Abrams
Review by Walter Cummins
Peter Schjeldahl ends his essay “The Art of Dying”—written when he was well aware of his terminal lung cancer—with a recognition that “Dying is my turn to survey life from its far—now near—shore.” He thanks God, who may be a welcome human invention, for human minds, which are “the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it … circling back to the sense of a meaning.”
This essay is much less an attempt to understand what happens to us all after life has ended than a revisiting of essential events through a checkered existence that has reached its final stage. The dying Schjeldahl is still every much engaged in living, almost desperate to experience as many works of art as he can in his limited months and, of vital importance, to write about them. As Steve Martin notes in his foreword, the man followed this book’s title essay with another forty-five pieces in The New Yorker. That was a last plunge into the subjects of life that had sustained him for decades. For him, dying meant a full immersion into the sources of his sense of meaning, his personal approval of existing in the universe.
For Schjeldahl those sources were works of art, and perhaps even more, the ability to write about art in a way that combined an emotional reaction with an intellectual consideration. He does not stand back to offer definitive judgments that all should adhere to. He considers his ideas “never prescriptive or proscriptive.”
As much as the joy he finds in the moment of seeing and discovery, he may find even more in the challenge of putting that discovery into words. The voice of the prose is uniquely his, and he possesses the ability to find words to bring the visual to life on the page. Of writing he says, “I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.” And he also says, “When I finish something and it seems good, I’m dazed. It must have been fun to write. I wish I’d been there.”
Of course, he wants his readers to be dazed too. Much of that comes from his insights, such as, “Nearly every house that he [Edward Hopper] painted strikes me as a self-portrait, with brooding windows and almost never a visible or, should one be indicated, inviting door.” And “Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious.” Perhaps even more than what he says, how he says it becomes the greater pleasure of reading Schjeldahl. Even if the subject is an artist the reader knows nothing about, a satisfaction may be found in enjoying his voice—the sounds of his sentences and the enthusiasm behind them. Here’s one about an ensemble show at the Museum of Modern Art: “Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. Aesthetic bliss saturates—radically, to a degree still apt to startle when you pause to reflect on it—the means, ends, and very soul of a style that was so far ahead of its time that its full influence took decades to kick in. ”
Beyond his ability to write so inventively, Schjeldahl knows an impressive amount about an abundance of subjects that cover centuries of context for the works of arts, such as the court politics of Henry VIII when Hans Holbein the Younger was his official painter or the dada-esque hijinks of the circle around Marcel Duchamp.
So much matters to the man. His writing can be considered a quest for and a celebration of meaning: “Meaning is a scrap among other scraps, though stickier. Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines ‘nothing’ as everything that meaning is not. Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing. The ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,’ Wallace Stevens noticed. The same nothing, but a difference of attitude.”
Dying, as Schjeldahl reminds us, is the end of meaning, which is why he sought more meaning so eagerly in his final months before he vanished into the opposite: “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.”
Eventually, on October 21, 2022, the infusions that, after diagnosis, gave Schjeldahl three years of living and writing failed him. He is now surviving in the universe and in this, his final book.
