His daughter Jan once gave him a set of oils, and he painted a tiny man surrounded by enormous dark clouds. At The New Yorker, where he continued to show up a couple of days a week until the early eighties, he is recalled as a tall, quiet, witty man, who usually ate lunch by himself—often at the Blue Ribbon on Forty-fourth Street, close to the magazine’s former offices. Jon remembers going to clean out his father’s office at about that time and finding what he called “the uniform”—a tan London Fog raincoat—hanging by the door. “It was there when I got there,” his father told him.

His last novel, “Peckham’s Marbles,” came out in 1986, and after that he stopped publishing altogether. It was as if he knew he was saying goodbye to his readers in that novel’s Gatsby-like concluding lines: “For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore.” Katinka Loeser died in 1991, and a Westport friend, Max Wilk, recalls that De Vries became something of a recluse in the two years before his death, on September 28, 1993. All his books are out of print—a gloomy fact of modern literary life.

“Nonsense is such a difficult art!” De Vries once wrote, and to contemporary readers he is in many ways a mystifying figure, perhaps because he used laughter to disguise so much while letting so much poke through—especially his feelings of desolation and his sense of foreboding. In a letter to Thurber after Emily’s death, he wrote:

**{: .break one} ** Your words are of the kind that remind us that words are not necessary, that we are all side by side through all these things without it having to be said. We needn’t look far for the cue to courage. When Emily no longer had any spine left she supported herself on her sternum. We can do no less. We all have to climb out of the pit of desolation, or what is more likely, manage to live in it, planting our flowers among the ashes and squirting them with our gaiety. **

“The Blood of the Lamb” was dedicated to his three surviving children—“Jan, Jonny and Derek.” After that, the dedication page in his novels was left blank. ♦

 

 

 

Published in the print edition of the May 24, 2004, issue.

Jeffrey Frank, a senior editor at The New Yorker from 1995 to 2009, is a regular contributor to newyorker.com.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/24/riches-of-embarassment

[AdamSmith]

Why some are ditching the vault and coffin for natural burials and at-home funerals

https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-personalized-natural-burials-0514-story.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=exchange&tblci=GiAhPl1qLPg81u38gTdJwi1FwMu9OhMqIgpWMXjnhZ2K0CCP3z8

[Buddy2]

My brother Rick has written books that have done quite well, including on Amazon.

But he hasn't written about his Framingham, Massachusetts classmate, Christa McCaliffe.

(Challenger mission fatality)

Edited May 4, 2020 by Buddy2

[Guest OhPlease]

God only knowsIf the world required That which @TotallyOz requires simply to sign into this website, safe sex protections like condoms and PREP, the above mentioned  precautions would release the world of all safe sex precautions known to man. 

I mean really after all these years you still have to login from the main site? People are dying people are frightened and there’s about to be chaos in the streets with Donald Trump in command of our country and the only thing that I can offer right now is this:

this is called survival in the midst of a pandemic you’ll either survive it or you’ll succumb to it. 
 

 

Edited May 5, 2020 by OhPlease

[Guest OhPlease]

So this is March 27, 2020. Don’t anyone love you to believe anything different than Donald Trump is lying to you all to see if his presidency.

 

[Guest OhPlease]

The most hurtful and painful reality of tonight is learning that Adam Smith has blocked not only my account From messaging him but he’s also blocked my personal phone Number from calling Him

Perhaps it’s for the best.....

[AdamSmith]

1 hour ago, OhPlease said:

The most hurtful and painful reality of tonight is learning that Adam Smith has blocked not only my account From messaging him but he’s also blocked my personal phone Number from calling Him

Perhaps it’s for the best.....

...???

WTF?

Not ever any. I would not ever.

[Buddy2]

Time to read Thomas Mann again, either The Magic Mountain or   Doctor Faustus.

Or Gunter Grass.

[Buddy2]

I read "Tin Drum" in Vietnam (1968)?

[Lucky]

1 hour ago, Buddy2 said:

I read "Tin Drum" in Vietnam (1968)?

If I had been in Vietnam during the war, I sure hope I would have known what year it was. But I hear that drugs were common as the Commies knew how to weaken the soldiers.

So maybe the "fog of war" would have prevented me from knowing what day it was!

[AdamSmith]

Again... 

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[Buddy2]

1 hour ago, Lucky said:

If I had been in Vietnam during the war, I sure hope I would have known what year it was. But I hear that drugs were common as the Commies knew how to weaken the soldiers.

So maybe the "fog of war" would have prevented me from knowing what day it was!

I was a chaplains' assistant in a light infantry brigade. Part of the job was guarding the chaplain, so I waited until discharge in June 1969 to indulge.

[Buddy2]

1 hour ago, Lucky said:

If I had been in Vietnam during the war, I sure hope I would have known what year it was. But I hear that drugs were common as the Commies knew how to weaken the soldiers.

