Growing up, my parents sometimes talked about magazine columnists as if they were friends. As an only child, I remember interminable dinner-party conversations about the latest Joan Didion essay. I once cried, literally cried, during a movie because it was so painfully boring. I asked my mother if we could leave. She said, “I don’t like it either, but we need to watch it because Pauline Kael wrote a good review of it.”
Although I’ve grown into a committed fanboy of certain authors, and now recognize the transcendent cool of The White Album, I’ve never attached myself to a magazine writer.
Except for Peter Schjeldahl
I started reading Schjeldahl when he joined The New Yorker as their art critic in 1998. I had emerged from the seven-year cocoon of medical training, we had no kids, and Sarah was doing a second residency. I finally had time to read more than just the cartoons.
I loved Schjeldahl’s writing. I found his willingness to criticize refreshing. He could convince me to reconsider art I found uninteresting. My favorite articles of his concentrate on a single painting. The Immersive Thrill of Matisse’s “The Red Studio” is a great example.
The Schjeldahl article I have read the most, however, is not a review. It is not even about art. It is about life, written by a man facing death. The article, The Art of Dying, is a memoir, a celebration, and a collection of observations that could adorn an entire line of T-shirts.
I am not sure why I am writing about the article when you can (should) just read it.1 Read it again and again—every few years. I guess I am writing about this essay to share, to pay homage, and to wring more meaning out of it.
The article begins with Schjeldahl reflecting on a lung cancer diagnosis. The first paragraphs are downright funny. “I’m an alcoholic twenty-seven years sober. Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.”
But the humor passes, and beauty begins. This is how he recounts the call from his doctor with the diagnosis:
After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.
I have been the voice on the other end of that call dozens of times. I don’t think I have asked a patient what they thought about after they hung up. Why would I? Knowing would not help me care for them. Yet, Schjeldahl makes me want to start asking.2
Much of the article reads like a series of disconnected thoughts. As you read, though, a whole comes into view. I’m tempted to compare the essay to a painting by Seurat, first viewed up close, and then from a distance — but references to art in the presence of Peter Schjeldahl seem presumptuous. In its construction, the article also reminds me of Dear Committee Members, a novel constructed from letters of recommendation.
The observations shared in The Art of Dying stick with me. I have remembered many of them for years.
About his father, “I spent years of my childhood trying to win his approval and years of my adolescence trying to provoke his disapproval, until I had to accept that he didn’t care either way.”
“Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side.”
“The years that you spend as a nobody are painful but golden, because no one bothers to lie to you.”
An observation that he makes about writing meant nothing to me when I first read it. Now that I’ve become a bit addicted to daily writing, I understand:
“Writing consumes writers. No end of ones better than I am have said as much. The passion hurts relationships. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.”
And then there is a paragraph like this, which explains snobbery to perfection and gives a lesson in art appreciation.
The same goes for snobbery, a necessary stage for the insecure until we acquire taste that admits and reflects the variety of experience. To limber your sensibility, stalk the aesthetic everywhere: cracks in a sidewalk, people’s ways of walking. The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption. If you can’t put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly.
A career in medicine makes you see it in everything. Schjeldahl writes, “I believe in earnestly agreeing to deathbed wishes and then forgetting about them, unless it’s to satisfy those among the living.” We do this with people’s “end-of-life plans” all the time.
He covers how he learned to write criticism: “Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.” This applies so perfectly to learning medicine, where even your most private failings involve at least you and your patient.
And then there’s this. Its application to lung cancer screening belongs on Sensible Medicine. Its application to my father belongs here.
A CAT scan… incidentally discovered a spot in my left lung. This later led to hospital visits for scans and tests, including a needle biopsy (ouch), all of them inconclusive. Fed up with the rigmarole, I refused further investigation. Shouldn’t have? Live and learn.
I am thankful for all of Peter Schjeldahl’s work. Before going to an exhibition, I often search for a related Schjeldahl article to help me prepare. I’ve read The Art of Dying more than any article about art, because it helps me prepare for just about everything.
On the New Yorker website, you can also listen to the author read the article. I recommend reading it first and then listening to it.
I did remember, after writing this, that a few patients have told me without me asking.
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