Free How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields Page B

half-empty pages, feels to the touch too light. When I pick up the doctored book-object, it weighs less than the eye says it should. So, too, when I separate the delicate pages one by one and examine not just the words written on each page but also the space through and
past
these pieces of paper, I have the uncanny experience of looking
through
empty picture frames.
    Turning pages, my hand (accustomed to a physical understanding of the page) literally measures subtracted weight. This tactile emptiness lies at the heart of the book’s attempt to plumb antispaces—landscapes unrecoverable at the levels of text, paper, geography, and memory—which are excruciating to Foer, whose oeuvre is simultaneously an attempt to recover, through art, the dead bodies of the Holocaust (his mother’s parents weresurvivors) and a demonstration that such an attempt is not only impossible but also wrong (“to write a poem after Auschwitz,” etc.). The book is both hospital and crypt: the thousands of tiny rectangular spaces are both beds and graves.
    No one from my immediate or extended family died in the Holocaust, and yet in a way that’s difficult to explain, it was the defining event of my childhood …
Our ground time here will be brief
    B UILT TO S PILL ’ S “Randy Described Eternity” is a launching pad for the empty space between your body holding your guts (built to spill onto the pavement) and the vast cavern of forever-land eternity. Doug Martsch manipulates the thin, hollow body inside his electric guitar toward both extinction and monument, marking our inability to hold the dual concepts completely in mind. This isn’t thrill-seeking exploration or death taunt. It’s a slow plod toward guitar inexpressible. No benedictions or apologies, just a few shafts (I can always hope) of illumination. Electric guitar solos simultaneously battle against postmodernity and worship it—feedback jamming the alternating currents into sound sculptures of pain and ecstasy. White-boy field hollers: slow it down, add pedal steel guitar, and you have a country song. Keepthe guitar/drums setup, add a light show, and you have the rock existential thing. Martsch doesn’t really close in on death, but hey, his guitar’s alive.
A day like any other, only shorter
    P HILLIP, WHOSE MFA thesis I’d just directed, died in a freak accident. He was walking his dog, lightning struck a tree, and a heavy branch hit his head. At the funeral, many of his classmates and teachers told standard stories: funny, sad, vivid, delicately off-color. I praised him fulsomely, thereby casting a warm glow back upon my own head. Another professor, trying to say something original, criticized his fledgling work. I upbraided her for her obtuseness, but I felt bad about badgering her and made it worse by harrumphing, “Words are famously difficult to get right. That’s why being a writer is so interesting.” Worse still by adding, “Who among us doesn’t get the words constantly wrong?” She said she would write Phillip’s widow an explanatory and exculpatory note, but it came out wrong, too, I promise. Because language never fails to fail us, never doesn’t defeat us, is bottomlessly … —But here I am, trying to paper over the gaps with dried-up glue.
Our ground time here will be brief
    W ITHOUT RELIGION , no one knows what to say about death—our own or others’—nor does anyone know after someone’s death how to talk about (think about) the rest of our lives, so we invent diversions.
    In Bruges
is a film about two English hit men who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, where they have to while away the days, knowing they’re next. Given death’s imminence, is any particular activity of any greater significance than any other activity? Good question.
    Lance Olsen’s novel
Calendar of Regrets
is concerned with tourists, travelers, cafés, voyeurism, the lure and illusion of art, what happens when we die: “Movement is a mode of writing.