So maybe the "fog of war" would have prevented me from knowing what day it was!

One always knew how many days were left in Vietnam before finally going home.

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

TNG pre-creation of Apollo 11 landing + Miracle on the Hudson...

 

[AdamSmith]

Great weird-fiction author, second only to Poe.

Cool Air

H. P. LOVECRAFT

You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I
shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated
and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild
autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a
bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is
to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave
it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of
my peculiarity.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with
darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of
mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst
of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and
two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured some
dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York, and being
unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap
boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might
combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings and
very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice
between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West
Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had
sampled.

The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from
the late forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and
sullied splendour argued a descent from high levels of tasteful
opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with impossible
paper and ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there lingered a
depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery; but the floors were
clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water not too often cold
or turned off, so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place
to hibernate until one might really live again. The landlady, a
slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me
with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my
third floor front hall room; and my fellow lodgers were as quiet and
uncommunicative as one might desire, being mostly Spaniards a little
above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the din of street-cars in the
thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.

I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred.
One evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor, and became
suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odor of ammonia for
some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping,
the stuff apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the
street. Anxious to stop the matter at its source, I hastened to the
basement to tell the landlady, and was assured by her that the trouble
would quickly be set right.

"Doctair Munoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have
speel hees chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself--seecker and
seecker all the time--but he weel not have no othair for help. He ees
vairy queer in hees seeckness--all day he takes funneeh smelling baths,
and he cannot get excite or warm. All hees own housework he do--hees
leetle room are full of bottles and machines and he do not work as
doctair. But he was great once--my fathair in Barcelona have hear of
heem--and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber that get hurt of
sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and my boy Esteban he breeng
heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals. My God, the
sal-ammoniac that man use for to keep heem cool!"

Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I
returned to my room. The ammonia ceased to drip and as I cleaned up
what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's
heavy footsteps above me. Doctor Munoz I had never heard, save for
certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven mechanism, since his step was
soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what the strange affliction of
this man might be and whether his obstinate refusal of outside aid were
not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is, I reflected
tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person
who has come down in the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

I might never have known Doctor Munoz had it not been for the heart
attack that suddenly seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my room.
Physicians had told me of the danger of those spells, and I knew there
was no time to be lost. So, remembering what the landlady had said about
the invalid's help of the injured workman, I dragged myself upstairs and
knocked feebly at the door above mine. My knock was answered in good
English by a curious voice, some distance to the right, asking my name
and business; and these things being stated, there came an opening of
the door next to the one I had sought.

A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest
of late June, I shivered as I crossed the threshold into a large
apartment whose rich and tasteful decoration surprised me in this nest
of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now filled its diurnal role of
sofa, and the mahogany furniture, sumptuous hangings, old paintings and
mellow bookshelves all bespoke a gentleman's study rather than a
boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room above mine--the
"leetle room" of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had
mentioned--was merely the laboratory of the doctor, and that his main
living quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose convenient
alcoves and large contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers
and obtrusively utilitarian devices. Doctor Munoz, most certainly, was a
man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.

The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in
somewhat formal dress of perfect fit and cut. A high-bred face of
masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short,
iron-grey beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark
eyes and surmounted an acquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a
physiognomy otherwise dominantly Celt-Iberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair
that argued the punctual calls of a barber was parted gracefully above a
high forehead; and the whole picture was one of striking intelligence
and superior blood and breeding.

Nevertheless, as I saw Doctor Munoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a
repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly
inclined complexion and coldness of touch could have afforded a physical
basis for this feeling, and even these things should have been excusable
considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been the
singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so
hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust and fear.

But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange
physician's extreme skill at once became manifest despite the
ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly
understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to them with a master's
deftness, the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though oddly
hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn enemies
to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a
lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and
extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in
him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and
mixed a suitable draught of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory
room. Evidently he found the society of a well-born man a rare novelty
in this dingy environment, and was moved to unaccustomed speech as
memories of better days surged over him.

His voice, if queer, was at least soothing, and I could not even
perceive that he breathed as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out.
He sought to distract my mind from my own seizure by speaking of his
theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully consoling me
about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are
stronger than organic life itself so that if a bodily frame be but
originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a scientific
enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of nervous animation
despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in the
battery of specific organs. He might, he half-jestingly said, some day
teach me to live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious
existence--without any heart at all!

For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring
a very exact regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in
temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally, and the frigidity
of his habitation--some fifty-five or fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit--was
maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine whose pumps I had often heard in my room below.

       *       *       *       *       *

Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery
place a disciple and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid
him frequently overcoated calls, listening while he told of secret
researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a bit when I
examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his
shelves. I was eventually I may add, almost cured of my disease for all
time by his skilful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the
incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed these cryptic
formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably
have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which
organic pulsations had fled.

