Though written in language that feels entirely liberated from the
tradition of letters, from the tone of authority, from the heaviness of
history—a language that sparkles not like special stones in the
depths but purely on the surface of things—though the writing
feels and flows with an energy that is new, sensitive to the thin film
of the present,
David Shields’s latest book, The Thing About
Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, sings a very old song. “Sing
me something,” said the angel to Cædmon, the author of the oldest
poem in English. “Sing me frumsceaft,” sing to me about
creation, about the world, its origin and its end. The song that the
cowherd sings to an angel is the song now sung by the
UW English
professor: the song about the human condition.
But Cædmon’s world had a roof over it, a “heofon to hrofe” and
a “haleg scepen,” a shaper, a maker of this roof. With Shields, the
song of creation speaks of no shelter, or a maker of that shelter; it’s
a song about exposure. If there is a leading theme in Shields’s work,
it is exposure in a world where there is nothing left but humans, their
bodies, fears, families. Not even the religion of literature offers us
protection from the elements of reality. This is why Shields’s language
is so clear, so transparent. Everything from the world makes its way
through the words to the reader with little or no distortion.
There is a trick to all this—but the trick works. That trick
makes David Shields look like he is hiding nothing from the reader. And
what he bares in this book is the existential situation of a writer in
the middle years, the middle ages, the middungeard—the
place between heaven (youth) and hell (old age). “In the middle of the
journey through life I came to find myself within a dark wood,” writes
Dante. At this point in life, Shields, who is 51, decides it is time to
sing about what it means to be a human being.
For the song, he employs three modes: the memoir, the quote, and
science journalism. The portions of memoir give us the condition of the
family. Shields is between his teenage daughter, Natalie,
who is
heading to her physical zenith, and his 97-year-old father, Milton, who
is heading to the grave. Despite his great age, Milton is very much
alive, very much in the world. “He’s a survival machine,” writes
Shields with more spite than praise.
At the quotation level, Shields scans high and popular culture for
thoughts about the body, youth, aging, and death. “Aristotle described
childhood as hot and moist, youth as hot and dry, and adulthood as cold
and dry,” Shields writes in my favorite chapter, “Decline and Fall.”
“The rapper Ice-T said, ‘We’re here to stick our heads above water for
just a minute, look around, and go back under,'” he writes in “Exit
Interviews.” “Joke courtesy of Dr. Herring: There are three kinds of
married sex. When you’re married, you’re so lusty you have sex in every
room in the house. After several years, the passion dies down a little,
and you confine sex to the bedroom. After many years, you pass each
other in the hallway and say, ‘Fuck you,'” he writes in “Sex and Death
(iii).”
At the final level, the level of science journalism, we are fed the
biological facts of life. There’s information on the leading causes of
death, the function of sex, and the point at which this and that
society declares you done—”In France, the brain has to be silent
for 48 hours. In the former Soviet Union,
patients needed to
flatline for five minutes.”
The movement between the scientific, the cultural, and the personal
is effortless. Shields’s greatest accomplishment is here: He never
significantly shifts his tone when moving from one mode to the next.
The science sections do not sound too lifeless; the personal sections
do not sound too full of life. They are just about the same, and
because he has a pleasant tone, he transforms a terrible subject into a
pleasant reading experience.
Finally, his book has a heart. It’s on page 212. The three types of
text (memoir, quotes, science journalism) are held by this core—a
word that means heart in French, “coeur,” a word that gives us
“courage” and also “cordial,” and “cardiac arrest.” What makes this
book live is here: “What I’ve been trying to get to all along, in a
way, is this: The individual doesn’t matter. You, Dad, in the large
scheme of things, don’t matter. I, Dad, don’t matter. We are vectors on
the grids of cellular life. We carry 10 to 12 genes with mutations that
are potentially lethal. These mutations are passed on to our
children—
you to me, me to Natalie.”
Here we understand the curse of the second fall. Not the first fall
from Eden, but the second fall from Cædmon’s world. At the time
the hymn appeared in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People—the eighth century—a human was lucky to live to
40 and likely to live to 30. But in that “brief crack of light between
the two eternities of darkness” at least there was a shaper of all
things and an existential roof over your being. Science has more than
doubled our life spans but at the terrible price of living with the
truth—that life is a process that has no shaper or shelter, that
life is not about humans but about something else, something out of our
control. We are gene robots.
We are replicants. We live for long
but we live for nothing. 
