TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

The Dreamed Part to anticipate and bear the idea of your death. A death that can ask at any moment for you to come up front, though you haven’t raised your hand and you’re retracting your head between your shoulders, like a turtle, begging not to be chosen. A way to find consolation and some peace (never enough) is to remember that opening of Nabokov’s in Speak, Memory : “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abysswithmore calmthan theone he is headed for (at some forty- five hundred heartbeats an hour).” And so, facing this final abyss, saying to ourselves that we were already there, at the beginning of everything, in an initial abyss. Repeating to ourselves that we were already dead, that we are returning to the place where we came from, and that our passage here has been nothing more than that of a tightrope walker on a high wire. (Having been born dead should be of some added utility in all of this.) † When you are young, death always comes from far away, from outside, from on high: like that meteor that, they say, wiped out the dinosaurs and almost all other life on the planet, but allowed for the appearance of the evolutionary mechanism that would culminate in the human being (though it’s always preferable to imagine and rewrite big reptiles and humans coexisting and killing one another, like in some kind of primitive theme park, because that keeps it all much more entertaining and turns out to be much more interesting). Anyway, at the beginning of our lives, death is always something that happens to others. And every so often, it happens to those young people who, with perspective, when everything has been consummated and they have been consumed, are remembered in a grave voice and saying 195