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The Moroccans claim that full participation in life demands the regular contemplation of death. I agree without reserve. Unfortunately I am unable to conceive of my own death without setting it in the far more terrible mise en scene of old age. There I am without teeth, unable to move, wholly dependent upon someone whom I pay to take care of me and who at any moment may go out of the room and never return. Of course this is not at all what the Moroccans mean by the contemplation of death; they would consider my imaginings a particularly contemptible form of fear. One culture’s therapy is another culture’s torture.
"’Good-bye,’ says the dying man to the mirror they hold in front of him. ‘We won’t be seeing each other any more.’" When I quoted Valery’s epigram in
The Sheltering Sky, it seemed a poignant bit of fantasy. Now, because I no longer imagine myself as an onlooker at the scene, but instead as the principal protagonist, it strikes me as repugnant. To make it right, the dying man would have to add two words to his little farewell, and they are: "Thank God!"
-- Paul Bowles
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