Coincidence: in a new book I’ve been reading, I find someone comparing the experience of watching a person die with the intensity of falling in love. And you know, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in some other language there’s a word for this—like the word for that particular kind of love that in the language spoken by the Bodo people is called onsra.

I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams. I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much of our vision of the past. Why should so much that has happened feel as though it had not truly happened? Life is but a dream. Think: Could there be a crueler notion?

Memory. We need another word to describe the way we see past events that are still alive in us, thought Graham Greene.

Agreed.

Agreeing here also with Kafka. And, at the same time, with Camus: The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.

Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Dying, Christopher Hitchens asked himself how this bit of Nietzsche could ever have struck him as deep. Clearly it wasn’t true to his own experience—and it hadn’t been true to Nietzsche’s, either. It was having cancer that had brought about this rethinking, Hitchens said.

How could I not now also recall the old graffiti “God is dead—Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead—God.” Later, anti-atheists could not resist replacing “Nietzsche” with “Hitchens.”

Recent obits. I. M. Pei. Agnès Varda. Ricky Jay. Bibi Andersson. Doris Day.

Though not in that order (I liked the rhyme).

I’ve heard of people who confess to regularly reading obituaries in the hope of seeing the name of someone they know. Reading obituaries is also said to be a source of comfort to many lonely people. Presumably it’s not the deaths that these people like reading about but the neatly summarized lives that the deceased supposedly lived. But are these same people also avid readers of biographies? Probably not. Write your own obituary: an exercise often recommended by life coaches and human-development counselors, and one that has never had the tiniest shred of appeal for me.

It is from death that the storyteller derives his authority, wrote Walter Benjamin, in his authoritative way. And: the “meaning of life” is the center about which the novel moves.

Bart Starr. Carol Channing. W. S. Merwin. Michel Legrand.

Who, coincidentally, wrote the score for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Most of these people were long-lived, almost all having survived well past the average human life span of seventy-nine years. My friend, not young at all, was nevertheless young enough to have been their daughter.

John Paul Stevens. Toni Morrison. Paul Taylor. Hal Prince.