I was touched by his account of the aged Doctor Torres of Valencia, who
had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through the great
illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders
proceeded. No sooner had the venerable practitioner saved his colleague
than he himself succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the
strain had been too great; for Doctor Munoz made it whisperingly
clear--though not in detail--that the methods of healing had been most
extraordinary, involving scenes and processes not welcomed by elderly
and conservative Galens.

As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was
indeed slowly but unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero
had suggested. The livid aspect of his countenance was intensified, his
voice became more hollow and indistinct, his muscular motions were less
perfectly co-ordinated, and his mind and will displayed less resilience
and initiative. Of this sad change he seemed by no means unaware, and
little by little his expression and conversation both took on a gruesome
irony which restored in me something of the subtle repulsion I had
originally felt.

He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices
and Egyptian incense until his room smelled like the vault of a
sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings. At the same time, his demands
for cold air increased, and with my aid he amplified the ammonia piping
of his room and modified the pumps and feed of his refrigerating machine
until he could keep the temperature as low as thirty-four or forty
degrees, and finally even twenty-eight degrees; the bathroom and
laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order that water might not
freeze and that chemical processes might not be impeded. The tenant
adjoining him complained of the icy air from around the connecting door;
so I helped him fit heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty.

A kind of growing horror, of outré and morbid cast, seemed to possess
him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such
things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently suggested. All in
all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my
gratitude for his healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers
around him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to his needs
each day, muffled in a heavy ulster which I bought especially for the
purpose. I likewise did much of his shopping, and gasped in bafflement
at some of the chemicals he ordered from druggists and laboratory supply
houses.

An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around
his apartment. The whole house, as I have said had a musty odour, but
the smell in his room was worse, in spite of all the spices and incense
and the pungent chemicals of the now incessant baths which he insisted
on taking unaided. I perceived that it must be connected with his
ailment, and shuddered when I reflected on what that ailment might be.
Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at him, and gave him up
unreservedly to me, not even letting her son Esteban continue to run
errands for him.

When I suggested other physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much
of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain. He evidently feared the
physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and driving force waxed
rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. The
lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery
purpose, so that he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death demon
even as that ancient enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always
curiously like a formality with him, he virtually abandoned, and mental
power alone appeared to keep him from total collapse.

He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he
carefully sealed and filed with injunctions that I transmit them after
his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered
East Indians, but including also a once celebrated French physician now
generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable things had
been whispered. As it happened, I burned all these papers undelivered
and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly frightful, and his
presence almost unbearable. One September day an unexpected glimpse of
him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had come to repair his
electric desk lamp, and for whom he prescribed effectively while keeping
himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been through the
terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with
stupefying suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the
refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the process
of ammonia cooling became impossible. Doctor Munoz summoned me by
thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the injury
while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness
surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use,
and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night
garage we learned that nothing could be done until morning, when a new
piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and fear,
swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what
remained of his failing physique; and once a spasm caused him to clap
his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his way out
with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again.

The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at
about five in the morning the Doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding
me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain at all-night
drug stores and cafeterias. As I would return from my sometimes
discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed bathroom door, I
could hear a restless splashing within and a thick voice croaking out
the order for "More--more!" At length a warm day broke, and the shops
opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching
while I obtained the pump piston or to order the piston while I
continued with the ice; but, instructed by his mother, he absolutely
refused. Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on
the corner of Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a
little shop where I introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the
task of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to install
it.

The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the
hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a breathless, foodless round
of vain telephoning and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and
thither by subway and surface car. About noon I encountered a suitable
supply house far downtown, and at approximately one-thirty that
afternoon arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia
and two sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and
hoped I was in time.

Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil,
and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep
basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads
of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the Doctor's
closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled screaming and
mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice: perhaps as a result
of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course, have locked the door
behind him, yet it was now fastened, presumably from the inside. There
was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow thick dripping.

Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen, despite a fear
that gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door; but
the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some wire
device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms on
that hall and flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses
protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed south
room, which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.

A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall
door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had
accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind
hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws
that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and
ended unutterably.

What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But
this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper
before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out in
terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from that
hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the nearest police
station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible in that yellow
sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending
clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I
believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know.
There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that
I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia and grow faint at a
draught of unusually cool air.

"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man
looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I
fancy you know--what I said about the will and the nerves and the
preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was a good theory,
but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I
had not foreseen. Doctor Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He
couldn't stand what he had to do; he had to get me in a strange, dark
place, when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs
would never work again. It had to be done my way--artificial
preservation--for you see I died that time eighteen years ago."

       *       *       *       *       *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air